by Denis Avey
Above ground, the lads had been at work dealing with the injured. There were now more than thirty sets of remains laid out. We reassembled them as best we would and they were sewn into blankets straight away. It was a grisly task. They were our friends.
Innocent people were dying around us all the time but it’s different when they are your comrades. It was a massive blow to morale but we had to get on with it. There were claims later – which were believed by the Red Cross – that the lads had been killed because they had been watching the ‘show’. It wasn’t like that. They thought they were safe.
The bodies were to be buried in a cemetery belonging to the Church of the Ascension of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Oswiecim. I was sent on ahead with Bill Meredith – a lad from Liverpool – to help dig a mass grave to one side against the wall. There was a small chapel at the end of a walkway and it was the first time I had seen gravestones with photographs on them. They intrigued me.
We stripped to the waist and began digging. When it was finished a lorry arrived with the remains on the back. There were a few lads around but there was no ceremony or service that I remember. They passed the bodies down and Bill and I laid them in the earth side by side. It was like in the desert. For the first time in too long I thought about the men I’d left in the sand and about Les who I had left unburied.
There was no time to pay respects. We were sent back on the lorry leaving the bodies uncovered. I don’t know who closed the grave. Three weeks later a bomb fell on the cemetery and their resting place was destroyed. After the war the bodies that could be identified and some that couldn’t were moved to an official war cemetery in Krakow where they have been left in peace ever since.
Chapter 14
Months had passed since I had written to my mother about Ernst. I saw him around the factory site from time to time but I had heard nothing from home. I had no idea whether my mother had received the letter or whether she had contacted his sister Susanne in Birmingham – if she was still there. It had been worth a try but privately I thought it was hopeless. The Red Cross postal system was a lifeline but it was regularly disrupted and getting worse.
After some months a letter arrived addressed to me in an unfamiliar hand. It was followed by a parcel. The letter was written in English and I opened it without thinking of Ernst. I think it began ‘Dear Ginger’, and it was signed by Susanne. It was intended for him but written as if to me. She said she was sending cigarettes. It had worked.
A letter from my mother confirmed that she had contacted Susanne and told her that cigarettes were the only way to help. It was now up to her. I opened the parcel and there they were, two hundred English Players cigarettes. Those my uncle sent – on the occasions they got through – were the 555 brand. The Players cigarettes were for Ernst and there were more than I had seen for many months.
It was a miracle: Ernst’s sister was safe and well. More to the point, she now knew that her brother was alive and in Auschwitz. I could only hope the name meant nothing to her.
We had made a human connection. It meant more than the contents of the package, valuable though they were. The contact letter alone defied the evil of the place. I was overjoyed. Now I had to get the letter and the cigarettes to him and that meant smuggling them into the IG Farben site. There were sometimes searches but I was lucky.
Cigarettes were more valuable than gold in the camps. When I swapped with Hans, the Kapo had held our lives in his hands and I bribed him to turn a blind eye for fifty fags, twenty-five before, twenty-five afterwards. It was a princely sum in the camp and now I was about to give Ernst far more.
I never really knew what Ernst’s job on the site was but he was able to move around more than most and he appeared to be spared the worst of the outdoor labour. I guessed he was a carrier or a messenger of some sort.
It was a while before I saw him again. I waited for an opportunity to get up close and whispered to him to meet me in a secluded spot in five minutes.
He appeared. I checked we were alone and then pulled the letter from his sister out of my pocket. He was beside himself when he realised what it was. I told him to take it away and read it, then gestured that he should rip it up. He had lost everything, they all had. Destroying a letter, probably his only personal possession at that time, was asking a lot. I knew that would be hard. But the safety of both of us depended on it and I trusted he would do it. He took the letter and hid it somewhere in his zebra uniform.
I double-checked no one was coming before pulling the first batch of the cigarettes and a bar of chocolate from my battle-dress. Giving the cigarettes in one go risked losing everything because there were probably too many to hide. I told him I would give them in instalments over time. In that place, at that time, it was a king’s ransom and Ernst knew it.
I was surrounded by all those desperate people. They had been stripped of everything and wrenched from wives, children, parents and grandparents who were murdered on arrival. Those who were spared toiled on, starved and broken, knowing those they loved had been gassed and their bodies burnt. Eventually despair, disease, exhaustion or beatings would finish them too.
That was the context. Amongst all that I was giving Ernst a letter and a gift from his sister in England. It was all I could do for him. I had no idea how he would use those cigarettes; what food or favours he would trade them for. They wouldn’t buy him freedom, but they might buy him advantage, a chance to survive. That was all. It was up to him now.
He had come so far already but none of us knew how this would turn out. The stench from those far-off chimneys and the corpses at the end of each working day were testament enough. Each life was subject to malign force or murderous whim.
I’d had a glimpse behind the wire of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, but he knew that world and how best to survive it. I had confidence in him, but I knew he was still likely to die. I tried not to show him I knew. I smuggled the rest of the cigarettes to him over the coming weeks. And he never told me what he did with them.
Apart from his sister in England I knew nothing more of his family. He never referred to parents or grandparents and he appeared unencumbered. It was easier to survive that way. I knew that from my own experience. It was true of my time in the desert and when the ship was torpedoed. It was true in captivity. It was easier to rely on number one, it focused the mind. Like I’ve said there is nothing without number one. That’s maybe why I connected with so few people in those years.
Ernst had been different. Despite the despair in his eyes, there were mischievous traces of the lad he’d been, hints of the man he could become. I felt I’d recognised a kindred spirit. I always looked out for him and would give him more cigarettes when I could. Had the war lasted longer I’m sure we would have tried to get another supply sent over.
I was desperate to get out of that godforsaken place even for a matter of hours so when the opportunity came up to join a working party outside the Buna-Werke, I grasped it. Any opportunity to contact civilians had to be taken. We were ordered to go to the town of Katowitz by train to load up with supplies and come back. We weren’t told what we were to carry or why they thought it required six of us. We were led out of the camp under armed guard and after a walk we arrived at a railway station with low platforms that looked out across an open marshalling yard.
From where I stood, I could see diagonally across the tracks. A number of cattle trucks containing prisoners had just arrived further down the line. They were being formed into long columns about a hundred yards away. The women had been separated from the men but they were all still in civilian clothes. We knew what we were seeing. We knew what would happen to those women and children.
One of the women was holding a crying baby in her arms. An SS guard was walking up and down the line. I saw him stop and remonstrate with the woman before walking on. The child continued to cry. He went on a few paces then turned, marched back down the line to the woman and then punched the baby with all his might in the face. There was silence.
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br /> I nearly vomited with shock and frustrated rage. Even at that distance I knew the child would have been killed. That horrific scene wiped out any relief at getting out of the camp for the day. The train arrived for us and we climbed in. I couldn’t speak. We were used to seeing cruelty to adults but the killing of a baby in a mother’s arms was unspeakable.
We arrived at a military-run warehouse with a large yard near Katowitz where we were ordered to begin loading a train carriage. Most of the load was comprised of large blankets that had been stitched together forming sacks. I couldn’t say what was inside, it could have been bread. I never found out. I didn’t much care after what I’d seen.
We returned in a normal civilian carriage with guards in the corridor to prevent us escaping. I had seen a baby punched to death. I replayed that scene again and again in my mind as I stared out of the window. Already I was starting to lock things away. There was nothing I could do. I had never walked by on the other side nor ducked a fight; that’s not how I was brought up. Now I was having to do it all the time.
My swap with Hans had brought some names, some information. I had a better idea what went on in their camp but I had expected to learn more. I was disappointed. The selections took place there but the mechanised slaughter was happening elsewhere. There was still a lot I didn’t know.
Weeks passed and winter was approaching, the weather was turning cold. Victory seemed to be coming our way but slowly. I still had no idea how this terrible saga of the camps would end. Who would survive to tell the tale; who would be left to bear witness?
Slowly over the months the idea took me to try again. Hans was still alive. Miraculously his two comrades were too. I suggested that we swap again and he agreed; his lot had not improved and it was worth the risk. Again the days of planning began. This time the swap would take place not in the Bude – the hut we used the first time – but in a Bau, a brick building going up on the site.
Just inside the main door there was a tiny room we sometimes used to rest in and we decided to make the exchange there. It had corners where things could be concealed ahead of the swap so it seemed a better place.
When the day came I felt better prepared than the first time. I knew how the march went, where the difficulties lay, but I would still need a tremendous amount of luck.
We swapped clothes quickly, this time feeling the chill as I got his zebra uniform on. Again he left first, anxious to get on with it. My cheeks were smudged with dirt, my hair had been re-hacked and crudely shaved again. I paused, checked my buttons were done up before stepping out and prepared to feign the weakness of exhausted men. I got across to the stripeys without incident and readied myself for the count, lost in their number.
I hadn’t reckoned with the plunging temperature. I hated the cold; I still do. I shuddered violently. This time the count was interminable.
We moved off on that now familiar march; the bodies of the latest dead were taken back with us, just like the first time I had entered the camp. And again, just like the first time, some were dropped, picked up and dropped again. After that prolonged trudge I passed through the gates of Auschwitz III-Monowitz for the second time. The order ‘Mützen ab’ was bellowed from somewhere and we removed our hats and pulled ourselves upright. Then it was on and up towards the Appelplatz – the parade ground about halfway down the central walkway on the right. There were fences around us even on the inside. The orchestra was playing, just like before.
We formed up to be counted again. This time it went on for what felt like hours. The exertion of the march had not warmed me. There was nothing in those stripey rags to keep any of my body heat in. Evening was approaching. I didn’t need to feign anything, I felt as miserable as the men around me. Then it started to rain.
I was sure there were more of us on the Appelplatz this time, not that I counted. When we were finally dismissed I followed my guides down towards the barracks buildings to one side of the square and nearer to the perimeter fence with its high voltage cables. Once inside I took to the bunk and stayed there. I knew I wasn’t going to be eating their food.
My two friends had suffered in the months since I had last shared their bunk. I was surprised they had lived that long. I didn’t tell them but they both looked thinner. The Pole was worse. His skin now had a sickly yellowish hue. He had the look of a man on the way out. The inmates gave it a strange name then. They called it the look of the Muselmann.
I sensed that the allied bombing and the progress of the war had given them a faint hope of surviving but it remained ethereal. My time was limited but I couldn’t press either of them to talk, they were exhausted and the Pole collapsed into unconsciousness when he climbed into the bunk. I felt sure he wouldn’t last the night. I managed to talk to the German a little longer.
I felt better prepared for the feeling in there this time; the moaning, the rambling, the odd screams. The German was probably in his early twenties but sharing that bunk they were bodies more than people to me already; thin bodies at that. They gave off little heat and I was shivering.
Death had a smell about it, and I had noticed it the first time. I can’t describe it but it hung in the air in those barracks sheds, dank, dark and ghastly. The strain of the day had beaten us. I fell asleep to the sound of groaning and the distant rhythm of prayers.
The Pole made it through the night but needed help to get on his feet in the morning. He can’t have lived much longer and I never saw him on the site after that. I was glad to be done with the count, to be through the gate and back on the road to the Buna-Werke, to the work I normally cursed.
The swap in the Bau was done quickly and without a word. I was relieved to be back and safely in uniform. I tried one more time some weeks later, again using the Bude to change in like the first time. I’d left the door on the shed open because a closed door suggested secrets. This time, a guard was nosing around in the contractor’s yard and we had to abandon the attempt before it began.
In retrospect I should have noted mentally what I had learnt the first time and left it at that. That wasn’t how I was. I’d got away with it once, I’d do it again. I had memorised some of the names of the Kapos and the guards back then but foremost I had seen it for myself and that mattered to me. Hearsay had no value. We didn’t know how these camps would be wound up or who would be left at the end of the war to say that these crimes had happened at all.
Chapter 15
It was a wet and miserable morning. It had rained heavily and the ground had turned to sludge. I was one of twenty British POWs ordered to help lay electric power cables for a new plant. We were lined up and standing waist deep in a muddy trench with a fat mains cable between our legs. In the strange logic of the camps we were doing the job because the slave labourers were now too weak to haul the heavy-duty cable. We were unrolling it from a massive wooden drum and the longer it got the heavier it was. If we didn’t pull in unison we couldn’t shift it at all.
A young Jewish boy, perhaps eighteen years old, was standing by the cable drum above me. He was thin and weak like the rest but he had a pleasant face. I never saw what he’d done wrong; the guards didn’t need reasons. An SS officer approached him and the boy did what they all had to do. He stopped work, whipped his cap off his head, thrashing it against the side of his legs and stood to attention.
It didn’t stop him getting clobbered. The officer hit him in the face with something hard in his hand and within seconds the blood was flowing uncontrollably. The boy managed to haul himself back to attention mumbling something in a language I couldn’t place. As soon as the boy was bolt upright he was struck again and knocked to the ground crying with pain. Again he pulled himself up and again he was hammered in the face. By now his striped uniform was covered in blood. I was watching a young boy being clubbed to death. I’d seen it all before but the suppressed rage inside me welled up and this time something snapped.
I shouted up at the SS officer in bad German ‘Du verfluchter Untermensch!’ It was the worst I
could muster. I had called him a damned sub-human, a term the Nazis used to describe anyone they regarded as inferior: the Slavs, Gypsies, the Jews. I knew they were explosive words. The beating stopped but I knew it wouldn’t be the end of it.
It was a cold ten minutes before the officer retaliated. He let me finish the work first. I climbed out of the trench and I turned my back to walk away. He came from behind without warning. The instant he was alongside me there was a crushing blow to my face. I was knocked to the ground holding my right eye; he’d hit me with the butt of his pistol. I blacked out for a matter of seconds. When I recovered, my eye was already closing up with cuts above and below it. The officer had gone.
I never saw what happened to the boy but he can’t have lived long. If those head injuries didn’t kill him he had been marked out and would die soon anyway.
My eye was a mess and I’d had just one blow. There was a South African doctor in our camp, a chap called Harrison. The Red Cross visitors claimed he had the medical supplies he needed. What he actually had was aspirin and a 60-watt light bulb for basic heat treatment. He did what he could for me and I knew better than to report the injury.
The swelling disappeared and the cuts healed, but my vision was odd and it stayed that way for years. Sometimes I’d look at a broad building and it collapsed before me, appearing no wider than a telephone pole. Years after the war that eye turned cancerous and was taken out and replaced with a glass implant. I knew why.
