by Denis Avey
That boy’s powerlessness and my inability to help him haunted me. I had been brought up to challenge injustice and in Auschwitz I could do so little. I saw so many people beaten, so many killed. But it’s the image of that brave boy that looms up at me in the dark. His are the features I see when I wake covered in sweat. I knew nothing about him, not even his name, but that boy’s bloodied face has been with me night and day for almost seventy years.
Many lads did what they could for the stripeys, a cigarette here and there and some food if they could get it to them. For others the trauma spawned fear. Some of the lads were afraid of their diseases, of being sucked under with them. We were all captives trying to survive after all. Generosity wasn’t restricted to those who had been fortunate in civvy street.
Frank Ginn was one such soldier. I hesitate to say it but the poor lad was more or less illiterate. I would regularly read and write his letters for him and I got to know him. He struggled with German and you needed some to communicate in the camps.
One day he asked me to accompany him to a joiners shed north-east of the Queen Mary building. Inside, there was a big bench, tools and shavings everywhere and a couple of Greek Jews working alone.
They had a smattering of monosyllabic German and Frank thought I might be able to communicate better with them. The Greeks in the camp, those that had survived, were mostly from Salonika, it was said. They were adept traders, tough and wily.
These two were supposed to be making things for the construction site and they had landed jobs fitting their skills at home. For all the stripeys that was a real boon. They were out of the weather and looked better fed than most.
Frank had given them food when he could but now they assumed I was his boss – I can’t think why – and I became the object of their interest. They smiled whenever I came in. It was during one of these occasions that the SS arrived.
I expected trouble but they didn’t so much as bat an eyelid on seeing me there. There were no questions asked. I assumed the Greeks were making something for them on the side. They all had to seek what protection they could; turn their skills into a crust. The complex web of relationships made it hard to know who I could trust on the site. That’s why I always kept names out of the equation. I never knew who was connected to whom. There could be spies anywhere. Information also was a commodity to trade for advantage.
One day, to my surprise, the joiners produced a tiny wooden cabinet for me and insisted I take it. It was handcrafted with tiny drawers and dovetail joints. It was the kind of mini-chest I could have kept toiletries in except I didn’t have any. It was a bizarre item to receive in a concentration camp, especially when most prisoners were scrambling for buttons and cigarette ends to trade. I was baffled.
Frank had made the initial connection with them but they had become my friends too over the months. Now they wanted me to have the chest and I felt uncomfortable about it. The Greeks had a reputation for driving a hard bargain and it made little sense. They probably saw it as an investment in future favours but they never spoke of it like that.
Admittedly it wasn’t an easy thing for them to trade. The camp inmates could have no use for it. Cigarettes were a better currency for them, they were portable and readily swapped.
The chest had to go to a civilian worker or an outsider of some sort. I suppose a POW fitted the bill. They never said what they wanted in return; it was enough perhaps that I was indebted to them. From then on I tried to give them food if I could so I suppose it worked.
Smuggling it out of the site proved easy on that occasion. There were sometimes searches and Postens to be bribed. It was a leaky place and the guards could easily be induced to turn a blind eye to smuggling if there was something in it for them. On this occasion I sailed through, got back to E715 and put it in my rucksack in the hut. It was a rare thing of beauty made in a place of ugliness.
By December 1944 the Red Cross parcels had dried up. Allied bombing had seen to that. Their extra rations had kept us alive; without them we would have suffered terribly. Now we had to survive on the meagre rations the Germans gave us. There was less to pass on to the Jewish prisoners.
I don’t recall the last time I saw Hans or Ernst. They were often on my mind but by January 1945 we knew the Russians were closing in. We could hear gunfire and artillery in the distance. The camp’s days were numbered. I didn’t know whether that meant liberation or further turmoil.
On 18 January 1945 the Jews were marched out of Auschwitz III-Monowitz for the last time. The camp, just a few hundred yards along the track from E715, was abandoned except for some of the sick who were left behind. The poor stripeys had been marched out at gunpoint in the depths of winter through snow and ice. Thousands of them were forced to leave. The death march had begun.
That morning, we marched into IG Farben as usual, expecting to work, and found it empty. The striped figures who had swarmed over the construction site and appeared to spring from the earth itself when I had first seen them were gone. It was still and eerie.
Rumours flourished. I thought we were being held back as hostages as the Russians advanced. That night there was a ferocious Russian air raid. We fled the camp as usual to take cover, leaving our things inside. I hid in a small depression in the field behind the huts as the bombs hailed down. There was no let up. It went on and on.
I spent the night in that dent in the ground and don’t remember sleeping. I was close but I didn’t see any of the individual blasts, my head was down and covered. When it was over, I emerged from my hole to find the camp all but destroyed. I sought out what was left of my block and I crawled into the debris to see what I could salvage. I found my watch, which had been hanging on a nail on the bunk, and a rucksack with a few things in it, including that tiny painted chest the Greeks had given me. I grabbed them and scrambled out. Some of the others were doing the same but there wasn’t much time.
It was still dark and cold and I had no greatcoat – I don’t remember ever having one. It was a necessity I’d have to do without. The Russian guns were clearer now, perhaps five miles away and getting louder. They gave us heart but filled us with foreboding in equal measure.
The Germans got us together before first light and ordered us into two columns. Some said later that Mieser, the German NCO, had given the lads the option of heading east towards the Russian front line on their own or going west with the column. That’s not my memory of it. We were still being held at gunpoint. Heading towards the Russians in strange uniforms would have been suicide anyway. Years later I was told that two lads had taken the risk and had died at the hands of the Red Army.
Our column was the last to go. We were marched through the gates with the twists of barbed wire laced back and forth through the rungs and left what remained of E715 for the last time.
Chapter 16
We were marched a short way along the fence of the IG Farben site in the bitter cold and dark and I spat farewell at those diabolical towers and chimneys, the steel gantries, the gasometers and the miles of piping. Then we turned away towards the south-west, avoiding the town of Auschwitz and leaving the mounds of frozen earth and misery behind, never to return.
No one told us where we were going. I have no memory of passing through that community where so many of the civilian staff had lived. I thought of the Jewish prisoners I had known, of Ernst, whose sister in England had perhaps dared to hope he might survive, and of Hans about whom I still knew little. There were many others but they were faces without names.
We hadn’t gone very far when I saw a roll of rags lying in the road and gathering snow up ahead. As we got closer I recognised the lumps of stripey sacking, now dusted white and hardened by frost. Then there was another and another. There was no mistaking them. We stepped around the stiffened corpses and kept on going. Some had been shot in the face and dumped in ditches, others lay on the track where they had stumbled and had been killed. What heat they’d had in their frail bodies had long gone. The bullet holes only told half
the story.
I should have realised it wouldn’t be over so soon, that there would be more to witness. Now I wasn’t sure who would survive to tell the world. For weeks I had tried to second guess how it would end. Now I knew. The Germans had marched off their Jewish prisoners, thinking they could wring some more work out of them. But if their slaves faltered, that was it. It didn’t look like many had made it.
Their bodies had been left where they fell to stiffen in the ice. They had begun the march starved and exhausted and many had succumbed rapidly to fatigue and cold. Some had collapsed and never got up again.
‘Death begins with the shoes,’ Primo Levi wrote later of his time in Auschwitz III-Monowitz. It was true of the concentration camp where the chafing of crude wooden clogs caused feet to swell and suppurate, slowing people down, bringing decline, beatings and death and it was true out there in the snow.
He, I learnt later, was one of those who had been too ill to leave Auschwitz III-Monowitz and so he had avoided the death march and survived.
We were walking over frozen bodies for days. I knew then there would be few survivors. There were so many stiffening corpses. Ernst, Hans, and the rest were surely dead. If I got home to England I had thought I could perhaps find his sister Susanne, tell her what I’d seen, but there seemed little point now. For the moment, I put them out of mind, they were dead and that was it. Now I had to survive. Like I say, without number one there is nothing.
Our guards were Wehrmacht and not the SS but still we didn’t know what they planned for us. There was one particular soldier I recall, a veteran from the eastern front. He had faced the Russians in action and had a false leather hand to prove it. He had every reason to head west. I couldn’t resist the taunt. I got alongside him after miles of striding over corpses and in the best German I could muster I said to his face. ‘Ihre Zeit kommt noch’ – your time will come. He went rigid. He knew what I meant.
He spat something back at me and I understood: ‘I’ll shoot you first.’ He probably would have done too. Fears were fears and fingers were on triggers. After a while I stopped seeing bodies. I knew it wasn’t because the murder had ceased. We were simply on a different route.
Food was very scarce and most of what we ate was stolen from the fields. Some nights we slept under guard in barns, on others we had no choice but to lay out in the snow. I was exhausted but with no greatcoat for warmth, to sleep at night was to die so I struggled to stay conscious.
After a few days I could see mountains ahead and we began to gain altitude. As we climbed the temperature slid further. We were told it touched minus thirty degrees centigrade. The snow scoured my face and ice froze into balls around my ears. It was a long miserable ascent. I began losing the sensation in my feet; frostbite was setting in. I heard later of lads pulling off their boots and leaving parts of their toes inside.
On and up we climbed until the route began to level out and then drop away into a long and winding descent. The snow stopped coming down and the drifts around us became shallower. Patches of vegetation began to poke through and as we struggled on, the snow thinned and began to disappear.
After many hours we were ordered to stop for a break in a field by a river that was in full spate. Then the sun broke through the clouds and the water was instantly energised, sparkling with a thousand points of reflected light. It was fresh, pure and beckoning, and I thought at once that it would cleanse me of all the filth, suffering and mental anguish. It was raging melt water from the icy hilltops and perilously cold but its beauty disarmed me. I knew if I plunged in all my trials would be over. It was a moment of destructive serenity and I had to struggle to resist.
We marched about twenty miles each day and the weather soon became colder again. We were usually in open country but we were under armed guard all the time and escape was impossible. Where would we go? What sustenance could we find in that wintery landscape?
The food situation was already dire. At one point a guard allowed me to swap my watch for bread with a civilian during a rest stop. It had to be done but I resented the guard taking his share.
When we stopped I saw the soldiers setting up their machine guns on tripods. That always made us jumpy. We didn’t know what they had planned for us. After all, we had witnessed Auschwitz. After a while we noticed the guns were facing away from our tiny column and we relaxed. We were in partisan territory and they expected an attack.
The guards had a vehicle carrying their packs, some of their weapons and what supplies they had to feed us. When it broke down they abandoned it, commandeered a horse and cart and transferred the entire load to that. The animal was knackered from the start. They were soon beating it mercilessly. After all the murders I witnessed in Auschwitz and all the corpses I had stepped over on that march, the plight of the beast still affronted me. The way it was being whipped it wouldn’t live long. In my mind there was no lower being than one who mistreats a defenceless animal. People can rebel, animals can’t.
I knew about horses from the farm. I could handle it better but I had to convince the guards. If the old nag died I told them, they would have to carry their kit themselves. If they let me lead the horse, I could keep it alive. They relented.
I took the reins and with the snow driving in my face once again I spoke gently into the horse’s ear. Domesticated animals have no anger in them. Earn their trust and they respond. Treat an animal well and it gives nothing but help. I got it walking again and it did another fifty miles in the drifting snow for me. Then the guards shot it in the head and strung it up in a barn. By then it was the right thing to do. Its misery was over.
I picked up a blade and sliced a piece of flesh from the rump and ate it raw. The guards took the rest and I never saw what they did with it. They probably cooked it. I couldn’t get any back to the lads.
We stopped there for a couple of days giving us time to rest. And then it was on with the trudge. On one occasion we slept the night in a normal prison with iron bars and the lot. It was shelter and better than a windy barn. On another occasion we slept in a malt house.
There was a small gang of lads that hung around me on the march. I guess I bossed them about a bit. Bill Hedges was one of them and Jimmy Fleet, of course. It’s strange to say but I think Jimmy saw me as having more mental strength than the others. He suffered a lot on the march and I was able to support him. I still owed both for hiding Hans during the swaps but that was already history. We had troubles of our own now and I avoided the tangle of deep friendships, the desert had taught me that. Tomorrow I could easily be shovelling snow or earth over their bodies, why make it worse? I kept my distance but Jimmy and Bill had covered for me, and I would look out for them.
We operated as a unit and developed a system of our own – a modus operandi. At the end of a long, hard march we were shown a place to kip and left to it. Military rank meant nothing in captivity and less still on that trek. People gravitated to those who knew what to do. If there was respect, it was earned. I tended to give the orders and we fanned out rapidly searching for food, mangelwurzels if we were lucky. The others scouted out the best corners to sleep in. I checked out where the guards were and what their routine was, to see what we could get away with. That system got us through.
I remember us searching one barn but the hunt for food turned up nothing. I flopped down determined to enjoy the one thing there was in quantity, the piles of beautiful fresh straw to sleep on.
My weight compressed those pale yellow stalks that had once supported grain. I was obsessed with thoughts of the bread it had produced. On the march we thought of nothing but food and as we slept we dreamt of it.
Now I couldn’t sleep or get comfortable. There was something lumpy beneath the straw. I dug down and found I was lying on a stash of potatoes. We’d struck gold. Someone was trying to help us, I was sure of it. I shouted the lads across. There were about six pounds of spuds in all. We lit a fire, cooked and ate what we could. It was a veritable feast, wonderful. We carried the rest
with us when we moved. We never found anything like it again.
We had passed through Ratibor in Silesia and on into Czechoslovakia. As days turned to weeks we headed deeper into Bohemia, passing through Pardubice on the river Elbe and on through the outskirts of Prague to Pilsen. In parts of Sudetenland, where you might say this whole sorry mess began with the German occupation which started the war, local people – Czechs rather than ethnic Germans – threw bread to us as we passed. The guards stepped in and tried to stop them but we still got some. It was appreciated.
Hunger hurts. It had been a tough day. The lads were all bedded down in a small barn for the night when I noticed that the dividing wall stopped short of the rafters. It was eight feet high and after a few attempts, I managed to climb up and swung my legs over, dropping down the other side into a ramshackled outhouse.
I began exploring and found a bowl of solidified, rancid fat possibly for the animals. I considered it then gagged, put it down and shinned back over the wall and hit the sack. I thought about it all night. When the order came to leave the next morning I jumped up without thinking, leapt over the wall and found the bowl. I ate the lot without pause and managed to keep it down.
The mind conquers everything. I forced the most appalling things down my gullet on that march and each time I convinced myself that it was a Christmas dinner. It’s how I survived.
From Pilsen it seemed we were being taken towards the Austrian border. By now I was desperate. We weren’t getting any food. I wasn’t going to starve to death as a captive. I might as well be on the run fending for myself.
I decided to go alone and never told a soul, not even Bill and Jimmy. If I had said anything it would have put pressure on them to come along. If I died, they would die. I wouldn’t take that responsibility. I operated better alone.
