by Denis Avey
Through the desert, the years of captivity and Auschwitz I had told myself, ‘You didn’t have to think, you had to do.’ It was decision-making by instinct and it had got me through. Now there was no danger and too much time to think. The dreams were starting to conquer me. I relived the powerlessness of seeing and not doing and I did it nightly.
There was no help for traumatised soldiers back then. It wasn’t even thought of. I know now I was a mess, a complete and total mess. Many of us were.
If my mother never asked about the war, people in the village couldn’t stop their questions. They didn’t really want to know, of course, they just wanted a few heroic anecdotes. They knew nothing about the concentration camps then and if I mentioned anything at all, it didn’t resonate with them. It didn’t fit in to what they knew or even what they wanted to know. People were just uncomfortable hearing about it and their response was to go blank. I called it the glazed-eye syndrome.
No one at home understood what we soldiers had been through. Some talked utter rubbish. The question that insulted me most was, ‘How many Germans did you kill?’ We were forced to do the things we had done and it cheapened the whole thing to talk about it like that. They were inviting us to gloat about the things we wanted to forget. The enemy soldiers we had killed had paid the price and going on about it showed a lack of respect.
One chap – a butcher from Epping who hadn’t served anywhere – told me bravely that he would have run his wife through with a knife to spare her falling into the hands of the Germans if they had conquered Britain. That clearly wasn’t meant for her ears. He squirmed when I ran into both of them side by side on the train a short time afterwards. I didn’t need to say anything.
Auschwitz was already a distant planet but the dreams brought back some of the faces. There was nothing I could do to enquire about Hans but with Ernst it was different. There were some things I would force myself to do whether I was up to the task or not. I had to find Susanne in Birmingham and tell her what I knew. I had managed to negotiate some official leave by now and I had some weeks to spare. It was a fool’s errand and I hadn’t thought it through.
I don’t know now how I made contact, whether I wrote, found a telephone number or whether I simply turned up on the doorstep. I knew she was called Susanne and I had connected her to the surname Cottrell. Ernst may even have given me that name from the start. I assumed she had been adopted by the family that had taken her in before the war so in my mind she was always Susanne Cottrell. The story of the cigarettes was one thing Mother did talk through very briefly. She was pleased I had got some of them and that it had helped. She didn’t need to know about the camps and I went no further than that with her.
My recollection is that I met Susanne in Birmingham, I can’t be sure. I was in no fit state to meet anyone and I hadn’t planned what I would say. What with the war and captivity I had none of the tact needed to break bad news gently. I didn’t really know why I was going to see her at all. She was on my list I suppose, along with Les Jackson’s folks and others I traced later.
I think I went to the house but it’s all very vague now. I have a feeling we went for a walk; I remember being outside. She was about twenty-two years old – pleasant but shy and small in stature. She still had an accent.
It was an anguished meeting. I wanted her to know that the cigarettes had got through, that Ernst had been overjoyed to have them and that it might have bought him some brief help and protection. I could tell her all that, if I could spit it out, but where would the story go then? There was no happy ending.
I had visions of the death march and those frozen corpses. We had walked over their bodies for miles. I knew the chances were Ernst had been murdered with the others. If he had survived the march he had probably been herded into another death camp and perished later. I couldn’t bring Susanne hope, nor could I tell her anything of Ernst’s death; I hadn’t witnessed it or seen his body.
I was suddenly alongside a young girl who had lost everything, but now had a chance to rebuild her life. Why burden her with the bestiality of Auschwitz? I couldn’t talk about it anyway. There were a lot of silences. I still partly thought in German. After losing so much weight I must have looked dreadful.
It was a traumatic meeting and I left wondering whether I had done more harm than good. The barbarity of Auschwitz had entered every pore. I was saturated in the memory but I couldn’t get it out. Who would I tell? Looking back I was in a terrible state. PTSD they call it now – post-traumatic stress disorder. It took me years to get back to rational thinking. I was weird all right.
Sometime later I tried half-heartedly to get in contact with Susanne again. I failed and gave up. I had done enough harm; I had to move on.
Around then, on 3 June 1945 I was given a new address book by an old girlfriend called Jane, a concert pianist. It was small and covered in brown leather and I pencilled in the details I had for the girl I still thought of as Susanne Cottrell: 7 Tixall Road, Birmingham. There’s also an address for Gerdi Herberich in Nuremberg – it must have been a good sandwich.
Les Jackson’s relatives are scribbled in there too. His folks were the next on my list for a visit but my experience with Susanne had shaken me. It took me months to go back to Aspen Grove in Liverpool and face them.
Eventually, I drove up to meet his father and we went to the pub and both drank too much. He had lost his son and I knew exactly how. I was there to fill in the gaps but I spared him the details. He didn’t need to know that Les had been blown apart. I said what we all said in those circumstances, that I was with him when he was killed, that it had been quick. I hope it helped. Mr Jackson wasn’t emotional about it, the sherbet saw to that. Dear old Les, he’s still out there somewhere in the sand.
We were slightly the worse for wear when we got back to the house, then in walked Marjorie, his sister. She was as beautiful as ever. I’d danced with her before embarkation and had her picture stuck on the cabin wall. She was with a feller called Evans and I realised she was married. To ease her embarrassment in front of her husband I pretended not to know her and introduced myself as if we were strangers; I was also protecting myself. Marjorie had been special, she moved beautifully in the ballroom, but I had been away a long time. Life had moved on and another door had closed. I slept at the house and left early next morning.
Les’s story is not quite finished. He had a wife who lived in Southampton and when I was back in barracks at Winchester I went to see her unannounced. I should have known better. I wasn’t thinking straight at all then. I introduced myself at the door and she was flustered and asked me to wait outside. After a few moments she appeared with her coat and suggested we go to a pub to talk.
I guessed straight away she had a new man. There was nothing wrong in that, Les had been dead a few years, but it was strange for me. I had come to bring comfort, pass on what details I felt I could, but she wasn’t that interested. I don’t know what I expected. I thought she would want to know what happened, to hear some of the escapades we had been through. She didn’t have much time and she seemed distracted and anxious. I told her what I could and we said goodbye outside the pub. I didn’t go back to the house.
It upset me, that meeting. The soldiers had gone away to fight and many had paid with their lives. The war had just ended and they were already lost and forgotten; the water had closed over their heads. It all added to my swelling mental turmoil.
I hadn’t been back long when I got a mysterious phone call at home in Essex. It was from a man who said he had been a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz III-Monowitz. He wasn’t someone I knew all that well from the camp, he had never asked for my help and I had never to my knowledge given him anything. We knew him by the nickname ‘Mops’. Somehow he had got hold of my real name and made contact through the Red Cross. I was intrigued, I had been so careful. He wasn’t even a prisoner I’d had dealings with and now he was calling from Paris at a time when international phone calls were rare.
He tol
d me all about the Jewish death march. He said he had counted hundreds of gunshots each day they walked and that many had been slaughtered. Miraculously, he had come through. It confirmed what I had seen but it was the first indication that anyone had survived. I wrote his name down in my little book as ‘Merge’ with an address in Paris. I never heard from him again but two or three weeks later four Jewish boys arrived at the house unexpectedly. ‘Mops’ had sent them. The oldest was eighteen, the other three around fourteen. They were polite lads who had come across from Ilford. They were not camp survivors but had lived out the war in Britain. Perhaps they had escaped on a similar Kindertransport as Susanne. They never asked for anything and I couldn’t really help them. We chatted a bit, my mother gave them a meal and they set off again, leaving us mystified.
Chapter 18
The officers back at Winchester called me in, wanting to know if I had anything to report from my time as a POW. Too right I had but where would I start? I struggled to tell them about Auschwitz and sensed straight away that they couldn’t take it in. They knew so little about the concentration camps in 1945 and for me that door had slammed shut. I couldn’t prise it open again.
I told them what I could about the slavery, the beatings and random murders, the gas chambers and the crematoria but back in England it all sounded so far-fetched and words failed me. If they knew about the labour camps, they certainly had no idea that allied soldiers had been put to work alongside them. Their body language suggested they were uncomfortable hearing about it. Like the people in my village, they just glazed over.
Many former prisoners were made to feel they had let the side down by being captured at all. No one ever said it straight out, but we felt under suspicion. Instead of being victims of Nazi forced labour programmes it was as if we had unwittingly helped the German war effort. We weren’t treated as returning heroes at any rate. I gave up and walked out.
I never spoke about Auschwitz officially for decades after that. I think they handed out forms to the lads coming home later asking for their experiences as prisoners. It probably spared the officers the embarrassment of talking about it. By then I had moved on. We had done what we could to sabotage work at IG Farben and had suffered as much as any who served. We had also witnessed humanity’s darkest chapter and come home with nothing we could talk about. Nothing anyone could understand, at least.
I fulfilled one promise to myself and wrote down what I could remember about Auschwitz III-Monowitz. I scribbled down the few names that remained in my mind and the details I had gathered about camp conditions as I had seen them and then I put it away in an old leather briefcase and tried to forget about it. I tried to tell myself it was over.
It wasn’t. Things were starting to happen which I couldn’t fully explain. I still saw Jane from time to time. Her husband had died during the war and she was now working as a PA to a US Admiral stationed at the American Embassy in London. She kept up the piano playing all the same. We’d always had a fiery friendship, Jane and I. Even before the war we argued quite a lot but that never spoilt things. I was invited to join her and a large group of friends for dinner in London. It was a pleasant evening after which the party transferred to her apartment in Beaufort Street, Chelsea where the entertainment continued, or at least I think it did. I’m not sure what happened.
Some time later I walked into a police station far away in the East End on the other side of London. I was dazed and confused and desperately scared. It turned out I’d lost three days of my life. They said I wasn’t drunk and as far as I could tell I hadn’t been unconscious but I still couldn’t account for the time.
On top of that I had a US army staff car with me. I don’t know how I got it but I guess it came from one of Jane’s party guests. At least the car wasn’t damaged so that was something. I was worried, very worried both for myself and others. I had been so jumpy since I got home. If someone caught me unawares or touched me on the back I spun round expecting to have to fight. I got angry easily. I had been beyond the rules for so long that anything was possible. If I had been in trouble or hurt anyone during those missing three days I had no recollection of it. The memory loss scared me.
I handed myself in at the police station and told them what I thought had happened. It was all a bit silly, really. They didn’t know what to do with me. They checked whether anyone matching my description was wanted for anything. I imagine they had a lot of weird behaviour to contend with from returning soldiers at that time. I left the staff car with the police and headed home alone both chastened and shaken by what had happened.
I was demobbed in early 1946. I returned home to the village only to be pestered by people asking the same mindless questions about the war. I couldn’t give them what they wanted. People were fascinated by the strangest things, like the baseball bat that fell from the sky. I left that on the back seat of my open-topped car in Leytonstone while I went to get some food. When I came back it had been pinched. I’d always fancied I might find out who its owner had been and return it to the family. I wasn’t thinking straight. The bat had survived but its owner was certainly dead. It would hardly bring his loved ones peace and comfort.
Few of my friends had returned to the village after the war and I felt the loneliness more in such a familiar place. The innocence and joy of life there had evaporated. There had never been enough hours in my day before I left. Life had a swing to it then. Now it was empty. I was restless, and feeling increasingly weak, I began to suffer stomach cramps. Something was wrong but I wasn’t sure what. I hit on the idea of going up to Manchester to track down Bill Hedges. I thought I might even stay in the north and look for work.
I found Bill eventually and it was good to see him. He was married and if he was going through similar traumas to me he didn’t say. We couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about Auschwitz, in any detail. It didn’t fit into our lives any more. He had survived the long march and got home, that was something but we both wanted to move on, find our places again in a world that couldn’t comprehend us.
My stomach pains were getting more acute all the time by then. When they struck I was forced to my knees, writhing in agony and I was getting crushing headaches along with it. I had chronic fatigue and I felt like I was falling apart. My tongue was as black as the ace of spades. I needed a doctor quickly.
He didn’t hang around. I was whipped straight in to the Manchester Royal Infirmary where the doctors were equally mystified. I had had malaria and sandfly fever in the desert, dysentery and scabies in Italy and God knows what I might have contracted in Auschwitz. The talk there had been of typhus but it certainly wasn’t the only disease incubating in the camps.
They checked my lungs and everything else before one of the professors got to the root of it and diagnosed systemic tuberculosis. He said I had it in my throat, my lungs, my stomach and intestines. I knew it was serious but it was hardly surprising after working alongside the slave labourers for so long. The professor told me it would be a major operation and I would be laid up for months, possibly years. I insisted on having the whole procedure explained to me properly before I approved the operation, so the doctors gathered around my bed and went through it in minute detail.
I found it easier to understand it in engineering terms. They were going to remove a lengthy piece of my intestines and reconnect the piping. It was a major re-plumbing job.
I woke after the operations to find a six-inch scar across my abdomen. I had expected it to be large but I was still shocked. They sewed me up but the wound was gaping open again very soon. They stitched me up again and again but the flesh refused to knit and the gash was sometimes two inches wide. My body was exhausted. It took half a year to close properly.
Bill never came to see me. My father managed the journey once. I had gone to Manchester for a new start but mainly to get away from people and that terrible question, ‘What did you do in the war?’ Now I was fighting for my survival and I was grateful to be alive. I hadn’t realised how long it would t
ake to get back on my feet. At least in hospital I had the anonymous solitude I craved.
Thoughts of Auschwitz were receding further all the time. I took no interest in the first wave of war crimes trials in Nuremberg of men like the Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, the other military leaders Alfred Jodl, and Wilhelm Keitel and the rest.
The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had already evaded justice. He committed suicide soon after being captured by the British in May 1945 just a few weeks after I got home. He was the man most responsible for the crimes I had seen, the death camps and slave labour. His death, like everything else around then, passed me by.
The trial of the Directors of IG Farben for their part in the slave labour programmes was still being prepared whilst I was fighting my way back from TB. By the time I was back on my feet that trial was well underway.
Some of the allied survivors of E715 swore affidavits during 1947 that were used by the prosecution. No one managed to track me down. I was still very ill, away from home in hospital and disconnected from all that was happening. I was in no condition to give evidence physically or mentally.
After many weeks in the Manchester Royal Infirmary I was moved to Baguley Sanatorium to rest and recover. TB hospitals were brisk places in those days and fresh air was the remedy. I had a room of my own with doors at either end like the ones we had in stables on the farm, where the bottom and top open and close separately. The upper half was always wedged open and it was the same with the windows, whatever the weather or season. At night they narrowed the gap slightly but it made little difference. There was a rubber cover over the blankets to protect against the rain and in winter they regularly swept snow from my bed with a dustpan. The room was really a roof without substantial walls so the wind and snow howled right through it. The blankets were supposed to keep me warm but even under the covers it was chilly and no mistake.
