by Denis Avey
Being there was the easy part. What I really hated were the twice-daily injections into the muscles of the backside. When that was done there was an oral medicine to take that could strip the paint from the walls. Perhaps that’s why there weren’t any walls.
It was late 1947 before I was fit to leave. I had been in hospital for more than eighteen months. Soon after that, on 8 December, my father got in contact with me to say that Mother was seriously ill and I should come home immediately. I went straight to Manchester Station and was distressed to learn I couldn’t get a train to London for six hours. When it finally left it was still a long slow journey. Then I had to change in London and get another connecting train out to the village. I arrived exhausted and too late. My mother had already died.
I had sensed on my return home from the war that she wasn’t well. Her golden hair, which gave her the appearance of a woman in a Titian painting, had turned grey. She had paid the price for our war.
Father had been taking her to Epping on a shopping trip. She had sat down to change her shoes and fallen off the stool. He took her straight to hospital but there was little they could do. She died within a few hours. She had suffered a cerebral aneurysm – a bleed on the brain. She was a wonderful, loving person and only fifty-nine when she died.
After the funeral I realised there really was nothing left for me in North Weald and I left the village of my childhood for good, returning north to Manchester, determined to try and build a future for myself there.
It was a while before I got a job. Many firms said I was over-qualified and of course my southern accent marked me out. There was a fair bit of prejudice against southern lads in the north in those days and vice-versa.
I had always been practical. I had kept the carrier rolling in the desert and I was used to fiddling with cars and motorbikes before the war so I bought myself some tools and got a job as a maintenance fitter at a firm with a quaint name. It was called the Winterbottom Book Cloth Company based in Weaste, Manchester. It was a start. They produced – as the name suggests – material for binding books and a peculiar starched fabric used for tracing technical drawings, known as imperial tracing cloth.
Soon after that I met a girl called Irene. She was a real party animal, both outgoing and excitable. We married quite quickly and we moved in with my mother-in-law in Burnage, south Manchester until we could find somewhere to live.
Eight months later I got a lucky break at work and a chance to shine. The steam engines that operated almost everything at the Winterbottom factory had broken down and the future of the firm was in jeopardy. The Works Manager, who was omnipotent in those days, called for the steam service engineers from Bolton but it was going to be days or even weeks before they could come.
I said I could fix it given half a chance. I was well liked but regarded as a bit unusual. It was a fair description then, I still wasn’t myself. The works manager said it was ridiculous to think I could repair such a complex piece of machinery. What they didn’t know was that pre-war I had helped Sir Oliver Lyle on his experiments to improve the efficiency of steam engines whilst working for the sugar company, Tate and Lyle. I had picked up a thing or two.
I had good reason to chance my arm but it was a gamble. They knew I was handy with tools and in the end they decided they had nothing to lose. I knew it was a huge job. I had to lift up a fifty-tonne crankshaft on hydraulic jacks, get the bearings out, roughly remould them and then finish them on a lathe. I put them back in position and scraped them smooth. After thirty-six hours without pause or sleep I got the engine running again. They were jubilant; I was relieved.
I had saved them tens of thousands of pounds. My success was noted by the head office and I was offered promotion and a new job with a firm owned by the same holding company.
The firm was called UMP and I was to be its chief engineer. My luck had changed; at last I was using my skills, making up for the education that had been cut short by conflict. The successful post-war years had begun.
At home I was less happy. Irene’s lively temperament might have suited me before the war but I soon realised that I had changed. We weren’t well suited. By day I was working and becoming more successful and at night I was still suffering terribly. In those troubled years the nightmares which had hovered over me in the hours of darkness, descended like a thick and noxious cloud.
I couldn’t talk about it to her or anyone else. She could never understand; in those days no one understood. When my head touched the pillow the ghosts returned. Sleep became something to fear. That boy being beaten wasn’t the only recurring nightmare. There were the faces of other tortured Jewish prisoners – disjointed images looming and melting before me. Countless times during the night I would surface into consciousness like a diver emerging from an underwater cave, confused and gasping for breath. My heart would be racing and I was drenched in sweat.
There was nowhere to go for help and in those days I wouldn’t have admitted to myself that I needed it anyway. None of us did. My poor wife was unable to understand, no one had prepared her or me for anything like that, and it was a lot to ask of her.
The memory of Les’s death never haunted me, neither did the countless other killings I had seen. I didn’t dream of the man I killed with my hands in the desert, though the feeling of all those moments was always with me somewhere. Instead I dreamt constantly about the Jewish prisoners. Those memories saturated everything.
Worse, I dreamt of those hours in Auschwitz III. The ghastly smells flooded the bedroom around me, I heard that perpetual rambling of voices in the night, felt again how it was to lie there in those bunks. I was hidden in that dark and terrible place from which there was no escape. I knew the slightest noise would give me away. I couldn’t move or breathe, I had to be still; my life depended on it.
I’d had that dream before but this time it was more terrifying. I was facing imminent discovery and only silence, absolute silence, could prevent disaster. As the dream reached its horrendous climax, Irene, lost in her own slumbers next to me, called out in her sleep.
I had to stop the sound or I would be caught and killed. Still asleep, I jumped on her, desperate to stifle the noise. It was seconds before I woke and realised what I was doing: I had my hands on her throat. I sat there on the edge of the bed with sweat dripping from my face and I knew she was hurt. She could barely speak, and she had red weal marks on her neck for days. It was a terrible, terrible moment. I had reached the bottom.
Something had to change. The next day I went to the doctors and the police station to report what had happened. It had shaken me deeply and it had to be done. I knew when I lost my memory in London that I was a loose cannon and I had gone to the police that time. This was worse, far worse.
I thought I was becoming dangerous and I wouldn’t have minded if they had locked me up. Part of me wanted them to. It would prevent anything worse happening. They listened but they were very negative. They never took it seriously.
The doctor wasn’t much help either and he sent me packing with some pills. I don’t know what they were. Long before anyone spoke of post-traumatic stress disorder I was living in its grip. I felt alone with it. I had no idea that countless others were suffering too. I had never allowed myself to be a victim, so being a victim of my own mind was something indeed.
I knew I had to channel the pain and despair somehow. I had to cure myself. Strength of mind had got me through the war, the camps and the long march home. I had told myself then that they could never capture my mind, but now it had captured me and I was being destroyed by it. I had to take control again.
I took up judo because the discipline fascinated me. It was a bridge from the martial traditions I had grown up with, the boxing and the military life, to something more interesting. Boxing had certainly been about tactics and agility but now I was learning how to use an opponent’s strength and anger against him. I didn’t have to duck and punch, all I had to do was to find his fulcrum and he would fall. I trained until I
became a black belt and the philosophy attracted me. I liked the idea of transcending the pain threshold. The mind is a marvellous thing. It had allowed me to do the things I had done, but could I heal myself?
I would have loved to study Buddhism and explore eastern religions but we didn’t do things like that back then. My day job was pretty demanding and it probably wasn’t my sort of thing anyway. The journey back to better health took years, decades even. It certainly wasn’t a talking cure I went for, quite the reverse. I retreated further into silence about the war and all that I had done and seen. It was past and buried and it had no place in my life. I had to move on.
Our experiences as prisoners didn’t chime with the popular mood. People wanted to hear of brave escape attempts, not forced labour programmes. So the prison camp movies focused on the officers who had not been compelled to work. The experience of the majority of ordinary prisoners was buried and lost. They wanted combat heroes and battles won, not defeats or ignominious capture. They wanted moments of glory not drawn-out stories of endurance, however hellish. We had played our part and then, in those early post-war years, we had become invisible.
Gradually I got the worst of the nightmares under control somehow. I could never beat them but at least they weren’t beating me any more. I had always liked fast cars and now I took to motor racing in search of that life-affirming adrenalin rush. I joined a club that met at Oulton Park track and we raced our own souped-up Jaguars regularly. Life began to feel sharp again. I always drove at great speed even on the normal highway and regardless of the weather, I’m afraid. Normal life was slow and mundane. I needed the intensity of the rush and it helped dilute the memories.
As the years rolled by and foreign travel became more common I headed to Spain. Four times I ran with bulls through the streets of Pamplona during the San Fermín Festival. I entered into the spirit of it and dressed up for the event in a white shirt and trousers, all set off by the traditional red neckerchief and waistband. I had always been a terrible show-off but it was a great thrill. I went scuba-diving in the Red Sea long before that was fashionable too.
Not all my activities were so risky. I took to riding again and bought myself four horses and became a regular three-day event competitor, mastering dressage, show jumping and cross country. I managed to fit in a number of horseback safaris in Africa. So yes, post-war, I had a good life. I couldn’t have squeezed more in. I never thought for a minute that I was hiding from anything in those years. I thought Auschwitz had been purged and forgotten, that I had moved on, but all the time it was still there.
I could never sit with my back to a door; I still can’t. I am always alert and ready. I hate being cold or wasting food. It all stems from those years. The nightmares were not as extreme or as regular by then but they hadn’t gone away.
Outwardly things were going well. I had a large house in Bramhall, Cheshire, a large garden with a tennis court and a thousand roses in the flowerbeds but I wasn’t really happy at home. Irene and I shared few interests. I respected her but we were incompatible. We developed a largely separate social life, began to drift apart and that ultimately ended in divorce.
My father died in 1960. His pride and joy was a huge library of beautiful leather-bound books on every subject that he had collected over the decades. I couldn’t get them home to Manchester, that was a serious journey in those days and I had no space for them anyway. About a week later a couple of cockney traders came to the house in Essex. They wanted to make an offer for the contents.
They mooched around, scoffed and then named a derisory figure for his book collection. That was it. I sent them packing. I piled the books up in the garden a good distance from the house and burnt the lot along with his splendid mahogany desk. The books belonged to him and they belonged there, where they had always been. No one else should have them. The fire burned for three day and three nights. I pulled one volume from the flames at the last minute and threw it in the back of the car, then I drove home.
Around that time we had a burglary at the house. A lot of valuable stuff was stolen, clocks, watches, silver cups and amongst it all the old leather briefcase with my scrawled notes about Auschwitz. I hadn’t thought about them for years and I had never reread them since they were written. The case was heavy and always locked so it looked important but it had no value to anyone but me. Back then I was too concerned about the pricy items that had gone to care much for the battered case and my handwritten notes.
As chief engineer I had become quite a big wheel within the firm so when it was taken over in 1961, the new bosses at Venesta wanted to get rid of me. I turned down an offer of a job in London and became a group engineer for the Cheshire Sterilised Milk Company instead. I was making up for all those lost years. I had found another way of staying in charge, despite what was going on inside.
Things changed when I met Audrey. I knew then what I had been missing. She filled a hole in my life and has done so ever since. In work I felt I was taking responsibility, making decisions, driving life forward and generally running the show. I look at pictures of those years and see a confident-looking, middle-aged man with all the trappings of success, the fast cars, a spacious home, the large dogs, the horses.
Audrey describes meeting a very different person. She said I looked permanently lost as if searching for something. She detected a sadness which I hadn’t admitted to myself and I hoped no else had noticed. In her memory, I was lean of face and my eyes were always fixed on the floor. She knew something was wrong. She was right, she usually is. I wasn’t really normal. She had an inkling that it had something to do with Auschwitz but that was all. I was surprised she knew that much. Audrey helped me win my sanity back. She has been my life raft ever since.
There was another reminder of the war years. My injured eye was getting worse all the time. It had been trouble since I had been hit in the face after challenging the SS man. My vision would distort without warning, large objects would fold away to nothing before me, or worse there would be two of them. I had to abandon cricket and tennis. I couldn’t judge where the ball was any more worse still, I couldn’t see the engineering drawings in meetings. It was getting serious and it had to be sorted out.
Audrey and I were not fully together at that point but it was Saturday and I had arranged to take her shopping, after I had seen the eye specialist. It wasn’t to be.
The professor did a series of tests, shone bright lights into my eye and looked into it using a series of optical gadgets. When he finished, he gave the verdict. It was not good.
The eye injury had turned cancerous and it threatened more than my vision. If they didn’t operate within forty-eight hours the cancer could spread to my brain and I would die. At one o’clock I called Audrey to break the bad news to her. I wasn’t coming out of hospital and they were preparing me for an operation on the following Monday morning.
My eye would have to be removed and replaced with a glass one. Once I was over the shock, the professor asked if I might be part of an experiment that would further their understanding of the workings of the eye and its connected nerves. The professor said he had asked a colleague to fly over from Sweden to take part. They were to sever the nerves of my eye under a local rather than a general anaesthetic. I was to talk them through what I was experiencing as it happened.
The day of the operation came. I closed my good eye and looked at the clock with my impaired right one for the last time. It was exactly eleven o’clock in the morning as they wheeled me into theatre fully conscious, but a little dazed.
I was laid on a table with bright lights overhead and the experiment began. I don’t recall any real pain, but I do remember the professor probing ever deeper with his fine blade into my eye questioning me as they went. ‘Do you see anything when I do this?’ he asked.
‘No, no different,’ I said.
He probed a bit more. ‘What about this?’ he asked and on it went.
There was another fine movement of his hand, as delicate as a
watchmaker’s, and my right eye went dark. It was as if a weighty coin had been placed over it. The sight on my right side had gone for good and I had given a stilted commentary on it as it happened. I don’t recall much after that; I was probably placed under a general anaesthetic so they could remove the eye altogether.
I came around and was relieved that I could see with my good eye. I had come through so much by then I don’t recall feeling especially morbid about it, though Audrey had been very upset.
As a trade-off for assisting with their research, I would benefit from another experimental procedure. I was to be the recipient of one of the first moveable glass eyes. The muscles would be attached to a washer at the back of the socket and they in turn could fasten onto the false eye, allowing it some limited movement.
It was wonderfully futuristic then. What followed wasn’t. They bunged my eye full of plasticine to make a cast and gave me a temporary glass eye, which didn’t match. Sometime later I was sent to a small artist’s studio. A young woman appeared, we exchanged a few pleasantries and then she sat me down as if she was going to paint my portrait. She looked long and hard at me then produced a blank glass eye, some mini pots of paint and tiny brushes. Like an artist working on a cameo, she mixed the colours to capture every fleck and hue. She did a wonderful job and it was a better match than many produced later by more hi-tech methods.
Most people are unaware that it is a glass eye until I tap it with a teaspoon to underline the point. I still remove it occasionally and I have been known to leave it with my hearing aid on the dressing table. Audrey says there are so many bits of me laid out there on some nights that she’d be better off sleeping over there. She usually throws in an imaginary wooden leg to enhance the joke.
