by Denis Avey
Then in June 1966 a letter arrived with a cheque offering compensation for what the attached slip called ‘Nazi persecution.’ It was made out for the grand total of £204 and signed by the Paymaster General. I was appalled and disgusted. We never thought the government had treated us right and this just confirmed it.
It was some time before the years of fast living came to an end and it happened with a jolt. I had designed a revolutionary new compact extrusion process capable of making aluminium toothpaste tubes and food containers more efficiently. It was my own venture and I put all my money into it. I was fascinated by the challenge but took too little care of the contracts and the small print. It turned sour and I lost almost everything. Around the same time my share portfolio took a nosedive and the good times were over. I was always hopeless with money.
There was still one big project left in me. Associated Dairies, which became the retail giant ASDA, asked me to build a factory near Newcastle to produce and bottle long-life and sterilised milk. I agreed to do it. I bought the land, negotiated with the local authorities, then designed and built what became the first fully automated plant of its type in the country. It was opened by Prince Charles and it was a fitting, if not prosperous, end to a career of which I was proud.
I had begun to reassess life before retirement. Audrey and I didn’t want to owe anybody money so we sold up and moved away from Cheshire. We bought a smaller house on the edge of the village of Bradwell in Derbyshire surrounded by fields. It’s a place where ancient dry stonewalls climb the green hills and divide the valleys. They enclose the lane behind the house, which tumbles and twists past a gapping cavern, winding onwards until it reaches the main road outside the village. It is a place where we live the seasons rather than witness them. It is in turn both splendid and bleak. It is the best and the happiest home I have known.
Chapter 19
The silence continued. Audrey knew none of the details of my time in E715, of the Auschwitz swap or even about Ernst. If I was asked, I refused to talk about any of it. It didn’t belong in our post-war lives. It remained locked away.
There weren’t the people demanding to know and there were few occasions to talk about it. If I was asked I couldn’t respond. Mine was not the experience of a real Holocaust survivor. I had witnessed some of humanity’s greatest crimes, but I had not been subject to them. So what could any of us say? Where did we fit in? By then Ernst’s was one of many gaunt faces in my mind, men whose moment of death might never be remembered by anyone.
But something was stirring. Not in me, not yet, but outside. The public were well aware of the Holocaust, the gas chambers and crematoria by now. Those terrible images of the concentration camps had begun appearing in the documentary programmes years earlier. Viewers had grown used to the pictures and had stopped seeing the victims as individuals, as people.
Now it was different. The attention started to shift from the gas chambers to the Nazi slave labour programmes themselves. I knew the victims I had seen had been less than slaves. A slave had a value to the owner, whereas the work these people were forced to do in places like IG Farben’s Buna-Werke was mainly a method of murder. Radio and TV reports started to appear focusing on their experiences.
In September 1999 I saw an article in The Times about a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz Buna plant called Rudy Kennedy but originally named Karmeinsky. He had appeared several times on radio and TV, campaigning for compensation for the victims of the Nazi slave labour camps. Strange though it was, I was seized by the possibility that I might know him and that we could have worked close together at IG Farben. I tried to contact him through the paper but nothing happened.
A few of the survivors were now making their anger known as never before. It was starting to have an impact. In August 2000, after years of wrangling, the German Government and leading companies set up the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future with ten billion Deutschmarks to compensate the slave and forced labourers and other victims of the Nazis.
We were persuaded to apply and I got the application form in on time to the International Organisation for Migration, one of the groups administering the scheme. It took them almost two years to reject my claim and all the others submitted by the allied prisoners of E715. The money didn’t bother me, it was the lack of recognition for what had happened that irked. Again our experience went unrecognised. I lodged a passionate appeal and encouraged the other lads to do the same.
I launched into a period of intense activity and angry letter writing. I bombarded MPs, the Ministry of Defence, even the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. I was determined that people should know that allied prisoners had been forced to work, sometimes in terrible conditions. It hadn’t been a question of sitting out the war and waiting to be liberated. We had been forced labourers too.
I particularly wanted the British Government to know about E715, a camp so close to Auschwitz that we had been part of its labour force. I felt that at least we deserved a payment similar to that received by the Far East prisoners of war who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Sometime later a cheque arrived for around £5000 from the IOM. I was pleased that my appeal to the German scheme had succeeded, but many of the lads had been rejected again. It didn’t seem right.
I was engaging with the war properly for the first time since 1945 but I still hadn’t really explored my own memory of what happened. The Imperial War Museum sent someone to talk to me. I don’t know how she managed it but she did a first-rate job. Somehow she got me to talk. It can’t have been easy. I rattled through it all so quickly. I was struggling for the first time to bring it all back. There were things I had never really spoken about before and I am sure I got some of it tangled now but I had taken the first step. I was talking about it. When the interviewer had gone I realised she hadn’t heard the half of it. I had barely scratched the surface.
One day a stranger arrived at the door. It was a fine day, which in Derbyshire means it wasn’t raining, and I was pottering around the house. The doorbell rang and I answered it to find a man who introduced himself as a military officer, though he was wearing civilian clothes. He came in and sat down on the sofa. He said he worked for the ex-serviceman’s organisation Combat Stress, then he knocked over a cup of tea that Audrey had made him and it went all over the new carpet. I put him at ease again and he began to explain that his organisation tried to help former soldiers cope with war trauma. He wanted to know if I needed any support. My answer was brief: ‘You’re sixty years too late, mate,’ I said.
I looked at the rank on his business card and then tore another strip off him. He hadn’t been through a war as far as I could tell so what did he know? I was very direct. I hope I wasn’t too harsh. We soldiers had been demobbed with a cheap suit and not so much as a thank you. I had survived the years of nightmares and mental anguish alone and then, in my eighties, someone was offering to help. Most of the lads were already dead.
Neither the government nor the military had cared after the war. That’s how things were then. Either families picked up the pieces or they didn’t. I couldn’t stop the nightmares completely but at least they didn’t control me any more. The man from Combat Stress represented neither government nor military and he was trying to help, poor chap. I felt sorry for him afterwards. They do excellent work.
Things really started to change in 2003 when I was asked to appear as a live guest on a local radio show to discuss war pensions. I was sitting there in the studio briefed to talk about the War Pensions Welfare Service. The ‘On Air’ light was lit. The programme was live. There were two other guests alongside me, my microphone was open and I knew what I had come to say. Then the presenter asked me an entirely unexpected question. He asked about my own war service.
As I tend to do, I began at the beginning. Suddenly I was talking about the war in very personal terms for the first time. I started slowly but still found odd German terms cropping up as I remembered it all. At one point the presenter had to ask
me to translate a German phrase I had used so the audience could keep up.
Soon the memories were flowing and the words were tumbling out. I would never be silenced again.
I ran through the story much as I have recounted it here until I began to describe Auschwitz and working alongside the Jewish prisoners from dawn to dusk every day. This was different. My voice started to break, the feelings welled up inside me and I ground to a halt. There was a long pause. I was back there again and struggling for words. I picked myself up and resumed with a safer part of the story and gained a moment to compose myself. Then I plunged back into it all again. I was describing the ghastly smell of the crematoria chimneys. I could taste it as I spoke. Again I was struggling. The other studio guests were silent, the presenter hardly needed to ask questions. I told him how I had grown used to seeing men kicked to death each day. This time something had really unlocked. I was able to talk about it all as never before; this was new for me. That show led to other interviews. Old memories were coming back all the time, there was no bottling it up now. I was off.
I wrote to Les Allen, the Honorary Secretary of the National Ex-Prisoners of War Association, and put him in the picture. Soon after that, Les sent a BBC reporter, Rob Broomby, up to see me. He had been investigating the story of the British prisoners held near Auschwitz. He had also worked on a lot of those early reports about the Jewish slave labourers and the German firms. He had returned from Berlin not long before, where he had been the BBC Correspondent. I liked Rob’s approach. He was down to earth and respectful. He understood.
Rob was to become part of this story in more ways than one. He was looking at the case for compensating British prisoners who had been forced to work for the Germans. I told him about the Jewish prisoner called Ernst with the sister in England, who I had tried to help by smuggling cigarettes. I told him about the swap with Hans and described the nights in Auschwitz III.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn when the broadcast went out that the full story of the swap didn’t really fit the bill. I learnt later that he had attempted to do something else with that section of the interview but it hadn’t worked out and he had abandoned it.
A few years went by before Rob, now working with a BBC producer called Patrick Howse, got in touch again. It was autumn 2009 and they wanted to record an interview about my story for radio and television. This time the focus was to be on the Auschwitz swap and my attempts to help Ernst.
In the weeks that followed, Rob telephoned again and again to ask more questions. He had the wild idea he might be able to trace Ernst’s sister, Susanne. If she was still alive, he said, they might find out how Ernst had died. I had not spoken to her since 1945 and I had no way of knowing what path her life had taken since. If she was indeed still alive, she would be getting on in years by now, we all were.
I went back to my little brown leather address book from 1945 to dig out what I could. It was old and faded but still clearly legible. I had written down her name then as Susanne Cottrell of 7 Tixall Road, Birmingham. I guessed this was probably an adopted name.
Rob kept me updated on the search to find her but I could tell it wasn’t going well. Weeks went by with no word.
The Association of Jewish Refugees had told him that Cottrell didn’t sound at all like a Jewish name and their specialist on the Kindertransports couldn’t trace anybody from a first name alone. His attempts to dig out the records from the Birmingham Council of Refugees for the period had been equally fruitless.
The first bit of luck for him came from the electoral register of 1945, which listed three voters living at the Tixall Road address. The good news was they all had the surname Cottrell, the bad news was none of them was a Susanne. There were three women listed, Ida, Sarah and Amy. He asked me whether one of them could have been Susanne listed under a different name. I had no way of knowing.
It was hopeless. I knew Rob was involved in daily news at the BBC and the hours of research were getting in the way of his other duties. I thought he would give it a few weeks and then throw in the towel. That’s usually what happens. At that stage it was only going to be a four-minute TV news item and a slightly longer report for BBC Radio. It wasn’t exactly a major documentary investigation.
Then he called me with a breakthrough of sorts. He had managed to contact the people who now lived at 7 Tixall Road. In a country where houses change hands at very regular intervals he was amazed to find an elderly couple still living there who had bought the house in the 1960s from a lady named Cottrell.
They recalled hearing the story of the German Jewish girl the Cottrells had sheltered during the war. Rob was elated but of course it only confirmed what I already knew. He hadn’t gleaned any more information. It gave him a temporary lift but it didn’t mean she was still alive. The trail went cold. I wracked my brain for more details of that traumatic meeting to help him and came up with nothing. That period was largely a blur.
I wasn’t certain that she had been formally adopted at all and if she had, those records would be private. The electoral register, census returns and even the phone book turned up a number of Cottrells scattered around the country but the hours spent on the phone had turned up nothing. His colleagues were starting to wonder whether it was a waste of time. There were plenty of easier stories to chase.
There was only one more thing for him to do. In desperation he started calling some of those he had spoken to already.
He picked up the phone to the family at Tixall Road again. Since the original inquiry they’d had some time to think. They had spoken to their son Andrew who lived in nearby Solihull. Not only did he remember hearing the story of the German girl who came to Britain as a child refugee at the start of the Second World War, but he was also sure she was still living in the Birmingham area. He thought she had married and taken the name James, and that she had a son called Peter. It got better. He was convinced he had seen her in the last year or two having dinner at a local pub restaurant.
It was great news. Rob was now looking for a Susanne James with a son called Peter who he believed had moved to the United States and might be a successful accountant. Now the search began on both sides of the Atlantic though James was a relatively common name.
But Andrew had supplied another lead. He was convinced that Susanne had lived until recently at an address on Warwick Road in the Acocks Green area of Birmingham.
It was a very long road. So long, in fact, that there was more than one person called James registered as living on it in recent years. One number worth chasing appeared to be a takeaway but they were more interested in orders than tracing missing people.
Another listing was intriguing. The electoral register for 2001 showed a Susanne E James at a Warwick Road address. The mystery was that there were two other names registered to vote at the same place, one of which sounded eastern European. The woman who picked up the phone was obviously too young to be Susanne and was confused by the call. No wonder, there was a complete stranger on the line asking weird questions about an elderly lady he clearly didn’t know. Eventually she recalled being shown around the house as a prospective buyer by a small elderly lady with grey hair. It was promising but she couldn’t remember her name.
More frustration. Rob called me to say he was almost ready to give up. He had invested weeks in the search by now and had little to show, so Rob and Patrick fixed a date to come up and record my story for TV and radio as it was.
He said they had built into the schedule one last day of knocking on doors in Birmingham as a final throw of the dice but then they would be cutting their losses. Such was the pressure of news. I was sure when I heard that they would never find the women I had met sixty-four years ago as a young girl. Her brother Ernst was just one of millions of victims. I guessed what had happened to him and I didn’t need to be told. It had been a hopeless quest but a nice thought while it lasted. They would have to rely on me alone for their story.
The TV crew arrived in good time. I remembered Rob fro
m last time and I was introduced to Patrick. He had made a good impression on the telephone and he was, as I had imagined him, thoughtful and concerned. I was glad to see they were both wearing poppies.
They moved the furniture around and set up the cameras so that they could capture a glimpse of Hope Valley through the picture window over my shoulder. They had brought two cameras and though one was considerably smaller than the other, it made the sitting room into a mini studio. I showed them the shotgun my father had given me as a boy which is still on the wall and the pictures of me in my horse-riding days. Audrey served cups of tea and put everyone at ease.
I settled into the armchair with Rob opposite me putting the questions. He started the interview in the western desert. We skimmed rapidly over the fighting, my capture, and escape from the torpedoed ship. Then it was on to the Italian POW camp and my transfer first to Germany and then eventually to E715 to work with the slave labourers from Auschwitz.
He quizzed me about the swap with Hans, my nights in Auschwitz III and then I began to tell the story of Ernst and the smuggled cigarettes. Compared to those early, stilted attempts to talk about it all, it was getting easier. I got to the end of the story of Ernst and the cigarettes and they paused to change tapes.
I remained in my seat with the lapel microphones connected and looked out of the window and across the valley to Bradwell Edge. I had ridden my horse, Ryedale, along that ridge on countless occasions in earlier days and I knew every step of the way. Ryedale was a fine stallion; a Hanoverian-Arab Cross seventeen hands high and the most intelligent horse I have ever known. I even bought a miniature Shetland pony called Copper to keep him company. He was small enough to walk under Ryedale’s legs when he stood still. When they died, I dug a deep hole and buried first one and then the other in the field below the window. I had retreated from riding as the years advanced. Now, for me, the hill where I once rode is a view only and in most seasons a dramatic one.
