by Denis Avey
Heavens above, after all that time it was wonderful to see her but I was reliving it so quickly. I felt that strange meeting in 1945 was still between us and I wanted to get it off my chest.
‘I have been trying to remember what I said to you, it must have been terrible because I was so screwed up that I couldn’t explain anything to you at all or what my feelings were.’
She nodded.
We talked about the letters to my mother, the cigarettes she sent to me for Ernie, everything. ‘You did a marvellous job,’ I said to her, ‘those cigarettes were a gold mine for Ernst.’ I was still using his original name then.
‘It was the least I could do with the war on,’ she said. ‘My brother was lovely. He had a heart of gold, you couldn’t help but like him.’
I told her the story of the time he was almost caught in the Bude – the shed on the IG Farben site. I knew he was an intelligent chap. He kept his cool.
‘Well, it’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘and all those years and you didn’t know that Ernie survived?’
‘I didn’t know he survived at all,’ I said.
‘All those years? Goodness me,’ she looked up at me and added, ‘I only wish he was here today.’
‘Oh, so do I,’ I said.
It took a second or two for her words to sink in. He had been in America all that time, we could have met so easily. I was halfway through my next sentence when it struck me. I pulled myself upright and tried to push on. ‘I’d like to have a photograph of him,’ I was saying, ‘and the chance to talk to his family.’
‘They’ll be very excited,’ she said but I wasn’t able to hear any more. It all came over me at once: the news about Ernie, the dreadful memories and the pent-up emotion of all those decades. My throat blocked, I covered my face. I was bent double as if winded, bowed down in front of a woman I barely knew and I felt the tears I had never been able to shed welling-up.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and my voice cracked. I was still bent over when I felt Susanne’s hand on my shoulder.
No one said anything for some time. Then someone broke the silence and suggested we sit down and relax. Someone mentioned tea. It gave me something to do. I was the host again. I took some deep breaths, pulled myself together, arranged the sofa and got everyone sat down.
It was easier now. Lynn began to talk freely. She said she had known of my existence from when she first met Peter many years ago. Ernie had told them about the English POW called Ginger.
‘I have always known of your existence,’ Lynn said, ‘but we didn’t know your name was Denis.’ She described hearing the story during a weekend spent with Ernie. ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to him. I heard the story about you forty years after the fact. It was so important to him that Susanne knew he was still alive.’ She went on. ‘Nobody enjoyed life more than Ernie; he was so much fun, a real story teller. He went on to have a wonderful life.’
Susanne had been trying patiently to give me something. Now, with a little prompting and speaking quite formally as if she had rehearsed it, she took the chance. ‘I am delighted to give you this tape that Ernie made in 1995,’ she said, handing me a DVD recording.
It was, Peter explained, a short extract of Ernie’s life story as recorded by the Shoah Foundation. ‘Denis, you will want to see this,’ he said.
We climbed the spiral stairs to the mezzanine floor where we open presents at Christmas and enjoy a sherbet or two with friends and family. I collapsed on the sofa next to Susanne and they slotted the DVD into the machine.
It took a moment or two before the picture appeared and there he was in a freeze-frame on the screen. He was about seventy years old then and looked fit with it. His strong grey hair was swept back from his forehead and he was wearing a smart, open-necked blue shirt. I recognised the same sympathetic face I had seen in the photographs and also flashes of the boy I had known. He was sitting in a room with book-lined walls and there was a small table lamp over his right shoulder.
I guessed he was in the middle of the Auschwitz story as he wasn’t smiling. ‘Oh there he is,’ Susanne said on seeing his face. It would be the first time she had seen any of the interview and I thought it might not be easy for her. This was her brother but we were going through it together. Suddenly the frozen image animated and Ernie was talking directly to us.
He was telling another remarkable camp story about two Czech Jews from Prague who befriended a civilian who smuggled food in to them from their girlfriends outside. It was a fascinating preamble.
Slowly his story began to turn into something more familiar and I had the feeling I knew where it was going. ‘I had another stroke of luck,’ I heard him say. He said he had been delivering soup to the German civilian workers. It suddenly made sense. I had thought he was a runner of some kind so that fitted. That was how he managed to move around the camp more easily than the other prisoners.
He described looking out for the English POWs. He wanted to tell them that he had a sister in England. He said he had been watching one particular prisoner in his khaki uniform for some time. I realised he was describing me.
He said he thought I was welding and he was waiting for me to drop a cigarette butt. It all fitted. I was reliving that moment as he spoke. He was describing that first stilted introduction a lifetime ago.
Ernst had given his name and then asked mine. I grasped Susanne’s hand. The reply was ‘Ginger’.
‘Gingy,’ I echoed, hearing it as it had sounded to me on his lips that first time.
Ernie’s face lightened as he spoke. He looked into the middle distance with his head to one side as he described my red hair. The corners of his mouth lifted into a fond smile as he recalled the young soldier I was.
His memory differed a little in the detail. He thought I wrote the address down. I was sure I had memorised it but there it was as clear as day. He had remembered me and that’s what mattered.
He told the whole story much as I have related it here. He recalled me giving him the odd cigarette when no one was looking and then some months later he related how I had called him over. He paced his words as the story reached its conclusion. ‘He gave me a letter,’ he said exhaling sharply and swallowing to retain composure, ‘and ten packs of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate, from my sister.’ There was a glint in his eye.
And there we were: Audrey, Susanne and I with Peter and his wife listening to Ernie tell the story in my Derbyshire home sixty-five years after it happened. It was like a message from beyond the grave.
He said he wasn’t sure if he was the only one to have had such luck because he would never have related it to anybody. He knew to tell would have risked my life and his so he had kept quiet. I was touched.
What I had done had been such a small thing compared to the crimes that Ernie had endured but I knew, watching him that it had meant a lot to him. ‘Ten packs of English cigarettes,’ he said as if to underline it, ‘it was like being given the Rockefeller Centre.’
He had been in Auschwitz III in 1944, a heartbeat away from the death camp itself, and I had got a letter to him from his sister in England. He seemed as amazed repeating it then, fifty years later, as I remembered him being at the time.
But how had he survived the death march? He still hadn’t explained. I adjusted my hearing aid so as not to miss a word as he began to say what he had done with the cigarettes.
He had traded many for what he called ‘future favours’. Even in Auschwitz Ernie had retained his generosity. He gave some to a friend he called Maki, some to a man who had come from Breslau on the same transport to ease his life and some to his Kapo, no doubt for protection. And then he came to it.
‘The soles of my shoes had started to wear very, very thin,’ he said. ‘Of course, there were also shoe menders in the camps and I had new heavy soles put on my boots for two packs of English Players cigarettes.’ It was all falling into place. ‘That,’ he said ‘came to save my life on the death march in 1945.’
There it was and i
t was so simple. It was the shoes. I had walked over all those bodies. People who slipped and were shot, got frostbite and were shot, people whose wooden clogs bit into their swollen feet until they fell behind and were shot. Ernie had used the cigarettes to get the one thing that made the difference between life and death: strong boots.
He explained how, compared to some in the camp, he was enormously lucky. When the Russians approached and the SS prepared to evacuate Auschwitz he had been in better shape than many. He spoke German, he had some bread he’d saved, cigarettes to trade and shoes suitable for a long march. When the SS herded them out he had decided it was best to be at the head of the column. He knew that wherever they went, space would be limited. Those at the tail end of the march could end up sleeping out in the ice.
He described the deep snow and the biting cold, much as I remembered it. He estimated that 10,000 people were marched out of Auschwitz III, plus 30,000 from Auschwitz Main. They had begun the thirty-eight mile hike to Gleiwitz at gunpoint on that dreadful day.
He said that for the vast majority of the inmates, at that time of the year, with their clothing, their health and the emaciation they had suffered, it was undoable. ‘They fell like flies,’ he said, ‘anyone who fell was shot.’
‘Doesn’t he look sad?’ Susanne said when the excerpt stopped. ‘He relived the whole story.’
They wanted my reaction straight away but I couldn’t put it into words. I was so glad he remembered me and that I had played a part in his survival.
‘I hadn’t heard this story,’ Susanne said. ‘It was wonderful.’
I realised then it was a revelation for her too. She had done what she could but she had never really known how the smuggled cigarettes had helped her brother to stay alive.
‘I couldn’t do much during the war,’ she told me, ‘but I was glad it helped.’
She paused for a second then wished me a very long life and much happiness, which at my age is something.
I told her of my failed attempts to find her again after the war, to make my peace when I was more stable. ‘I wish I had kept in touch,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It would have been nice, when we were younger.’
Chapter 22
The first broadcasts of my story made waves, all right. People I hadn’t heard of for decades got in touch. The call that pleased me most came from Henry Kamm, a former New York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize and now lives in a converted mill in the south of France. He logged on to his computer as he does every morning, clicked on the BBC World Service news bulletin and spotted Rob’s item about a British POW and Auschwitz. He pricked up his ears when he heard mention of a Jewish prisoner called Ernst and realised it was his life-long friend Ernie Lobet. I was overjoyed to hear from him and his kind words about the way I had tried to help Ernst raised my spirits tremendously. Soon after that a package arrived from France and I opened it to find copies of his books inside. I flicked through the pages and there at the front I found a touching handwritten dedication to me. I won’t repeat it but it’s something I will treasure for the rest of my days.
The phone has never stopped ringing since then. I was invited to Downing Street twice, taken to lunch at the House of Lords and I have addressed crowded meetings at both the Cambridge Union, and the Oxford University’s Chabad Society for Jewish students.
There were countless radio, TV and newspaper interviews in the months that followed and it was all much more than I had bargained for. I was honoured by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, who got in touch to say they wanted to present me with a diploma in recognition of what I had done and they were sending the artist Felix de la Concha to paint me. Audrey was quick off the mark that time, wanting to know who was supplying the undercoat.
I spoke to school groups and addressed the appeal dinner of the Holocaust Educational Trust at a swanky London venue a week after a specialist had told me bluntly, very bluntly, that I was going to lose the sight in my good eye. So, on doctor’s orders, I stepped up onto the podium in my blazer and tie sporting a fine pair of dark shades to protect my remaining eye from the spotlights. Rob said I looked like an elderly Jack Nicholson on a bad day. He told me that the speech had to be tight as time was limited and I should get straight to the point. When I stood up and began my talk with the events in Egypt he guessed it would be a long night. In the end I only ran over by ten minutes, which is not bad for me. Now I can talk about it all, I feel I have to tell the whole story.
As it turned out the shades were unnecessary; a few weeks later I got a second opinion and I was told my good eye should last a lifetime. What more can you ask at my age?
It was a whirl of activity. Rob had persuaded me to work on the book by then and he was putting me through the mill pretty regularly, delving into corners of my memory that I had been reluctant to explore. It was hard going, both cathartic and painful in equal measure but the darkness is lifting on it and it’s getting easier all the time.
As Rob’s research continued it threw up some interesting questions about the nature of memory. He kept asking me if I was certain I had seen that Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the gates to Auschwitz III-Monowitz. I was, but he said some experts had questioned it and nothing survives at the site today to testify one way or the other. The sign everyone knows these days is at the gates of the main camp, Auschwitz I. After more than sixty years it is that one which is emblazoned on the collective memory although many camps had them. Rob said the most influential account of life in the camp – that of the survivor and writer Primo Levi – mentioned the sign at Auschwitz III more than once but the head of Research at the Auschwitz archive wasn’t convinced. That left enough of a question in his mind for him to come back to me several times to double-check and of course there aren’t many people left to ask. Then something odd happened. I met another survivor of that same camp living in the UK. He was a wonderful man named Freddie Knoller and I must have worked alongside him in IG Farben without ever knowing it. Rob chatted to him as well and he was not in any doubt about that dreadful sign. I had only seen it a couple of times, fleetingly, but he had marched through that gateway every single day.
From the start I wanted to understand the rest of Ernie’s life story. I wanted to know what happened to him after Auschwitz and about his time in America. Rob had shown me a small chunk of the long Shoah Foundation video but only the section where Ernie talked about me, the cigarettes and the start of the death march. He said he wanted to get to the end of all the interviews before showing me the whole of Ernie’s life story. I would have to wait a little longer.
The research began and then one day in the summer 2010 Rob drove up to Derbyshire with some more astounding news. This time it was not about Auschwitz but about something earlier, the torpedoing of the ship that I dived off in the Mediterranean back in 1941.
He said the records showed that the Italians had lost a lot of merchant ships in the Med during those months but only one vessel fitted the bill, the others were either in the wrong place or the dates didn’t match.
Rob was convinced that the ship I had been loaded onto had been the Sebastiano Venier, also known as the Jason. He got out the maps and the records on the dining-room table and went through them all and it had to be the one. That changed quite a lot for me.
On 9 December 1941, the Sebastiano Venier was hit by a torpedo fired from one of our subs, HMS Porpoise, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Pizey. Hundreds of allied soldiers, many of them New Zealanders, were killed. Nowadays they’d probably call it friendly fire, and it would rank amongst the worst examples in history, but back then the calculation had been much simpler: wars weren’t won by captives and enemy shipping was helping resupply Rommel. No matter how many prisoners died the ships had to be sunk to save the lives of those still fighting. The greater good depended on it whatever the cost. The price was paid by men like us.
That was the bad news. The carnage on board, especially in the hold where the torpedo had st
ruck, had been appalling but, Rob had discovered, not all the prisoners on the ship had perished, and in fact most had survived the attack. I couldn’t believe it, surely that wasn’t possible.
I had made it up on deck soon after the torpedo struck and went straight over the side without a thought, kicking as hard as I could to get away from the stricken vessel. I had seen the ship receding slowly into the distance and tilting ever deeper towards the bow as it went and then I lost sight of it. I was convinced that boat had gone down with all those poor lads trapped inside it.
I remembered the sea had soon got rougher and I could barely see anything in the waves. Then the Italian subchaser was on top of us, slicing through the few survivors in the water and tossing depth charges around. I could still see the ship’s name in my mind’s eye, the Centurion or something like it. Looking at the records, Rob said that vessel was almost certainly the Centauro – an Italian Spica Class boat – and it was carrying a captured New Zealand general who lived to describe what he had seen.
There had been a number of people in the sea at that point but as time passed they had all gone under. There was no one in the water after that from what I could see around me. So how was it possible that anyone had survived, I asked? It was simple, Rob replied, the Sebastiano Venier didn’t go down, in fact it became famous for staying afloat. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying at first. I was convinced the ship was just minutes away from sinking when I dived off. It had been another of those automatic responses; I didn’t have to think. Now I was hearing of an even more remarkable drama that unfolded on board the ship whilst I was in the water being blasted by depth charges.
The Sebastiano Venier’s outward voyage, taking supplies to Benghazi, had been a terrible passage for the crew and theirs was the only ship of five to get through. Air attacks from Malta and the guns of the Royal Navy saw to the rest. The experience had shredded the crew’s nerves. The Italian captain in particular had been nervous and jittery as they put to sea again and they all knew what awaited them on the return leg, even if the lads imprisoned down in the hold didn’t. They made it as far as the southern coast of Greece when, according to the surviving accounts, the captain spotted the periscope of an allied sub poking through the waves. He panicked and concluded rashly that the game was up. He feared that the moment a torpedo struck, the 2,000 or so allied prisoners would fight their way on deck and overwhelm the few lifeboats on board. He ordered the crew to abandon ship before the first torpedo struck in order to save his own skin. That decision rebounded, plunging him into ignominy and his fate was sealed.
