by Denis Avey
The Sebastiano Venier was about three and a half miles west of Methoni at the south western tip of Greece when the third torpedo fired by HMS Porpoise hit hold number one at the front of the ship, killing many of the men trapped there instantly.
Some of those I had left behind did what I had already done and dived into the waves, convinced that the ship was going down, but few of those survived. The vessel was turning to starboard by then and many of the men who jumped off the port side were caught in the wash as the stern swung around, and were pulled into the ship’s propellers and cut to pieces.
The man who saved the ship and the remaining prisoners was a mysterious German who has never been identified to this day. He appeared like the strangest sort of guardian angel, brandishing a Luger pistol and a heavy spanner. He restored order and got the few Italian engineers who had been left behind by their superiors to fall in line and then, working through an allied NCO, he convinced the prisoners to calm down and stay on board. He told them they might be able to save the ship if they worked together and that the sea was now their greatest enemy. He ordered the men to the rear of the vessel, telling them that their weight would help relieve the strain – however fractionally – on the forward bulkhead; he said their lives depended upon it. He gave instructions for first-aid posts to be set up to treat the injured and got the engines going again but very slowly. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; it was a fascinating story and one I would love to have witnessed.
I would have been in the water about twenty minutes at that point and I had already been carried far away. With the waterlogged bow of the ship acting as a drag the mystery German got the boat going astern and very slowly he edged it the remaining miles towards the shore. Several hours later, he beached it on the rocks to the grinding sound of steel. There were hearty Allied cheers for the German sailor who had put enmity aside to get as many men as possible to safety.
The lifeboats with the captain and crew inside had also made it slowly to towards land and they got to the shore only to see the holed vessel limping towards them and refusing to go down. If the ship had sunk, few on his side would have faulted the captain for sacrificing the prisoners to save himself. As it was, with the boat limping towards land, he was damned and he must have known it. He was arrested, so the story goes, court-martialled and executed for his decision to abandon ship so soon.
The German, who vanished as quickly as he appeared, was a different animal altogether; he was probably a marine engineer but his consideration for the wounded prisoners was never forgotten and those who encountered him spoke of a man of great courage and humanity who, enemy or not, had saved hundreds of allied lives, though more died trying to get ashore from the beached ship.
I didn’t know about any of this because I was on the loose for some time before I was recaptured and I never came across the other survivors, though some it turned out had also passed through Dysentery Acre.
I listened to what Rob was telling me but I was still wrestling with my own memory. It was a fantastic story. Nothing could ever be certain after such a long time, he said, but it was very hard to see how it could have been any other ship. I was staggered. It had been an appalling episode for me but like so much else it was swamped by what followed. Knowing so many men had survived that disaster was a relief. For almost seventy years I had assumed that I was the sole survivor. And then the penny dropped.
‘I had no need to jump in the sea at all.’
‘It looks like it,’ Rob replied.
‘Well what a silly-arse,’ I said.
Chapter 23
15 November 2010
The day began damp and grey but by mid-morning I looked out to see the cloud base had lifted, leaving patches of mist below Win Hill, the peak at the other side of the valley from the house. It was named, legend has it, by the victorious side in an ancient battle. The vanquished army had taken up position on another nearby summit now known as Lose Hill. Not everything in the Peak District is so polarised. It’s a friendly part of the world this, now I have mastered the dialect. Add to that a warm bed and three square meals a day and I reckon I’ve finally cracked it.
Rob arrived a little late and by then the sun had started to burn off the clouds and there were patches of blue sky over Hope Valley. He was bringing with him something I had waited twelve months to see: the full life story of Ernie Lobet – Ernst as I had known him – told in a video interview over four and a half hours long. I climbed the spiral stairs to the mezzanine floor, anxious to hear what became of the man I had known all those years ago. We settled down around the TV screen, Rob pressed play and Ernie began at the beginning and the beginning for him was a spacious eight-room apartment in what was, before the war, the beautiful German city of Breslau. The Lobethals were a prominent Jewish family. Ernie’s father was the chief executive of a sizeable rope-making factory and life was good. They even had a Nobel Prize winner in the family in the shape of his great-uncle, Paul Ehrlich, who had developed a treatment for syphilis around the turn of the century.
Ernie described going to the Baltic Sea for a short holiday with their nanny in 1929 when he was four years old, then coming back to find that their father had left them. I could tell it was a painful memory for him. His father had converted the assets of the firm into cash and fled to South Africa with another woman; there was a scandal and the story was all over the papers, he said.
His mother Frieda and grandmother Rosa were left struggling with no idea where he’d gone. They moved into a much smaller apartment and eventually his mother tracked her husband down, sued him and won. It was, Ernie said, a pyrrhic victory because she never saw a penny.
Their troubles then descended on them in legions. His mother contracted tuberculosis and was sent to hospital. Children were not allowed to visit TB patients in those days so he saw her no more than twice before the disease killed her in 1932. She died, he said, of a broken heart. A family that had had so much saw it all slipping away and this was only the beginning.
‘He is absolutely gorgeous isn’t he?’ Audrey said, picking up on the compassion in his words as he spoke of his family. His grandmother Rosa struggled to bring up Ernie and Susanne alone. She was a remarkable women, but her family had been wealthy and she’d had servants most of her life. Now suddenly she was elderly and saddled with two children that she was ill equipped to raise.
‘She was full of love and she would take off her shirt for her grandchildren,’ he said struggling with the potency of the memory as if it had caught him unawares.
Eventually his grandmother gave in to pressure from the extended family and placed the two children in a Jewish orphanage. ‘It was a terrible, terrible place,’ Ernie said. He hated every moment of it and he became in his own words ‘a very destructive influence’. Being small and skinny he was forced to eat more than the others and had to find ways of getting rid of the food. He hid piles of potatoes and gravy in a handkerchief and placed it in his pocket hoping to dump it later. He smiled as he described the sauce trickling down his legs as he ran to get rid of it after lunch.
Something strange was happening as he spoke. I felt I was really getting to know him for the first time and I liked what I saw. I think he was a more sensitive man than me but even relating that terrible childhood memory he managed to laugh.
He ran away from the orphanage several times and was eventually sent to live with foster parents. He said leaving that place was the happiest day of his early life. With his new guardians he had freedom to come and go as he pleased but the Germany he had known was twisting rapidly out of shape around him. He was eight when Hitler came to power in 1933 and two years later the Nuremberg Laws forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, accelerating the slide into the abyss.
As a thirteen-year-old he remembered the bicycle his grandmother worked slavishly knitting hats to buy him for his Bar Mitzvah. The ban on Jews working in universities and the professions had little direct impact on him as a boy but Kris
tallnacht – the night of broken glass – did. He recalled his fifteen-minute walk to school that day in November 1938, past smashed shop windows and ransacked properties. When he got to the beautiful synagogue in Breslau it was already in flames and the word spread that the Nazis were rounding up adult male Jews.
There was no more school after that. The desperate talk amongst the adults around him was of ways to emigrate, to get away. Susanne had won a place on the Kindertransport to England, but Ernie was left behind. He ended up working on a kibbutz-style project designed to encourage Jews to go back to the land and prepare them for a future life in Israel. They were tolerated for a while by the Nazis but eventually disbanded in the early years of the war.
Ernie, still only fifteen, came back home to look after his sick and aged grandmother who was by now totally dependent on him. They lived crammed into one room in a third-floor apartment as the rules constricting Jewish lives got tighter and tighter. Even the quantity of gas and electricity was restricted, forcing them to cook on a burner fuelled by kerosene from a friendly merchant. Ernie evaded the round-ups a little longer and got a job with a tyre remoulding company so he could support his grandmother.
Watching him tell his story, I was amazed how long he had managed to remain free. I had always feared he had endured far longer in the camps. It was a blessing of sorts, I told myself, but I knew – we all knew – where his story was going. Neighbours and a shopkeeper helped them secretly with extra food but the net was closing fast. German troops returning from active service were already bringing home accounts of what they had done with the Polish Jews: the round-ups, the ghettos, the random murders. The stories spread quickly but they were so gruesome no one wanted to believe them, it was a glimpse of things to come.
Ernie’s grandmother had been spared so far, though her sisters had already been sent away. Then, in January 1943, Ernie’s name appeared on one of the last lists of Jews to be deported from the city and he was told to prepare to be transported to the east. He expected it to be hard work, perhaps they would have to build roads or something like that, but no one knew exactly what lay ahead. He packed a rucksack, and what warm winter clothing he had and waited.
It was late in the afternoon when the men in leather coats came for him. They were Gestapo officers and they sounded civil at first, until his grandmother begged them to leave Ernie behind. ‘My grandmother was standing there and she looked so pitiful,’ he said, shaking his head wildly and biting his lip to fight back the tears. ‘She was so helpless without me and she knew she couldn’t cope. She begged and she begged them. “Can’t you leave him?” she said. “He is my sole support.” She didn’t understand. Then they got rough.
“Get ready now,” they said, and I knew I would never, never see her again. She was such a good woman.”’
It was hard to watch him going through it all again. Even sitting in the comfort of my own home I could put myself in his place as he relived that awful parting and I could feel it as he did. Now Susanne had gone his grandmother was the only family he had and good God what a terrible thing the old lady had to face. She was so frail.
I began to understand why Ernie was telling his story. He was committing it to record so that others in the future would know that he, Ernie Lobet, once had a grandmother named Rosa who lived and was loved by her family. He too was bearing witness. He discovered later that she died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
I don’t need to describe Ernie’s transport in the cattle trucks, his arrival at Auschwitz or the separation of those who were gassed immediately from those who could be worked to death more slowly. Once inside Auschwitz III-Monowitz, he described that moment of absolute devastation when the new arrivals who came with women and children realised that those they loved had probably been killed and burnt already. Ernie was alone so he was spared the pain of seeing others he cared for suffer.
Needless to say, he had many strokes of luck that helped him to survive Auschwitz. You had to find a niche or some way to supplement the meagre diet or you died, he explained. Ernie began work digging the foundations for a building; he could handle a spade, most of the others had barely seen one before, but he was as miserable as they were. Then he got a break. One of the guards ordered him to sweep the construction hut they used to shelter in. It had an oven inside and he was told to keep the fire going. Next they ordered him to keep a lookout for the sergeant so that most of the guards could stay inside and out of the cold. That meant that when Ernie came in to stoke the fire he could warm himself up a bit. It got him through the worst weeks of that winter.
I had always known he was a clever chap and he was lucky all right, I could see that. He explained how he’d managed to hold onto a hundred marks, which he had hidden behind his belt when he arrived. It must have been a gamble trying to decide what to do with it but he opted in the end to give it to the Block Senior in return for half a loaf of bread. It was an expensive meal but on the strength of it he was asked to become a camp runner carrying messages for the man. That meant he got a little extra soup and the chance to conserve energy. He could see from those around him that exhaustion was a killer.
The ones who worked outside began wasting away very quickly. Hundreds died in front of him and he knew it was impossible, absolutely impossible, to survive the camp if you didn’t find a little extra something to keep you alive. Where people worked also determined whether they lived or died. Ernie was lucky again and ended up working indoors with the German civilians which gave him a fighting chance, but no more than that.
As the story unfolded I heard his account of the cigarettes again and his meeting with me. It was a joy to be reminded of those few special moments but it was the rest I wanted to see.
Friendships among the prisoners weren’t necessarily an advantage. ‘Survival you had to do on your own,’ Ernie said. How true that was, I thought. It was also the reason I’d been such a solitary person during the years of my captivity.
One friend did stand out for Ernie and he was a man named Makki or Maggi, it was hard to hear exactly which. Ernie knew him from the hachshara, the kibbutz-style project he had attended years earlier where they had both learnt to till and sow the land. Ernie had given Makki – as I will call him – some of the cigarettes I had smuggled to him, so I felt a connection to this man.
What I really wanted to know was what happened after Auschwitz but when Ernie turned to the death march his mood altered. Everything he had built up to give him a chance to survive was swept away but he was less malnourished than most, he had strong boots and cigarettes as currency. I had seen those frozen corpses myself, and tramped out of Auschwitz on that same icy road so I knew about those dreadful days. Ernie estimated that between forty and sixty thousand people had been marched out of the Auschwitz camps and that only about twenty thousand had arrived at the end of the march. That didn’t mean they would live to see the end of the war, only that they had survived that particular ordeal.
Ernie knew straight away that he had to get to the front of the marching column because wherever they were going would be overcrowded. He was right. He was amongst the first to arrive at Gleiwitz concentration camp where he managed to get out of the snow and got a bunk for the night. Those who came later had to sleep on the hard, icy floor.
Rob had warned me obliquely to prepare for a gruelling story to come and I could not imagine how Ernie had survived. I had been forced to march right across central Europe but I knew that would have been impossible for them. It had almost finished me off and I had started in far better shape.
Ernie was in Gleiwitz for three days but they knew the Soviets were advancing rapidly. Wild rumours were flying around about what the guards would do with them next. Some said they were going to go to Buchenwald or Mauthausen concentration camps, others that Switzerland or Sweden had agreed to accept them. ‘Anything would be believed,’ Ernie said. ‘Another favourite rumour said we were going to work in Germany in a jam factory. Jam had sugar in it and everybody was hun
gry.’ I could imagine how tantalising that idea was; there was constant talk of food in our camp but for really starving men like them it must have been torture. The lawyers amongst the prisoners suggested there would be an amnesty for them. ‘As if you could have an amnesty for people who had never been condemned,’ Ernie added.
Finally they were told to get ready for a transport and then loaded into cattle trucks with no roofs. ‘There must have been about eighty in that car,’ he said, his eyes searching the floor. The snow was still falling when they set off and Ernie quickly lost track of time. ‘I was standing most of the way but then a lot started to die and we threw them out and that created room so that we could sit. I don’t know how many days we were in there. I had some bread left but we had no water.’
It was so frustrating hearing it all and not being able to help. I was muttering advice to him under my breath and it was as if he had heard me.
‘One guy had a canteen,’ he said ‘and somebody produced some string and we tied it on and dangled it down from the train and as we moved, it scooped up the snow. When it was full we pulled it up and we melted it in our mouths. That was how we survived.’
It took him four days to reach Mauthausen in Austria. The terrible reputation of that stone-quarrying camp had reached them even in Auschwitz. ‘We thought this would be our death but we were too tired, too weary to care,’ he said. ‘Some bread was thrown to us and we all made a beeline for it but I didn’t get any; nobody would share. Anyone who was lucky enough to get some devoured it before the others could.’
