Prologue

22 January 2010

A microphone was thrust in front of me as I climbed out of the taxi by the fortified gates of Downing Street. What could I tell them? I was there because of something I did in the war – not my fighting in the Western Desert, not my being captured by the Germans, but because of what happened in Auschwitz.

Back in 1945 no one had wanted to listen, so I stopped talking about it for the best part of sixty years. My first wife saw the worst of it. I would wake up covered in sweat with the sheets soaked, haunted by the same dream. I can still see that poor lad now, standing to attention, drenched in blood and being beaten around the head. I relive it every day, even now, nearly seventy years later. When I met my second wife Audrey she knew something was wrong and she knew it was to do with Auschwitz, but still I couldn’t speak to her about it for decades. These days I can’t stop going over it and she thinks I’m trapped in the past, that I should move on, look forward. That’s not easy at my age.

The polished door of 10 Downing Street that I had seen so often on the news framing the country’s leaders opened and I stepped inside. In the hallway they took my coat and ushered me up the stairs, past the framed portraits of former prime ministers. At one point I faced a photograph of Churchill himself, and thought to myself that it was a surprisingly small picture for such a giant of a leader. I paused for breath, leaning on my metal walking stick, before going on past the post-war premiers with Thatcher, Major and Blair towards the top.

I flopped into a chair – I was ninety-one and I needed time to recover from the climb. I looked around in awe at the grandeur of the Terracotta Room with its high ceilings and chandeliers. I knew that prime minister Gordon Brown had announced that morning that he would give evidence before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war and with the general election coming I wondered whether he would have time to meet me.

The mood changed in a flash. The prime minister came into the room, headed straight for me and took my hand. He spoke very softly, almost in a whisper. The room was now full of people but it still felt like an intensely private moment. ‘We’re very, very proud of you. It’s a privilege for us to have you here,’ he said. I was touched.

His wife Sarah introduced herself to me. I didn’t know what to do so I kissed her hand and said she was more beautiful than on the television. She was, but I still shouldn’t have said so. It was the kind of indiscretion that, luckily, a ninety-one-year-old can get away with. I quickly moved to safer ground by adding, ‘I liked the speech you made the other day.’ She smiled and thanked me.

The press photographers and TV crews wanted their shots of the two of us together. I thought the prime minister was having a rough time politically and I told him I didn’t like the way his colleagues were stabbing him in the back, and that if he needed a minder I was ready. He smiled and said he’d bear it in mind. ‘I wouldn’t do your job for a gold clock,’ I said. I may not have voted for him, but he was a decent man and I was impressed by his sincerity.

Gordon Brown’s attention was intense and undivided and for a while it felt as if it excluded all the other people in the room. I have a glass eye – another legacy of Auschwitz – and I struggled to focus on him with my good one. Mr Brown is also partially sighted and we sat so close together as we talked, our foreheads were almost touching.

He spoke of ‘courage’ and ‘bravery’ and I started to tell him about Auschwitz, IG Farben, the SS, all of it, the details tumbling out in no particular order. At one point I struggled to find a word and ‘Häftling’ – the German for prisoner was what came out. ‘That happens to me when I remember those days,’ a concentration camp survivor in the party said.

To be honoured as one of twenty-seven British ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ soon after that was humbling. Most were honoured posthumously. Only two of us were still alive; the other was Sir Nicholas Winton, who had saved more than six hundred children from Czechoslovakia. I emerged with a solid silver medal bearing the words ‘In Service of Humanity.’ On my way out, I told a journalist that I could now die a happy man. It’s taken me almost seventy years to be able to say that.

Now that I can talk about those terrible times, I feel as if a load is slowly lifting. I can think back clearly to the heart of it, the moment of the exchange.

Mid-1944

I knew we had to be quick. I waited, hidden in the little hut. I couldn’t even be sure that he would come, but he did and as he ducked inside I pulled off my tunic. He closed the door on the turmoil of that hideous construction site and shuffled out of his grimy striped uniform. He threw the thin garments to me and I pulled them on without hesitation. Then I watched as he dragged on my British army battledress, casting looks over his shoulder at the door as he did it.

He was a Dutch Jew and I knew him as Hans. With that simple exchange between the two of us I had given away the protection of the Geneva Convention: I’d given my uniform, my lifeline, my best chance of surviving that dreadful place, to another man. From now on, wearing his clothes, I would be treated the way he had been treated. If I was caught, the guards would have shot me out of hand as an imposter. No question at all.

It was the middle of 1944 when I entered Auschwitz III of my own free will.