Chapter 9

We arrived at a small station. The platform was very low and I had to climb down some steps to get off the train. I was marched off straight away down a rough track and after about two miles we came to a camp in quite pleasant countryside. Compared to where I’d been recently I couldn’t believe it. There were ten well-built wooden huts, grass in the compound and just a single wire fence at the perimeter. We’ll have some fun here, I thought. A few hundred allied prisoners were already inside. There were electric lights, running water, lavatories you could sit on and central heating pipes. The twin bunks had straw filled mattresses, even decent blankets. I heard it had been built for the Hitler Youth. It certainly looked like it.

The other prisoners told me where we were, a little south of a Polish town called Oswiecim.

The next morning we were woken at 0630 hours and marched out of the gates, through fields and woods for a mile and a half until the countryside abruptly vanished. Ahead was a vast, sprawling building site, stretching far away. Smoke plumed from chimneys and steam cranes. The dark bones of a satanic factory complex were rising from the mud in concrete and iron. Above them, a screen of barrage balloons bobbed on steel cables. We were marched in.

The whole site was crawling with strange, slow-moving figures – hundreds, no, thousands of them. All were dressed in tattered, ill-fitting striped shirts and trousers that were more like pyjamas than work clothes. Their faces were grey, their heads were roughly shaven and partly covered by tiny caps. They were like moving shadows, shapeless and indistinct, as if they could fade away any moment. I couldn’t tell who they were, what they were.

The rest of the lads called them the ‘stripeys’. They told me the Germanised name of this Polish town, Oswiecim. It was Auschwitz.

I recognised these poor wraiths as my fellow beings though much that marks humanity had been stripped from them. I could see that already. They wore the Star of David badge. They were Jews.

We were split into work Kommandos of twenty to thirty men and sent off to different contractors, all within their own fenced-off areas. The work began immediately, shifting and carrying building materials and heavy pipework around the site and laying cables. Right away, I saw how it was. When something needed to be shifted, they would call for the poor stripeys, who would appear as if from the earth and swarm around the pipe, valve or cable to be lifted. It took so many because they were so weak. There were men hauling huge bags of cement on their backs, others struggling with wheelbarrows.

Brutal foremen, wielding clubs or heavy knotted ropes, stood over them. These were criminals recruited as Kapos, prisoners who had the power of life or death over the others and they used it freely. I hated them instantly. I witnessed my first beating straight away and found it hard to believe that life was now so cheap. Even in the desert, we had taken more notice of death. Here they didn’t run to the cost of a bullet to end a stripey’s life when boots and clubs would do it for them.

At this point, they kept these Jewish prisoners away from us. Talk to us and they risked being shot or beaten to death. At night we returned to our half-decent camp and they were marched off, God knows where.

The massive factory was being built by the chemicals giant, IG Farben, primarily to manufacture ‘buna’, synthetic rubber for Hitler’s war effort, as well as methanol for fuel. The site was two miles long from east to west and almost a mile deep. Within that wired compound, laid out like a massive grid, there were countless individual ‘Baus’ or building sites and the place was dominated by a large industrial plant with four tall chimneys. We called it the Queen Mary after the three-funnelled liner. Somebody couldn’t count. There were buildings, towers and chimneys going up everywhere, gantries and plumbing on a giant scale, with narrow railway lines along each block, bringing in all that was needed to get this place up and working. Everywhere, in the nooks and crannies of this industrial nightmare, were the poor creatures in their filthy zebra uniforms, many too weak to stand, let alone shift and carry. I knew by now that this was no ordinary labour camp. They were being deliberately worked to death.

It was hell on earth. Hell on earth. There was no grass, no greenery of any sort, just mud in winter, dust in summer. Nature – not to mention the Grand Architect himself – had abandoned that place. I never saw a butterfly, a bird or a bee the whole time I was there.

It was soon clear that the guards could not enforce the rigid separation of groups. It slowed things down and they needed the work done quickly.

We were soon working alongside the Jews. From then on we shared their labours but not the lashes or the random killings. We were not supposed to die here and they were. That was the difference. When the wind came from the west, there was a sickly sweet stench from some distant chimneys.

For a few days I worked alongside one poor chap, I think they called him Franz. I had started to recognise him in the crowd. Then one day he just wasn’t there any more. I snatched a moment when the Kapos weren’t looking to ask one of the men in his Kommando what had happened to him. He gestured upwards with both hands and then said, ‘He has gone up the chimney.’

The scales were lifted from my eyes. Those too weak to work were being killed and burnt. The stench was the smell from the distant crematoria chimneys. I knew it now but being told was not enough for me.

On one march back from IG Farben a row broke out between some of the British prisoners and the Wehrmacht guards or Postens, as they called them. Our lads were winding them up, booing and jeering and I was caught up in the middle of it. There was a fracas and the Postens were quickly in amongst us trying to restore control, jostling and shoving us around. The Feldwebel – sergeant – was shouting orders. He was a tall feller and he focused on me the moment I emerged from the melee. He grabbed a rifle from a Posten, seized it with both hands and swung it with all his might towards my head. I saw it coming and ducked out of the way. There was a thud; the sound of crushing bone. One of the Germans immediately behind me had taken the full force of the blow to the side of his head. He went down straight away, his face losing shape. The butt of a nine-pound rifle swung with force at the temple didn’t leave much doubt. If he wasn’t dead already, he didn’t live long. We got back into line and prepared for retribution. It didn’t come. I never saw that particular Feldwebel again.

Our camp was too good to last. One day in early 1944 we were moved to a site only yards outside the southern edge of the IG Farben complex. The stripeys were somewhere to the east of us, close enough that at night we could hear screams and sometimes gunshots coming from their camp.

Our new prison compound was bare and basic and more crowded than the first. Icicles hung from the barracks ceiling in winter and mosquitoes swarmed in the warmer months. There was a crude latrine, just a row of holes in a plank over a pit and even those were few in number for a camp the size of ours.

We heard that E715, as it was named, had housed Russian prisoners. The rumours said the SS cleared them out to make way for us, herded them into the crude tunnel which was later to be our air-raid shelter and killed them there with poisoned gas. It was hard to know whether it was true or not. In a place like that anything was possible.

I now know that Soviet POWs were the victims of the first experiments using poisoned gas. In September 1941 hundreds of them were murdered using Zyklon B gas in a basement at the main Auschwitz camp. It worked but it wasn’t efficient enough for the camp commanders so they adapted a crematorium building to allow the gas crystals to be dropped in through holes in the roof. Nine hundred died in that experiment. The wheels of mechanised murder had begun to turn.

Back then the rumours that gassings had taken place in our own camp simply fuelled my frustration and the need for certainty. The Russians were treated nearly as badly as the Jews. We were luckier than either group. Our guards were usually the Wehrmacht, the German Army, less brutal than the SS but here they had none of the humanity of the Afrika Korps.

The German officer we saw most in E715 was an NCO called Mieser. He’d turn up if there was trouble to be sorted and he was there for the morning roll call.

We would be as unruly as we dared, we were not being counted for our benefit.

Mieser’s shouts for us to be silent –‘ruhig’ in German – were quickly echoed by the lads. Whenever he appeared we barracked him, repeating it mercilessly in chorus. So Ruhig, was the name we gave him. It was schoolboy stuff but good for morale. Ruhig could be officious and some hated him but he was not one of the worst.

We rarely saw the commandant or Hauptman as we called him. I had reason to face him on one occasion. We were returning from work one night in the rain. I was standing next to a cockney lad called Phil Hagen. We were in a small barbed-wire compound near the entrance to the camp and the guards began to search us. It didn’t take them long to find that Phil had a dead fowl stuffed down his trousers, a chicken or maybe a duck, which he’d managed to get hold of somewhere.

They always punished more than one if we got caught. There was a lot of shouting and hollering and the lads soon began to jeer, forcing the guards to take out their weapons and loose a few shots into the air to get control.

I was close to Phil so the two of us were carted off and locked up for the night in a freezing cold punishment cell towards the front of the camp. There was no food or water. When we were brought before the commandant the next morning, Phil claimed the creature had attacked him and he had been forced to kill it in self-defence. There was a pause for the translation, then the commandant burst out laughing and the tension was defused. No more was said about it.

There were two particular atrocities against our men that were widely discussed in the camp. I wasn’t on the spot but I heard all about them.

‘Jock’ Campbell was a sharp-witted lad and despite camp conditions he was usually well turned out, even dapper. The story goes that the column was returning to camp one evening when Jock spotted a female forced-labourer struggling to carry a heavy canister.

When Jock saw what was happening, he broke out of the column and went to help. He was ordered back in line. When he refused he was bayonetted, though not fatally it turned out. Some accounts have pointed the finger at a soldier named Benno Franz. I never saw the incident so I can’t say. What I did see was Campbell lying in the dirt being attended to by some of the lads when we were marched past. It was nasty but it can’t have been a full thrust and I am now fairly sure he recovered.

On 23 February 1944 a corporal from the Royal Army Service Corps was hard at work on the Buna-Werke site when he was ordered to climb seventy feet up a steel gantry covered in ice. He refused, saying that without the proper footwear it would be lethal. He was shot dead on the spot. His name was Corporal Reynolds. Some accused an officer called Rittler, others said it was the soldier Benno Franz again. I recall hearing a shot that day and never went to look as it was not an unusual sound. Those events doused what good humour there was.

Some in E715 decided the best way to cope was to fill what little spare time they had with creative activity. They tried putting on theatre productions in the barracks to raise morale, to show we weren’t beaten. Some bright spark had the idea of dramatising the story of Sweeney Todd, as if we needed the demon barber to add spice to our mundane lives. People were being dispatched all the time.

Perhaps someone was attempting a subversive allegory. If they were I can’t remember much of it other than the German guards and censors coming to check what we were up to. There were other dubious productions but it wasn’t my way of coping. We were witnessing a never-ending atrocity and I didn’t want diversion.

I changed my mind when it came to football and so did many of the lads, we were only human. A few T-shirts and some shorts were brought into the camp and someone dreamt up the idea of an international tournament of sorts. The teams were to be England, Scotland, Wales and South Africa but there weren’t enough of each nation. Burt Cook was the only South African to play, as far as I can recall, so they were just team names really. I played two games on the right wing for the South African team, I scored in the final and we won.

The matches took place on a field to the east of the main entrance and I fancy there were machine guns set up to stop us getting too frisky. Doug Bond, who became a friend of mine years later, was goalkeeper for England, though I didn’t know him at the time. The chance of a game had been hard to turn down and right or wrong I enjoyed it enormously.

Looking back we were perhaps naive. We were lined up for team photos afterwards and we can all be seen smiling, fresh-faced, into the lens. Now I think we were part of an elaborate propaganda exercise. The photographer was a civilian, as I recall, and the photos were handed out to us later. Around the same time we received some fresh uniforms, they weren’t new but they were smarter than what we had. Many of the lads were lined up and photographed in those too.

It was a gift to the Germans. It helped the Wehrmacht to put some distance between their treatment of us and the methods the SS used on the Jews. Someone was anticipating the questions that would come in the post-war period. I have no doubt it also helped the camp commanders keep the visitors from the Red Cross off their backs. They had proved to be highly gullible anyway. Some of their reports into conditions in our camp I saw later bore little resemblance to the truth.

They suggested we had been able to play football whenever there were enough guards. It was utter balderdash. One Red Cross report claimed that the work was not hard and that there were no complaints about it.

They said we had hot running water, and even more ridiculous that they had seen inmates playing tennis. The Red Cross did report that the pit latrines were insufficient in number and that the drinking water was unfit for consumption, something the Germans had at least confirmed to them.

This was not a cosy environment. I never knew who I could trust. There was constant talk of spies in our ranks, ferrets we called them. I was aware of the story of Miller, I recall seeing him. He was a well-spoken chap. He had arrived alone from Lambsdorf camp and told the lads he had served with the Green Howards, one of the smaller regiments. He had aroused suspicion immediately. Details of his war service and his knowledge of the regiment didn’t add up, so the story went. Some of the boys started fishing around. They concluded Miller was a ferret – a spy placed in the camp to get information from us.

What we heard was that they jumped him in the latrines, killed him and threw his body into the pit below. I wasn’t in on that one, but I never doubted it at the time. There were plenty of men capable of doing a job like that in the camp. The Germans never responded to the fact that a man had gone missing.