Chapter 11

The next time I saw Hans we were both struggling to shift pipes around. For eleven hours each day we’d heave and carry the heavy-duty components, piling up the weighty stop-taps on low trolleys that ran on the narrow gauge line between the buildings. Once the bogeys were loaded we’d push them across the site to where the valves and piping were needed. Our conversations had to be snatched between the loading and unloading of those heavy tubes and the valves that went with them. That was what we were doing when we hatched our plan.

We were sometimes shoulder to shoulder, straining together but even close up, speaking German out of the side of my mouth wasn’t easy.

This time they were being welded into place behind another dark brick façade, that of a three-storied filtration plant slowly taking shape. Metal staircases wound up through the unfinished building. The prize being wrought here in human lives was buna, artificial rubber to keep the Nazi’s war machine rolling. We knew the site as the Buna-Werke.

They say, ‘stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage’. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn’t capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free. I had always been a fighter, I had never knowingly walked away from a challenge but it was different now. I had little knowledge of eastern religions or philosophies then but I knew the mind could take you through brick walls. It was my mind that was supplying the muscle.

We were all forced to work for Hitler’s war effort, the slave labourers from the Auschwitz Concentration Camps, the civilian forced workers and the British POWs. We did similar backbreaking work to the Jews with one crucial difference. The programme known as ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit’, extermination through labour, did not apply to us.

When night fell we were marched to our respective camps; the Jews to Auschwitz III, sometimes called Monowitz and about which we knew little, and the British POWs to our camp E715, on the southern margin of the building site.

Every night, I went back to something more or less predictable, a spartan hut and poor food, but at least I could be fairly sure I would still be alive in the morning. For Hans and all the other stripeys there was no certainty of survival at all, not even to the next day.

The Jews had had their human dignity stripped from them but they had a chance if they had something to gamble with. All attempts to gain an extra crust came down to a gamble in the end, the roll of a dice.

There wasn’t much I could do but I was tormented by the need to know; to see what I could. As the weeks passed I managed to speak to Hans from time to time and as we spoke the idea of swapping with him took hold of me. That way I could see what was happening. I began to hang out the bait.

If we could organise an ‘Umtausch’ – an exchange – he could come into the British camp overnight to rest. He’d get better food and more of it, possibly even eggs. To cement the friendship I gave him part of a German sausage, which I had won. Whenever we received one in the British camp we drew lots for it. If we divided it evenly the wurst was hardly worth having. If one person got it at least he had something to chew on. It was hard to eat for us but when I gave it furtively to Hans it was more nutrition than he’d had in weeks.

I supplied cigarettes for him to trade. They were like gold dust in the camps and I was lucky enough to have an uncle who tried to send a batch of 555s each month.

They didn’t all get through, far from it, but my father still paid him back the full amount after the war. It cost him a pretty penny.

There were people to bribe and things to acquire but I had enough cigarettes for what I needed. I had sown the seed carefully with Hans because you trusted no one really. Not even a man who understood Heron’s formula. The idea had slowly begun to take hold in his mind, and over the weeks it matured into something approaching a plan.

There were just two lads in our camp that I let in on the plot, Bill Hedges and Jimmy Fleet. They told me I was an idiot but they went along with it. Bill’s bunk was above mine in the back corner of the hut and he handled most of the subterfuge. It was his job to secrete Hans away. To the rest, the story was to be that I was ill and had taken to my bed.

Bill had worked in a hardware shop up north before the war; that was all I knew about him. I’m afraid I called the shots even then and most people tended to go along with me. They were both sworn to secrecy about it. Like I said, we didn’t trust anyone.

The swap took weeks of meticulous planning and observation. I studied the movements of the Jewish prisoners, I knew where and when they would gather to march back to their camp, learnt to copy their weariness, the stoop, the shambling gait.

I taught myself to walk in the crude wooden clogs they wore. I traded cigarettes for a pair, wrapped rags around my feet to cushion the rough edges and practised shuffling in them. Those clogs could be a thing of torture on the site; they helped finish many men’s lives if their feet began to swell or they couldn’t move fast enough. I had to get that right.

One of the stripeys pointed me towards an older Kapo who I was told was less brutal than the rest. He was thickset with a dark weather-beaten face and from the stubble you could tell he used to have black hair in better times. I managed to get him onside with a bribe of fifty cigarettes – twenty-five now and twenty-five when I had returned successfully from the swap. This was without doubt the riskiest part. In a place like Auschwitz everyone had to fend for themselves. I could easily have been betrayed if he had seen a minor advantage to himself and I had seen Kapos kill people.

Through Hans, I got cigarettes to two of his companions in his work Kommando. They would have to guide me, show me where to go. When the time was right, I hacked at my hair with a pair of old scissors and then shaved off the rest with a blunt razor.

As the shift neared its end, I smeared dirt on my face especially on my cheeks and under my eyes to gain the grey pallor of exhaustion. I thought of the endless patrols into enemy camps in the desert. I was ready.

But why did I do it? Why did I, voluntarily, give up the status of a protected British POW to enter a place where hope and humanity had been vanquished?

I’ll tell you why. I knew that the inmates of Auschwitz were being treated worse than animals. I didn’t know then what the various Jewish camps were, that Auschwitz I to our west was the brutal extermination camp until Auschwitz-Birkenau was built further west again and redefined the definitions of industrial slaughter. I didn’t know then that Auschwitz III-Monowitz, the camp next door to us, was, relatively speaking, the least lethal of the three. What I did know was that Jews were being killed in front of me and that those too weak to work any more were being sent for extermination. When I looked into the faces of the Jewish prisoners, with their hollowed-out cheeks and dark sunken eyes, it was as if there was nothing there. All feeling and emotion had been cauterised in them. I had to see for myself what was going on. I had to get myself in there.

Again and again, they begged us to tell the world what we had seen if we ever got home. The stripeys understood what was happening. The stench from the crematoria told them all they needed to know. So yes, we had all heard the talk of gas chambers and selections but for me it was no good just hearing about it. The words conjecture and speculation were never in my vocabulary. I might not have known which camp was which but I needed to see what turned ordinary human beings into these shadows.

This, Auschwitz, IG Farben’s Buna-Werke with all the slave labourers in it, this was the inferno itself no doubt about it. I saw the brutality day after day but I was powerless to stop it. It was a stain on my life and I couldn’t let it go.

Even there, as a prisoner of war, I was certain that our side would defeat the Germans and that one day we would force someone to account for this. I wanted the names of Kapos and SS officers responsible for the obscenity around me. I wanted to see as much as I could. I knew that there had to be an answer to all this and that one day there would be a reckoning.

So yes, there was something I could do; something I was driven to do. It wasn’t much but if I could get in, if I could only see, I could bear witness.

There was something else, something not about grand causes but about me. I had always been a better leader than a follower; at least I thought I was. My dreams of becoming an officer had been stymied and my war had been cut short at Sidi Rezegh, but I was still on duty and now I had a cause. I could do this.