Chapter 15

It was a wet and miserable morning. It had rained heavily and the ground had turned to sludge. I was one of twenty British POWs ordered to help lay electric power cables for a new plant. We were lined up and standing waist deep in a muddy trench with a fat mains cable between our legs. In the strange logic of the camps we were doing the job because the slave labourers were now too weak to haul the heavy-duty cable. We were unrolling it from a massive wooden drum and the longer it got the heavier it was. If we didn’t pull in unison we couldn’t shift it at all.

A young Jewish boy, perhaps eighteen years old, was standing by the cable drum above me. He was thin and weak like the rest but he had a pleasant face. I never saw what he’d done wrong; the guards didn’t need reasons. An SS officer approached him and the boy did what they all had to do. He stopped work, whipped his cap off his head, thrashing it against the side of his legs and stood to attention.

It didn’t stop him getting clobbered. The officer hit him in the face with something hard in his hand and within seconds the blood was flowing uncontrollably. The boy managed to haul himself back to attention mumbling something in a language I couldn’t place. As soon as the boy was bolt upright he was struck again and knocked to the ground crying with pain. Again he pulled himself up and again he was hammered in the face. By now his striped uniform was covered in blood. I was watching a young boy being clubbed to death. I’d seen it all before but the suppressed rage inside me welled up and this time something snapped.

I shouted up at the SS officer in bad German ‘Du verfluchter Untermensch!’ It was the worst I could muster. I had called him a damned sub-human, a term the Nazis used to describe anyone they regarded as inferior: the Slavs, Gypsies, the Jews. I knew they were explosive words. The beating stopped but I knew it wouldn’t be the end of it.

It was a cold ten minutes before the officer retaliated. He let me finish the work first. I climbed out of the trench and I turned my back to walk away. He came from behind without warning. The instant he was alongside me there was a crushing blow to my face. I was knocked to the ground holding my right eye; he’d hit me with the butt of his pistol. I blacked out for a matter of seconds. When I recovered, my eye was already closing up with cuts above and below it. The officer had gone.

I never saw what happened to the boy but he can’t have lived long. If those head injuries didn’t kill him he had been marked out and would die soon anyway.

My eye was a mess and I’d had just one blow. There was a South African doctor in our camp, a chap called Harrison. The Red Cross visitors claimed he had the medical supplies he needed. What he actually had was aspirin and a 60-watt light bulb for basic heat treatment. He did what he could for me and I knew better than to report the injury.

The swelling disappeared and the cuts healed, but my vision was odd and it stayed that way for years. Sometimes I’d look at a broad building and it collapsed before me, appearing no wider than a telephone pole. Years after the war that eye turned cancerous and was taken out and replaced with a glass implant. I knew why.

That boy’s powerlessness and my inability to help him haunted me. I had been brought up to challenge injustice and in Auschwitz I could do so little. I saw so many people beaten, so many killed. But it’s the image of that brave boy that looms up at me in the dark. His are the features I see when I wake covered in sweat. I knew nothing about him, not even his name, but that boy’s bloodied face has been with me night and day for almost seventy years.

Many lads did what they could for the stripeys, a cigarette here and there and some food if they could get it to them. For others the trauma spawned fear. Some of the lads were afraid of their diseases, of being sucked under with them. We were all captives trying to survive after all. Generosity wasn’t restricted to those who had been fortunate in civvy street.

Frank Ginn was one such soldier. I hesitate to say it but the poor lad was more or less illiterate. I would regularly read and write his letters for him and I got to know him. He struggled with German and you needed some to communicate in the camps.

One day he asked me to accompany him to a joiners shed north-east of the Queen Mary building. Inside, there was a big bench, tools and shavings everywhere and a couple of Greek Jews working alone.

They had a smattering of monosyllabic German and Frank thought I might be able to communicate better with them. The Greeks in the camp, those that had survived, were mostly from Salonika, it was said. They were adept traders, tough and wily.

These two were supposed to be making things for the construction site and they had landed jobs fitting their skills at home. For all the stripeys that was a real boon. They were out of the weather and looked better fed than most.

Frank had given them food when he could but now they assumed I was his boss – I can’t think why – and I became the object of their interest. They smiled whenever I came in. It was during one of these occasions that the SS arrived.

I expected trouble but they didn’t so much as bat an eyelid on seeing me there. There were no questions asked. I assumed the Greeks were making something for them on the side. They all had to seek what protection they could; turn their skills into a crust. The complex web of relationships made it hard to know who I could trust on the site. That’s why I always kept names out of the equation. I never knew who was connected to whom. There could be spies anywhere. Information also was a commodity to trade for advantage.

One day, to my surprise, the joiners produced a tiny wooden cabinet for me and insisted I take it. It was handcrafted with tiny drawers and dovetail joints. It was the kind of mini-chest I could have kept toiletries in except I didn’t have any. It was a bizarre item to receive in a concentration camp, especially when most prisoners were scrambling for buttons and cigarette ends to trade. I was baffled.

Frank had made the initial connection with them but they had become my friends too over the months. Now they wanted me to have the chest and I felt uncomfortable about it. The Greeks had a reputation for driving a hard bargain and it made little sense. They probably saw it as an investment in future favours but they never spoke of it like that.

Admittedly it wasn’t an easy thing for them to trade. The camp inmates could have no use for it. Cigarettes were a better currency for them, they were portable and readily swapped.

The chest had to go to a civilian worker or an outsider of some sort. I suppose a POW fitted the bill. They never said what they wanted in return; it was enough perhaps that I was indebted to them. From then on I tried to give them food if I could so I suppose it worked.

Smuggling it out of the site proved easy on that occasion. There were sometimes searches and Postens to be bribed. It was a leaky place and the guards could easily be induced to turn a blind eye to smuggling if there was something in it for them. On this occasion I sailed through, got back to E715 and put it in my rucksack in the hut. It was a rare thing of beauty made in a place of ugliness.

By December 1944 the Red Cross parcels had dried up. Allied bombing had seen to that. Their extra rations had kept us alive; without them we would have suffered terribly. Now we had to survive on the meagre rations the Germans gave us. There was less to pass on to the Jewish prisoners.

I don’t recall the last time I saw Hans or Ernst. They were often on my mind but by January 1945 we knew the Russians were closing in. We could hear gunfire and artillery in the distance. The camp’s days were numbered. I didn’t know whether that meant liberation or further turmoil.

On 18 January 1945 the Jews were marched out of Auschwitz III-Monowitz for the last time. The camp, just a few hundred yards along the track from E715, was abandoned except for some of the sick who were left behind. The poor stripeys had been marched out at gunpoint in the depths of winter through snow and ice. Thousands of them were forced to leave. The death march had begun.

That morning, we marched into IG Farben as usual, expecting to work, and found it empty. The striped figures who had swarmed over the construction site and appeared to spring from the earth itself when I had first seen them were gone. It was still and eerie.

Rumours flourished. I thought we were being held back as hostages as the Russians advanced. That night there was a ferocious Russian air raid. We fled the camp as usual to take cover, leaving our things inside. I hid in a small depression in the field behind the huts as the bombs hailed down. There was no let up. It went on and on.

I spent the night in that dent in the ground and don’t remember sleeping. I was close but I didn’t see any of the individual blasts, my head was down and covered. When it was over, I emerged from my hole to find the camp all but destroyed. I sought out what was left of my block and I crawled into the debris to see what I could salvage. I found my watch, which had been hanging on a nail on the bunk, and a rucksack with a few things in it, including that tiny painted chest the Greeks had given me. I grabbed them and scrambled out. Some of the others were doing the same but there wasn’t much time.

It was still dark and cold and I had no greatcoat – I don’t remember ever having one. It was a necessity I’d have to do without. The Russian guns were clearer now, perhaps five miles away and getting louder. They gave us heart but filled us with foreboding in equal measure.

The Germans got us together before first light and ordered us into two columns. Some said later that Mieser, the German NCO, had given the lads the option of heading east towards the Russian front line on their own or going west with the column. That’s not my memory of it. We were still being held at gunpoint. Heading towards the Russians in strange uniforms would have been suicide anyway. Years later I was told that two lads had taken the risk and had died at the hands of the Red Army.

Our column was the last to go. We were marched through the gates with the twists of barbed wire laced back and forth through the rungs and left what remained of E715 for the last time.