Chapter 21

After all those years I was desperate to speak to Susanne. I had to know what had happened to Ernie and how he survived. I also wanted to explain my odd behaviour all those years ago.

Rob had said he didn’t want me to talk on the phone. He said he was arranging a reunion and they wanted the first spoken words between us to be captured on camera. They had done the work to get me this far so I agreed.

Then Rob called me to say there would be a delay. Susanne wanted to wait until her son Peter and his wife Lynn were over from America in a few weeks and then the three of them could come up to Derbyshire together. It seemed like a good plan. A few days before the scheduled meeting, Rob called to suggest we all went out to a pub for lunch after the filming. I didn’t see the need and I didn’t want our meeting to be in public. Audrey would make some food for us – what could be better? He told me later they had wondered whether we would have much to say to each other after all this time.

I could understand their concern. It wasn’t as if we had been real friends in 1945. I had gone to see her out of duty and then realised there was nothing I could say to help. After sixty-four years even close friends would have to get to know each other again but we would be starting from scratch.

The day arrived. I wanted to make an effort so I put on a blue and gold silk cravat with a patterned waistcoat. I never really thought much about clothes but they were driving a long way to see me and none of us were getting any younger.

Rob, Patrick and the cameramen arrived early. Audrey made them tea and we stood around chatting. They were more nervous than I was. Rob’s mobile phone rang and he stepped outside to get a better signal. It had rained overnight and the air was damp. He came in again to say the car had arrived then went back to show them the way.

I wasn’t going to wait for the doorbell to ring so I went outside to look and there she was, wearing a grey coat with a fur collar and a red scarf. Six decades is a long time but she was walking briskly along the garden path with her son and his wife Lynn. She turned to climb the steps to the house, looked up smiled and said ‘Hello.’ I took her by the hand as she reached the door and I got the first chance to see her clearly.

‘Susanne,’ I said, leaning forward to kiss her, first on one cheek then the other, ‘how are you, my love?’

‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said, ‘lovely to see you.’

I was holding both her hands now so we could get a decent look at each other, ‘It’s over sixty years,’ I said, ‘over sixty years.’ I led them into the house.

‘It’s a gorgeous place you have here,’ Susanne said, admiring the view from the window. ‘I am so pleased for you.’

I had been warned she might be shy but she didn’t appear to be. She said later that the gentle hills of the Peak District had lifted her spirits and put her at ease as they approached in the car.

‘You were taller when I first met you,’ I said cheekily.

‘I have shrunk a lot,’ she said.

‘Oh, join the club.’

‘You were very tall,’ she added. ‘It’s the only thing I remember about you.’

Heavens above, after all that time it was wonderful to see her but I was reliving it so quickly. I felt that strange meeting in 1945 was still between us and I wanted to get it off my chest.

‘I have been trying to remember what I said to you, it must have been terrible because I was so screwed up that I couldn’t explain anything to you at all or what my feelings were.’

She nodded.

We talked about the letters to my mother, the cigarettes she sent to me for Ernie, everything. ‘You did a marvellous job,’ I said to her, ‘those cigarettes were a gold mine for Ernst.’ I was still using his original name then.

‘It was the least I could do with the war on,’ she said. ‘My brother was lovely. He had a heart of gold, you couldn’t help but like him.’

I told her the story of the time he was almost caught in the Bude – the shed on the IG Farben site. I knew he was an intelligent chap. He kept his cool.

‘Well, it’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘and all those years and you didn’t know that Ernie survived?’

‘I didn’t know he survived at all,’ I said.

‘All those years? Goodness me,’ she looked up at me and added, ‘I only wish he was here today.’

‘Oh, so do I,’ I said.

It took a second or two for her words to sink in. He had been in America all that time, we could have met so easily. I was halfway through my next sentence when it struck me. I pulled myself upright and tried to push on. ‘I’d like to have a photograph of him,’ I was saying, ‘and the chance to talk to his family.’

‘They’ll be very excited,’ she said but I wasn’t able to hear any more. It all came over me at once: the news about Ernie, the dreadful memories and the pent-up emotion of all those decades. My throat blocked, I covered my face. I was bent double as if winded, bowed down in front of a woman I barely knew and I felt the tears I had never been able to shed welling-up.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said and my voice cracked. I was still bent over when I felt Susanne’s hand on my shoulder.

No one said anything for some time. Then someone broke the silence and suggested we sit down and relax. Someone mentioned tea. It gave me something to do. I was the host again. I took some deep breaths, pulled myself together, arranged the sofa and got everyone sat down.

It was easier now. Lynn began to talk freely. She said she had known of my existence from when she first met Peter many years ago. Ernie had told them about the English POW called Ginger.

‘I have always known of your existence,’ Lynn said, ‘but we didn’t know your name was Denis.’ She described hearing the story during a weekend spent with Ernie. ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to him. I heard the story about you forty years after the fact. It was so important to him that Susanne knew he was still alive.’ She went on. ‘Nobody enjoyed life more than Ernie; he was so much fun, a real story teller. He went on to have a wonderful life.’

Susanne had been trying patiently to give me something. Now, with a little prompting and speaking quite formally as if she had rehearsed it, she took the chance. ‘I am delighted to give you this tape that Ernie made in 1995,’ she said, handing me a DVD recording.

It was, Peter explained, a short extract of Ernie’s life story as recorded by the Shoah Foundation. ‘Denis, you will want to see this,’ he said.

We climbed the spiral stairs to the mezzanine floor where we open presents at Christmas and enjoy a sherbet or two with friends and family. I collapsed on the sofa next to Susanne and they slotted the DVD into the machine.

It took a moment or two before the picture appeared and there he was in a freeze-frame on the screen. He was about seventy years old then and looked fit with it. His strong grey hair was swept back from his forehead and he was wearing a smart, open-necked blue shirt. I recognised the same sympathetic face I had seen in the photographs and also flashes of the boy I had known. He was sitting in a room with book-lined walls and there was a small table lamp over his right shoulder.

I guessed he was in the middle of the Auschwitz story as he wasn’t smiling. ‘Oh there he is,’ Susanne said on seeing his face. It would be the first time she had seen any of the interview and I thought it might not be easy for her. This was her brother but we were going through it together. Suddenly the frozen image animated and Ernie was talking directly to us.

He was telling another remarkable camp story about two Czech Jews from Prague who befriended a civilian who smuggled food in to them from their girlfriends outside. It was a fascinating preamble.

Slowly his story began to turn into something more familiar and I had the feeling I knew where it was going. ‘I had another stroke of luck,’ I heard him say. He said he had been delivering soup to the German civilian workers. It suddenly made sense. I had thought he was a runner of some kind so that fitted. That was how he managed to move around the camp more easily than the other prisoners.

He described looking out for the English POWs. He wanted to tell them that he had a sister in England. He said he had been watching one particular prisoner in his khaki uniform for some time. I realised he was describing me.

He said he thought I was welding and he was waiting for me to drop a cigarette butt. It all fitted. I was reliving that moment as he spoke. He was describing that first stilted introduction a lifetime ago.

Ernst had given his name and then asked mine. I grasped Susanne’s hand. The reply was ‘Ginger’.

‘Gingy,’ I echoed, hearing it as it had sounded to me on his lips that first time.

Ernie’s face lightened as he spoke. He looked into the middle distance with his head to one side as he described my red hair. The corners of his mouth lifted into a fond smile as he recalled the young soldier I was.

His memory differed a little in the detail. He thought I wrote the address down. I was sure I had memorised it but there it was as clear as day. He had remembered me and that’s what mattered.

He told the whole story much as I have related it here. He recalled me giving him the odd cigarette when no one was looking and then some months later he related how I had called him over. He paced his words as the story reached its conclusion. ‘He gave me a letter,’ he said exhaling sharply and swallowing to retain composure, ‘and ten packs of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate, from my sister.’ There was a glint in his eye.

And there we were: Audrey, Susanne and I with Peter and his wife listening to Ernie tell the story in my Derbyshire home sixty-five years after it happened. It was like a message from beyond the grave.

He said he wasn’t sure if he was the only one to have had such luck because he would never have related it to anybody. He knew to tell would have risked my life and his so he had kept quiet. I was touched.

What I had done had been such a small thing compared to the crimes that Ernie had endured but I knew, watching him that it had meant a lot to him. ‘Ten packs of English cigarettes,’ he said as if to underline it, ‘it was like being given the Rockefeller Centre.’

He had been in Auschwitz III in 1944, a heartbeat away from the death camp itself, and I had got a letter to him from his sister in England. He seemed as amazed repeating it then, fifty years later, as I remembered him being at the time.

But how had he survived the death march? He still hadn’t explained. I adjusted my hearing aid so as not to miss a word as he began to say what he had done with the cigarettes.

He had traded many for what he called ‘future favours’. Even in Auschwitz Ernie had retained his generosity. He gave some to a friend he called Maki, some to a man who had come from Breslau on the same transport to ease his life and some to his Kapo, no doubt for protection. And then he came to it.

‘The soles of my shoes had started to wear very, very thin,’ he said. ‘Of course, there were also shoe menders in the camps and I had new heavy soles put on my boots for two packs of English Players cigarettes.’ It was all falling into place. ‘That,’ he said ‘came to save my life on the death march in 1945.’

There it was and it was so simple. It was the shoes. I had walked over all those bodies. People who slipped and were shot, got frostbite and were shot, people whose wooden clogs bit into their swollen feet until they fell behind and were shot. Ernie had used the cigarettes to get the one thing that made the difference between life and death: strong boots.

He explained how, compared to some in the camp, he was enormously lucky. When the Russians approached and the SS prepared to evacuate Auschwitz he had been in better shape than many. He spoke German, he had some bread he’d saved, cigarettes to trade and shoes suitable for a long march. When the SS herded them out he had decided it was best to be at the head of the column. He knew that wherever they went, space would be limited. Those at the tail end of the march could end up sleeping out in the ice.

He described the deep snow and the biting cold, much as I remembered it. He estimated that 10,000 people were marched out of Auschwitz III, plus 30,000 from Auschwitz Main. They had begun the thirty-eight mile hike to Gleiwitz at gunpoint on that dreadful day.

He said that for the vast majority of the inmates, at that time of the year, with their clothing, their health and the emaciation they had suffered, it was undoable. ‘They fell like flies,’ he said, ‘anyone who fell was shot.’

‘Doesn’t he look sad?’ Susanne said when the excerpt stopped. ‘He relived the whole story.’

They wanted my reaction straight away but I couldn’t put it into words. I was so glad he remembered me and that I had played a part in his survival.

‘I hadn’t heard this story,’ Susanne said. ‘It was wonderful.’

I realised then it was a revelation for her too. She had done what she could but she had never really known how the smuggled cigarettes had helped her brother to stay alive.

‘I couldn’t do much during the war,’ she told me, ‘but I was glad it helped.’

She paused for a second then wished me a very long life and much happiness, which at my age is something.

I told her of my failed attempts to find her again after the war, to make my peace when I was more stable. ‘I wish I had kept in touch,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It would have been nice, when we were younger.’