Chapter 22

The first broadcasts of my story made waves, all right. People I hadn’t heard of for decades got in touch. The call that pleased me most came from Henry Kamm, a former New York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize and now lives in a converted mill in the south of France. He logged on to his computer as he does every morning, clicked on the BBC World Service news bulletin and spotted Rob’s item about a British POW and Auschwitz. He pricked up his ears when he heard mention of a Jewish prisoner called Ernst and realised it was his life-long friend Ernie Lobet. I was overjoyed to hear from him and his kind words about the way I had tried to help Ernst raised my spirits tremendously. Soon after that a package arrived from France and I opened it to find copies of his books inside. I flicked through the pages and there at the front I found a touching handwritten dedication to me. I won’t repeat it but it’s something I will treasure for the rest of my days.

The phone has never stopped ringing since then. I was invited to Downing Street twice, taken to lunch at the House of Lords and I have addressed crowded meetings at both the Cambridge Union, and the Oxford University’s Chabad Society for Jewish students.

There were countless radio, TV and newspaper interviews in the months that followed and it was all much more than I had bargained for. I was honoured by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, who got in touch to say they wanted to present me with a diploma in recognition of what I had done and they were sending the artist Felix de la Concha to paint me. Audrey was quick off the mark that time, wanting to know who was supplying the undercoat.

I spoke to school groups and addressed the appeal dinner of the Holocaust Educational Trust at a swanky London venue a week after a specialist had told me bluntly, very bluntly, that I was going to lose the sight in my good eye. So, on doctor’s orders, I stepped up onto the podium in my blazer and tie sporting a fine pair of dark shades to protect my remaining eye from the spotlights. Rob said I looked like an elderly Jack Nicholson on a bad day. He told me that the speech had to be tight as time was limited and I should get straight to the point. When I stood up and began my talk with the events in Egypt he guessed it would be a long night. In the end I only ran over by ten minutes, which is not bad for me. Now I can talk about it all, I feel I have to tell the whole story.

As it turned out the shades were unnecessary; a few weeks later I got a second opinion and I was told my good eye should last a lifetime. What more can you ask at my age?

It was a whirl of activity. Rob had persuaded me to work on the book by then and he was putting me through the mill pretty regularly, delving into corners of my memory that I had been reluctant to explore. It was hard going, both cathartic and painful in equal measure but the darkness is lifting on it and it’s getting easier all the time.

As Rob’s research continued it threw up some interesting questions about the nature of memory. He kept asking me if I was certain I had seen that Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the gates to Auschwitz III-Monowitz. I was, but he said some experts had questioned it and nothing survives at the site today to testify one way or the other. The sign everyone knows these days is at the gates of the main camp, Auschwitz I. After more than sixty years it is that one which is emblazoned on the collective memory although many camps had them. Rob said the most influential account of life in the camp – that of the survivor and writer Primo Levi – mentioned the sign at Auschwitz III more than once but the head of Research at the Auschwitz archive wasn’t convinced. That left enough of a question in his mind for him to come back to me several times to double-check and of course there aren’t many people left to ask. Then something odd happened. I met another survivor of that same camp living in the UK. He was a wonderful man named Freddie Knoller and I must have worked alongside him in IG Farben without ever knowing it. Rob chatted to him as well and he was not in any doubt about that dreadful sign. I had only seen it a couple of times, fleetingly, but he had marched through that gateway every single day.

From the start I wanted to understand the rest of Ernie’s life story. I wanted to know what happened to him after Auschwitz and about his time in America. Rob had shown me a small chunk of the long Shoah Foundation video but only the section where Ernie talked about me, the cigarettes and the start of the death march. He said he wanted to get to the end of all the interviews before showing me the whole of Ernie’s life story. I would have to wait a little longer.

The research began and then one day in the summer 2010 Rob drove up to Derbyshire with some more astounding news. This time it was not about Auschwitz but about something earlier, the torpedoing of the ship that I dived off in the Mediterranean back in 1941.

He said the records showed that the Italians had lost a lot of merchant ships in the Med during those months but only one vessel fitted the bill, the others were either in the wrong place or the dates didn’t match.

Rob was convinced that the ship I had been loaded onto had been the Sebastiano Venier, also known as the Jason. He got out the maps and the records on the dining-room table and went through them all and it had to be the one. That changed quite a lot for me.

On 9 December 1941, the Sebastiano Venier was hit by a torpedo fired from one of our subs, HMS Porpoise, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Pizey. Hundreds of allied soldiers, many of them New Zealanders, were killed. Nowadays they’d probably call it friendly fire, and it would rank amongst the worst examples in history, but back then the calculation had been much simpler: wars weren’t won by captives and enemy shipping was helping resupply Rommel. No matter how many prisoners died the ships had to be sunk to save the lives of those still fighting. The greater good depended on it whatever the cost. The price was paid by men like us.

That was the bad news. The carnage on board, especially in the hold where the torpedo had struck, had been appalling but, Rob had discovered, not all the prisoners on the ship had perished, and in fact most had survived the attack. I couldn’t believe it, surely that wasn’t possible.

I had made it up on deck soon after the torpedo struck and went straight over the side without a thought, kicking as hard as I could to get away from the stricken vessel. I had seen the ship receding slowly into the distance and tilting ever deeper towards the bow as it went and then I lost sight of it. I was convinced that boat had gone down with all those poor lads trapped inside it.

I remembered the sea had soon got rougher and I could barely see anything in the waves. Then the Italian subchaser was on top of us, slicing through the few survivors in the water and tossing depth charges around. I could still see the ship’s name in my mind’s eye, the Centurion or something like it. Looking at the records, Rob said that vessel was almost certainly the Centauro – an Italian Spica Class boat – and it was carrying a captured New Zealand general who lived to describe what he had seen.

There had been a number of people in the sea at that point but as time passed they had all gone under. There was no one in the water after that from what I could see around me. So how was it possible that anyone had survived, I asked? It was simple, Rob replied, the Sebastiano Venier didn’t go down, in fact it became famous for staying afloat. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying at first. I was convinced the ship was just minutes away from sinking when I dived off. It had been another of those automatic responses; I didn’t have to think. Now I was hearing of an even more remarkable drama that unfolded on board the ship whilst I was in the water being blasted by depth charges.

The Sebastiano Venier’s outward voyage, taking supplies to Benghazi, had been a terrible passage for the crew and theirs was the only ship of five to get through. Air attacks from Malta and the guns of the Royal Navy saw to the rest. The experience had shredded the crew’s nerves. The Italian captain in particular had been nervous and jittery as they put to sea again and they all knew what awaited them on the return leg, even if the lads imprisoned down in the hold didn’t. They made it as far as the southern coast of Greece when, according to the surviving accounts, the captain spotted the periscope of an allied sub poking through the waves. He panicked and concluded rashly that the game was up. He feared that the moment a torpedo struck, the 2,000 or so allied prisoners would fight their way on deck and overwhelm the few lifeboats on board. He ordered the crew to abandon ship before the first torpedo struck in order to save his own skin. That decision rebounded, plunging him into ignominy and his fate was sealed.

The Sebastiano Venier was about three and a half miles west of Methoni at the south western tip of Greece when the third torpedo fired by HMS Porpoise hit hold number one at the front of the ship, killing many of the men trapped there instantly.

Some of those I had left behind did what I had already done and dived into the waves, convinced that the ship was going down, but few of those survived. The vessel was turning to starboard by then and many of the men who jumped off the port side were caught in the wash as the stern swung around, and were pulled into the ship’s propellers and cut to pieces.

The man who saved the ship and the remaining prisoners was a mysterious German who has never been identified to this day. He appeared like the strangest sort of guardian angel, brandishing a Luger pistol and a heavy spanner. He restored order and got the few Italian engineers who had been left behind by their superiors to fall in line and then, working through an allied NCO, he convinced the prisoners to calm down and stay on board. He told them they might be able to save the ship if they worked together and that the sea was now their greatest enemy. He ordered the men to the rear of the vessel, telling them that their weight would help relieve the strain – however fractionally – on the forward bulkhead; he said their lives depended upon it. He gave instructions for first-aid posts to be set up to treat the injured and got the engines going again but very slowly. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; it was a fascinating story and one I would love to have witnessed.

I would have been in the water about twenty minutes at that point and I had already been carried far away. With the waterlogged bow of the ship acting as a drag the mystery German got the boat going astern and very slowly he edged it the remaining miles towards the shore. Several hours later, he beached it on the rocks to the grinding sound of steel. There were hearty Allied cheers for the German sailor who had put enmity aside to get as many men as possible to safety.

The lifeboats with the captain and crew inside had also made it slowly to towards land and they got to the shore only to see the holed vessel limping towards them and refusing to go down. If the ship had sunk, few on his side would have faulted the captain for sacrificing the prisoners to save himself. As it was, with the boat limping towards land, he was damned and he must have known it. He was arrested, so the story goes, court-martialled and executed for his decision to abandon ship so soon.

The German, who vanished as quickly as he appeared, was a different animal altogether; he was probably a marine engineer but his consideration for the wounded prisoners was never forgotten and those who encountered him spoke of a man of great courage and humanity who, enemy or not, had saved hundreds of allied lives, though more died trying to get ashore from the beached ship.

I didn’t know about any of this because I was on the loose for some time before I was recaptured and I never came across the other survivors, though some it turned out had also passed through Dysentery Acre.

I listened to what Rob was telling me but I was still wrestling with my own memory. It was a fantastic story. Nothing could ever be certain after such a long time, he said, but it was very hard to see how it could have been any other ship. I was staggered. It had been an appalling episode for me but like so much else it was swamped by what followed. Knowing so many men had survived that disaster was a relief. For almost seventy years I had assumed that I was the sole survivor. And then the penny dropped.

‘I had no need to jump in the sea at all.’

‘It looks like it,’ Rob replied.

‘Well what a silly-arse,’ I said.