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.
E
vening was approaching and I knew the British POWs would soon start to assemble fifty yards away from the stripeys for the march back to E715.
I could see that the Jewish work
Kommandos
were getting ready to form their own column for the trudge back to their camp and I made my move.
People were milling around so taking advantage of the end-of-day confusion, I strode purposefully towards the
Bude
, a wooden shed tucked away in the contractor’s yard. I opened the door and stepped inside. I knew the stark interior with its small tables and a simple bench because we sometimes ate and sheltered in it. As soon as I was hidden inside I pulled off my heavy boots and got the coarse wooden clogs ready for a speedy exchange. Hans saw me go into the hut, and followed rapidly on my heels.
Suddenly he was framed in the doorway and without hesitation he pushed on in. He was clearly agitated; what we were doing was more dangerous for him than for me but he had come. For him the chance of a safer night and a bit more food was worth the risk. With a nervous glance over his shoulder as he dropped the latch, he darted across to me, his head down as if it helped to hide our purpose.
There was no time to talk. Speed was essential; this couldn’t take more than a minute or we could be missed.
Hans pulled off his infested top and tossed it to me. In return I gave him my thick military tunic. I pulled on his blue striped
outfit, the smell of filth and human decay rose from the weave and I was conscious of the creatures emerging from the folds and frayed seams, ready for new blood. I could cope with that, I knew how to live with lice. The desert and the Italian camps had taught me that. The thought of catching typhus never occurred to me then. For now, lice were the least of my problems.
I had left my army shirt in the barracks and was wearing just a vest under my military tunic. A shirt of any sort beneath this zebra sacking could have aroused suspicion even with my head shaved and my face smeared to look gaunt.
All the markers of my real identity had now been stripped away.
What a difference a uniform makes
, I thought fleetingly as I looked at Hans, now dressed in my clothes. I had been right; he was roughly the same height and build as myself and, like me, he was quite pale-skinned.
I had bartered for a pair of old shoes for him and stashed them away in the
Bude
in advance. Wooden clogs on a British POW would have been noticed. I had already hidden my army boots away before he came. I wasn’t going to trust anyone with them, not even overnight.
Once the swap was completed I quickly talked Hans through the plan again. I told him he mustn’t show any excitement or do anything to draw attention to himself in any way. His movements had to be calm and deliberate. Above all, I said, don’t run. I doubt he had the strength anyway. He left immediately looking every inch a British soldier and headed off, as he had been told, to find Bill and Jimmy.
I waited a moment. Then I adopted the hangdog expression that I had observed, dropped my shoulders and with my eyes cast downwards I left the hut and hobbled towards the Jewish column which was forming up. There I edged myself into the middle of a rank, coughing as I went so I could hide my accent behind a croaking voice if anyone spoke to me.
It felt good, like I was calling the shots again. I wasn’t merely a
bystander any more. Just cheating their discipline meant I was putting one over on the enemy.
I was suddenly aware of new dangers. I ran my fingers furtively up the front of the pyjama-like jacket to check it was fastened to the top, bringing it tight around my throat. It had to be. I knew a missing button or an open neck could result in a clobbering by the
Kapos.
I would have no alternative but to take the beating or give the game away. If I was unmasked they would have shot me on the spot; that much I knew. Inside I was geared up for a fight but outwardly I had to feign weakness and compliance.
Adrenalin pumped through my veins as I listened to the rhythmic background drone of counting: ‘
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
.’
The living were counted with the dead whose corpses lay piled to one side. As long as the
Kapos
saw a head in the dirt they would count it as a body; as long as the numbers were the same morning and evening it didn’t matter if that body was still alive. It made no difference to them.
If a
Kapo
made a mistake he had to blame the prisoners to save his skin. That meant at least a punch, a full beating or, if the SS got involved, a blow with a rifle butt or worse. They put pressure on the
Kapos
; the
Kapos
beat the prisoners. That was how it was. I’d seen it from the comparative safety of the POW ranks. I hated the
Kapos
all the more for it.
When the counting was over they did it again to be sure. There were SS guards, guns at the ready, standing watchfully at each side of the column, with a
Kapo
flitting along the ranks, gesturing with his hands and fingers as he checked the numbers. My attention had shifted to the route out of the yard. I tried to anticipate the next danger.
From where I stood in the middle of a rank, pressed between the curving shoulders of men who could easily be corpses tomorrow, it was hard to see the heap of today’s bodies which had been dumped away to one side. It was if the mounds of grimy rags in vaguely human form were already being sucked into the earth.
For some, the end had no doubt brought release; suffering and consciousness extinguished together. The Jewish
Häftlinge
were always collapsing on the job, gasping their last breath unnoticed in the dirt as work continued around them or they were kicked and punched until they simply faded away.
I was startled by a sudden burst of activity, again focused on the pile of bodies. Their fellow prisoners were dragging the skeletal remains across the ground and dumping them on thin boards making improvised wooden stretchers. They showed no emotion. The dead were just another load, this time of skin and bone, and the limbs of those who lifted them quivered with the burden. There were not enough boards so some of the carriers had to pick up the remains in their own hands, grabbing at arms and legs or grasping a fistful of their worn-out uniforms. Dropping a body would mean a delay and a beating and an injury here meant rapid decline and usually death.
Those with boards shared the weight between two or more. Even here, even now, human ingenuity was hard at work: one man had rigged up a rope around his shoulders and under the timber stretcher to relieve the strain on his scrawny muscles. They all knew that further exhaustion would shorten their own lives.
With the cadavers loaded, their carriers rejoined the ranks. I was supported by adrenalin but emotionally I was closed down. My defence mechanisms were in play. I didn’t have to think, I just had to do. Too much thought would dull my purpose and bring danger. If you want to speak a language fluently, you have to think in that language and so it was with me, there, in amongst those broken, shadow people. I had to accept what was happening to them as they did. I had to think and act as they did.
After weeks of plotting and running the scenario through in my mind the success of my plan was poised on a razor’s edge. The cold focus returned. It was like all those desert patrols again. I had milliseconds to assess the situation and respond. I had to stay sharp or it was the bullet.
My pulse was racing inside a body that had to ooze hopelessness. Here there could be no fighting back. This was a different job but it was a job all the same. I had to bear witness and nothing must get in my way.
Looking forward in the column I saw that one of the corpses was about to slip off the improvised stretcher. Something had to be done or there’d be trouble.
Quickly and without fuss, one of his comrades flicked the body back into position. He splayed the legs roughly apart so that one dropped on each side of the thin timber and the feet dangled in the dirt. That simple adjustment stopped the stiffening corpse from rolling off the board as it bounced along. The dead man was holding himself in place. He was helping his feeble pallbearers on a journey without ceremony with no funeral at its end.
Finally, the column shambled awkwardly off. If there had been a time to abort my plan it had gone. I’d left my comrades behind, and all that was familiar and predictable receded rapidly behind me. The wooden clogs were loose and cumbersome to move in and I gripped hard with my toes to keep them on. The rags I’d used to wrap my feet helped a little but they still chafed badly. At least that helped me master the shambling walk.