Audrey describes meeting a very different person. She said I looked permanently lost as if searching for something. She detected a sadness which I hadn’t admitted to myself and I hoped no else had noticed. In her memory, I was lean of face and my eyes were always fixed on the floor. She knew something was wrong. She was right, she usually is. I wasn’t really normal. She had an inkling that it had something to do with Auschwitz but that was all. I was surprised she knew that much. Audrey helped me win my sanity back. She has been my life raft ever since.
There was another reminder of the war years. My injured eye was getting worse all the time. It had been trouble since I had been hit in the face after challenging the SS man. My vision would distort without warning, large objects would fold away to nothing before me, or worse there would be two of them. I had to abandon cricket and tennis. I couldn’t judge where the ball was any more worse still, I couldn’t see the engineering drawings in meetings. It was getting serious and it had to be sorted out.
Audrey and I were not fully together at that point but it was Saturday and I had arranged to take her shopping, after I had seen the eye specialist. It wasn’t to be.
The professor did a series of tests, shone bright lights into my eye and looked into it using a series of optical gadgets. When he finished, he gave the verdict. It was not good.
The eye injury had turned cancerous and it threatened more than my vision. If they didn’t operate within forty-eight hours the cancer could spread to my brain and I would die. At one o’clock I called Audrey to break the bad news to her. I wasn’t coming out of hospital and they were preparing me for an operation on the following Monday morning.
My eye would have to be removed and replaced with a glass one. Once I was over the shock, the professor asked if I might be part of an experiment that would further their understanding of the workings of the eye and its connected nerves. The professor said he had asked a colleague to fly over from Sweden to take
part. They were to sever the nerves of my eye under a local rather than a general anaesthetic. I was to talk them through what I was experiencing as it happened.
The day of the operation came. I closed my good eye and looked at the clock with my impaired right one for the last time. It was exactly eleven o’clock in the morning as they wheeled me into theatre fully conscious, but a little dazed.
I was laid on a table with bright lights overhead and the experiment began. I don’t recall any real pain, but I do remember the professor probing ever deeper with his fine blade into my eye questioning me as they went. ‘Do you see anything when I do this?’ he asked.
‘No, no different,’ I said.
He probed a bit more. ‘What about this?’ he asked and on it went.
There was another fine movement of his hand, as delicate as a watchmaker’s, and my right eye went dark. It was as if a weighty coin had been placed over it. The sight on my right side had gone for good and I had given a stilted commentary on it as it happened. I don’t recall much after that; I was probably placed under a general anaesthetic so they could remove the eye altogether.
I came around and was relieved that I could see with my good eye. I had come through so much by then I don’t recall feeling especially morbid about it, though Audrey had been very upset.
As a trade-off for assisting with their research, I would benefit from another experimental procedure. I was to be the recipient of one of the first moveable glass eyes. The muscles would be attached to a washer at the back of the socket and they in turn could fasten onto the false eye, allowing it some limited movement.
It was wonderfully futuristic then. What followed wasn’t. They bunged my eye full of plasticine to make a cast and gave me a temporary glass eye, which didn’t match. Sometime later I was sent to a small artist’s studio. A young woman appeared, we
exchanged a few pleasantries and then she sat me down as if she was going to paint my portrait. She looked long and hard at me then produced a blank glass eye, some mini pots of paint and tiny brushes. Like an artist working on a cameo, she mixed the colours to capture every fleck and hue. She did a wonderful job and it was a better match than many produced later by more hi-tech methods.
Most people are unaware that it is a glass eye until I tap it with a teaspoon to underline the point. I still remove it occasionally and I have been known to leave it with my hearing aid on the dressing table. Audrey says there are so many bits of me laid out there on some nights that she’d be better off sleeping over there. She usually throws in an imaginary wooden leg to enhance the joke.
Then in June 1966 a letter arrived with a cheque offering compensation for what the attached slip called ‘Nazi persecution.’ It was made out for the grand total of £204 and signed by the Paymaster General. I was appalled and disgusted. We never thought the government had treated us right and this just confirmed it.
It was some time before the years of fast living came to an end and it happened with a jolt. I had designed a revolutionary new compact extrusion process capable of making aluminium toothpaste tubes and food containers more efficiently. It was my own venture and I put all my money into it. I was fascinated by the challenge but took too little care of the contracts and the small print. It turned sour and I lost almost everything. Around the same time my share portfolio took a nosedive and the good times were over. I was always hopeless with money.
There was still one big project left in me. Associated Dairies, which became the retail giant ASDA, asked me to build a factory near Newcastle to produce and bottle long-life and sterilised milk. I agreed to do it. I bought the land, negotiated with the local authorities, then designed and built what became the first fully
automated plant of its type in the country. It was opened by Prince Charles and it was a fitting, if not prosperous, end to a career of which I was proud.
I had begun to reassess life before retirement. Audrey and I didn’t want to owe anybody money so we sold up and moved away from Cheshire. We bought a smaller house on the edge of the village of Bradwell in Derbyshire surrounded by fields. It’s a place where ancient dry stonewalls climb the green hills and divide the valleys. They enclose the lane behind the house, which tumbles and twists past a gapping cavern, winding onwards until it reaches the main road outside the village. It is a place where we live the seasons rather than witness them. It is in turn both splendid and bleak. It is the best and the happiest home I have known.
T
he silence continued. Audrey knew none of the details of my time in E715, of the Auschwitz swap or even about Ernst. If I was asked, I refused to talk about any of it. It didn’t belong in our post-war lives. It remained locked away.
There weren’t the people demanding to know and there were few occasions to talk about it. If I was asked I couldn’t respond. Mine was not the experience of a real Holocaust survivor. I had witnessed some of humanity’s greatest crimes, but I had not been subject to them. So what could any of us say? Where did we fit in? By then Ernst’s was one of many gaunt faces in my mind, men whose moment of death might never be remembered by anyone.
But something was stirring. Not in me, not yet, but outside. The public were well aware of the Holocaust, the gas chambers and crematoria by now. Those terrible images of the concentration camps had begun appearing in the documentary programmes years earlier. Viewers had grown used to the pictures and had stopped seeing the victims as individuals, as people.
Now it was different. The attention started to shift from the gas chambers to the Nazi slave labour programmes themselves. I knew the victims I had seen had been less than slaves. A slave had a value to the owner, whereas the work these people were forced to do in places like IG Farben’s Buna-Werke was mainly a method of murder. Radio and TV reports started to appear focusing on their experiences.
In September 1999 I saw an article in
The Times
about a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz
Buna
plant called Rudy Kennedy but originally named Karmeinsky. He had appeared several times on radio and TV, campaigning for compensation for the victims of the Nazi slave labour camps. Strange though it was, I was seized by the possibility that I might know him and that we could have worked close together at IG Farben. I tried to contact him through the paper but nothing happened.
A few of the survivors were now making their anger known as never before. It was starting to have an impact. In August 2000, after years of wrangling, the German Government and leading companies set up the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future with ten billion Deutschmarks to compensate the slave and forced labourers and other victims of the Nazis.
We were persuaded to apply and I got the application form in on time to the International Organisation for Migration, one of the groups administering the scheme. It took them almost two years to reject my claim and all the others submitted by the allied prisoners of E715. The money didn’t bother me, it was the lack of recognition for what had happened that irked. Again our experience went unrecognised. I lodged a passionate appeal and encouraged the other lads to do the same.
I launched into a period of intense activity and angry letter writing. I bombarded MPs, the Ministry of Defence, even the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. I was determined that people should know that allied prisoners had been forced to work, sometimes in terrible conditions. It hadn’t been a question of sitting out the war and waiting to be liberated. We had been forced labourers too.
I particularly wanted the British Government to know about E715, a camp so close to Auschwitz that we had been part of its labour force. I felt that at least we deserved a payment similar to that received by the Far East prisoners of war who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Sometime later a cheque arrived for
around £5000 from the IOM. I was pleased that my appeal to the German scheme had succeeded, but many of the lads had been rejected again. It didn’t seem right.
I was engaging with the war properly for the first time since 1945 but I still hadn’t really explored my own memory of what happened. The Imperial War Museum sent someone to talk to me. I don’t know how she managed it but she did a first-rate job. Somehow she got me to talk. It can’t have been easy. I rattled through it all so quickly. I was struggling for the first time to bring it all back. There were things I had never really spoken about before and I am sure I got some of it tangled now but I had taken the first step. I was talking about it. When the interviewer had gone I realised she hadn’t heard the half of it. I had barely scratched the surface.
One day a stranger arrived at the door. It was a fine day, which in Derbyshire means it wasn’t raining, and I was pottering around the house. The doorbell rang and I answered it to find a man who introduced himself as a military officer, though he was wearing civilian clothes. He came in and sat down on the sofa. He said he worked for the ex-serviceman’s organisation Combat Stress, then he knocked over a cup of tea that Audrey had made him and it went all over the new carpet. I put him at ease again and he began to explain that his organisation tried to help former soldiers cope with war trauma. He wanted to know if I needed any support. My answer was brief: ‘You’re sixty years too late, mate,’ I said.
I looked at the rank on his business card and then tore another strip off him. He hadn’t been through a war as far as I could tell so what did he know? I was very direct. I hope I wasn’t too harsh. We soldiers had been demobbed with a cheap suit and not so much as a thank you. I had survived the years of nightmares and mental anguish alone and then, in my eighties, someone was offering to help. Most of the lads were already dead.
Neither the government nor the military had cared after the
war. That’s how things were then. Either families picked up the pieces or they didn’t. I couldn’t stop the nightmares completely but at least they didn’t control me any more. The man from Combat Stress represented neither government nor military and he was trying to help, poor chap. I felt sorry for him afterwards. They do excellent work.
Things really started to change in 2003 when I was asked to appear as a live guest on a local radio show to discuss war pensions. I was sitting there in the studio briefed to talk about the War Pensions Welfare Service. The ‘On Air’ light was lit. The programme was live. There were two other guests alongside me, my microphone was open and I knew what I had come to say. Then the presenter asked me an entirely unexpected question. He asked about my own war service.
As I tend to do, I began at the beginning. Suddenly I was talking about the war in very personal terms for the first time. I started slowly but still found odd German terms cropping up as I remembered it all. At one point the presenter had to ask me to translate a German phrase I had used so the audience could keep up.
Soon the memories were flowing and the words were tumbling out. I would never be silenced again.
I ran through the story much as I have recounted it here until I began to describe Auschwitz and working alongside the Jewish prisoners from dawn to dusk every day. This was different. My voice started to break, the feelings welled up inside me and I ground to a halt. There was a long pause. I was back there again and struggling for words. I picked myself up and resumed with a safer part of the story and gained a moment to compose myself. Then I plunged back into it all again. I was describing the ghastly smell of the crematoria chimneys. I could taste it as I spoke. Again I was struggling. The other studio guests were silent, the presenter hardly needed to ask questions. I told him how I had grown used to seeing men kicked to death each day. This time something had really unlocked. I was able to talk about it all as never before; this
was new for me. That show led to other interviews. Old memories were coming back all the time, there was no bottling it up now. I was off.