I wrote to Les Allen, the Honorary Secretary of the National Ex-Prisoners of War Association, and put him in the picture. Soon after that, Les sent a BBC reporter, Rob Broomby, up to see me. He had been investigating the story of the British prisoners held near Auschwitz. He had also worked on a lot of those early reports about the Jewish slave labourers and the German firms. He had returned from Berlin not long before, where he had been the BBC Correspondent. I liked Rob’s approach. He was down to earth and respectful. He understood.
Rob was to become part of this story in more ways than one. He was looking at the case for compensating British prisoners who had been forced to work for the Germans. I told him about the Jewish prisoner called Ernst with the sister in England, who I had tried to help by smuggling cigarettes. I told him about the swap with Hans and described the nights in Auschwitz III.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn when the broadcast went out that the full story of the swap didn’t really fit the bill. I learnt later that he had attempted to do something else with that section of the interview but it hadn’t worked out and he had abandoned it.
A few years went by before Rob, now working with a BBC producer called Patrick Howse, got in touch again. It was autumn 2009 and they wanted to record an interview about my story for radio and television. This time the focus was to be on the Auschwitz swap and my attempts to help Ernst.
In the weeks that followed, Rob telephoned again and again to ask more questions. He had the wild idea he might be able to trace Ernst’s sister, Susanne. If she was still alive, he said, they might find out how Ernst had died. I had not spoken to her since 1945 and I had no way of knowing what path her life had taken
since. If she was indeed still alive, she would be getting on in years by now, we all were.
I went back to my little brown leather address book from 1945 to dig out what I could. It was old and faded but still clearly legible. I had written down her name then as Susanne Cottrell of 7 Tixall Road, Birmingham. I guessed this was probably an adopted name.
Rob kept me updated on the search to find her but I could tell it wasn’t going well. Weeks went by with no word.
The Association of Jewish Refugees had told him that Cottrell didn’t sound at all like a Jewish name and their specialist on the
Kindertransport
s couldn’t trace anybody from a first name alone. His attempts to dig out the records from the Birmingham Council of Refugees for the period had been equally fruitless.
The first bit of luck for him came from the electoral register of 1945, which listed three voters living at the Tixall Road address. The good news was they all had the surname Cottrell, the bad news was none of them was a Susanne. There were three women listed, Ida, Sarah and Amy. He asked me whether one of them could have been Susanne listed under a different name. I had no way of knowing.
It was hopeless. I knew Rob was involved in daily news at the BBC and the hours of research were getting in the way of his other duties. I thought he would give it a few weeks and then throw in the towel. That’s usually what happens. At that stage it was only going to be a four-minute TV news item and a slightly longer report for BBC Radio. It wasn’t exactly a major documentary investigation.
Then he called me with a breakthrough of sorts. He had managed to contact the people who now lived at 7 Tixall Road. In a country where houses change hands at very regular intervals he was amazed to find an elderly couple still living there who had bought the house in the 1960s from a lady named Cottrell.
They recalled hearing the story of the German Jewish girl the
Cottrells had sheltered during the war. Rob was elated but of course it only confirmed what I already knew. He hadn’t gleaned any more information. It gave him a temporary lift but it didn’t mean she was still alive. The trail went cold. I wracked my brain for more details of that traumatic meeting to help him and came up with nothing. That period was largely a blur.
I wasn’t certain that she had been formally adopted at all and if she had, those records would be private. The electoral register, census returns and even the phone book turned up a number of Cottrells scattered around the country but the hours spent on the phone had turned up nothing. His colleagues were starting to wonder whether it was a waste of time. There were plenty of easier stories to chase.
There was only one more thing for him to do. In desperation he started calling some of those he had spoken to already.
He picked up the phone to the family at Tixall Road again. Since the original inquiry they’d had some time to think. They had spoken to their son Andrew who lived in nearby Solihull. Not only did he remember hearing the story of the German girl who came to Britain as a child refugee at the start of the Second World War, but he was also sure she was still living in the Birmingham area. He thought she had married and taken the name James, and that she had a son called Peter. It got better. He was convinced he had seen her in the last year or two having dinner at a local pub restaurant.
It was great news. Rob was now looking for a Susanne James with a son called Peter who he believed had moved to the United States and might be a successful accountant. Now the search began on both sides of the Atlantic though James was a relatively common name.
But Andrew had supplied another lead. He was convinced that Susanne had lived until recently at an address on Warwick Road in the Acocks Green area of Birmingham.
It was a very long road. So long, in fact, that there was more
than one person called James registered as living on it in recent years. One number worth chasing appeared to be a takeaway but they were more interested in orders than tracing missing people.
Another listing was intriguing. The electoral register for 2001 showed a Susanne E James at a Warwick Road address. The mystery was that there were two other names registered to vote at the same place, one of which sounded eastern European. The woman who picked up the phone was obviously too young to be Susanne and was confused by the call. No wonder, there was a complete stranger on the line asking weird questions about an elderly lady he clearly didn’t know. Eventually she recalled being shown around the house as a prospective buyer by a small elderly lady with grey hair. It was promising but she couldn’t remember her name.
More frustration. Rob called me to say he was almost ready to give up. He had invested weeks in the search by now and had little to show, so Rob and Patrick fixed a date to come up and record my story for TV and radio as it was.
He said they had built into the schedule one last day of knocking on doors in Birmingham as a final throw of the dice but then they would be cutting their losses. Such was the pressure of news. I was sure when I heard that they would never find the women I had met sixty-four years ago as a young girl. Her brother Ernst was just one of millions of victims. I guessed what had happened to him and I didn’t need to be told. It had been a hopeless quest but a nice thought while it lasted. They would have to rely on me alone for their story.
The TV crew arrived in good time. I remembered Rob from last time and I was introduced to Patrick. He had made a good impression on the telephone and he was, as I had imagined him, thoughtful and concerned. I was glad to see they were both wearing poppies.
They moved the furniture around and set up the cameras so
that they could capture a glimpse of Hope Valley through the picture window over my shoulder. They had brought two cameras and though one was considerably smaller than the other, it made the sitting room into a mini studio. I showed them the shotgun my father had given me as a boy which is still on the wall and the pictures of me in my horse-riding days. Audrey served cups of tea and put everyone at ease.
I settled into the armchair with Rob opposite me putting the questions. He started the interview in the western desert. We skimmed rapidly over the fighting, my capture, and escape from the torpedoed ship. Then it was on to the Italian POW camp and my transfer first to Germany and then eventually to E715 to work with the slave labourers from Auschwitz.
He quizzed me about the swap with Hans, my nights in Auschwitz III and then I began to tell the story of Ernst and the smuggled cigarettes. Compared to those early, stilted attempts to talk about it all, it was getting easier. I got to the end of the story of Ernst and the cigarettes and they paused to change tapes.
I remained in my seat with the lapel microphones connected and looked out of the window and across the valley to Bradwell Edge. I had ridden my horse, Ryedale, along that ridge on countless occasions in earlier days and I knew every step of the way. Ryedale was a fine stallion; a Hanoverian-Arab Cross seventeen hands high and the most intelligent horse I have ever known. I even bought a miniature Shetland pony called Copper to keep him company. He was small enough to walk under Ryedale’s legs when he stood still. When they died, I dug a deep hole and buried first one and then the other in the field below the window. I had retreated from riding as the years advanced. Now, for me, the hill where I once rode is a view only and in most seasons a dramatic one.
On that day, as the TV crew fiddled around, it was as if all colour on the hill opposite had drained from the scene. The trees and bushes that give the fell its texture looked drab and tired.
Autumn had yet to inflame the broad leaf trees lower down the valley.
The TV lights were on again and we were ready to restart the interview. I had to gather my thoughts quickly. Rob was asking about Ernst again and what I thought had happened to him.
My mind flashed back over the frozen, whitened corpses on the death march, the striped bodies we had walked over for mile after mile sixty-four years earlier. I could feel the cold again. There was not a shred of doubt in my mind that Ernst would have died like so many others. I was about to retell the story of that march and what I’d seen when I was interrupted.
‘We’ve done some research, Denis,’ Rob was saying. He was leaning forward in his seat and handing me something. ‘Ernst didn’t die.’
My mouth fell open as I struggled to understand. Rob was saying that Ernst had survived the death march. Pictures were being thrust into my hand. I groped for the monocle on a red cord around my neck. The face of a handsome young man came into focus. There were the features I had known. His hair had grown back and he wasn’t as thin as I remembered but it was him, all right. The boy I had known all those years ago was smiling back at me.
‘Good heavens above,’ was all I could manage.
Ernst had survived against all the odds. Rob told me that somehow he had struggled on when so many had perished. He had got to America and built a happy and prosperous life there for himself. He’d had a family and lived to be seventy-seven. Rob reached across and put an outline of Ernst’s life story in my hands.
‘Good heavens above,’ I repeated, ‘that is bloody marvellous.’
There were pictures of him as a child alongside a little girl. It had to be Susanne. There were photographs of him in later years looking as mischievous as only a fun-loving man in his seventies can. In one photo he was with an attractive woman with
distinguished grey hair and a sympathetic face. You could have knocked me down with a feather.
I felt lifted and dashed in an instant. He had died only seven years earlier. I felt so close to him at that precise moment and yet I realised we would never meet. But the question was already forming in my mind. How could he have survived the death march?
T
he TV crew wanted to film me outside so I put a warm jumper on. I walked in and out of the shot several times, opening and closing gates and repeating the movements from different angles. I fed mints to the two Shetland ponies, Oscar and Timmy, that we bought to prevent them going to France for meat. I can’t bear to see animals suffer. The filming took forever. I still couldn’t quite believe it. Ernst had survived the death march but how had they unearthed his story?
Twenty-four hours earlier Rob and Patrick had been no closer to a breakthrough. They had arrived in Solihull on a damp and dismal day and stopped the car outside a comfortable suburban home. They had gone to meet Andrew Warwick, whose parents still lived at the house in Tixall Road. They were shown into the kitchen and, leaning against the units, he repeated the story of his chance meeting with a lady he was sure was the Susanne they had been looking for. To save them time he drove them to the spot.
The Plume of Feathers was a large, comfortable pub with a dining room. It was a busy city establishment, not the kind of place where the staff knew many customers by name. One woman behind the bar had a vague recollection of an elderly lady fitting the description who came for lunch there with a friend. She usually chose the window seat but they hadn’t seen her for a long time.
It wasn’t a great lead. As midday neared, the queue of smartly
dressed elderly people waiting to order lunch wound round the pub as far as the door. Most of the women in the line fitted the description.
Rob and Patrick went round asking what seemed a hopeless question. Had anyone heard of an elderly lady called Susanne who had escaped Germany as a child before the war, they asked? It was becoming farcical. They left phone numbers behind the bar and stepped out into the desolate car park feeling deflated. Patrick suggested finding a public library and checking the electoral register once more. But instead they set off for Tixall Road to thank Mr and Mrs Warwick for their help and to film the house. Their spirits were flagging. The listing for a Susanne James who had lived in Warwick Road eight years earlier was now the only lead left.
They set off again. Rob was struggling to see the map without glasses and rotating it at arm’s length. Patrick pulled the car over to the side of a broad tree-lined road. ‘This is getting silly,’ he said, leaning over to see the map, ‘I think we want to be there.’ His finger did a swirl taking in half of Birmingham. He mumbled something about needles in haystacks and swung the car round and after a few miles the road signs started to make sense again. They were back on track.