The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz (2 page)

I joined the army because I was in too much of a rush to join the RAF. The paperwork took longer. That was my first lucky escape. Watching the Spitfires plying the clouds overhead I still wanted to fly but joining the RAF then would have meant near certain death. The RAF pilots were the knights of air, but when the Battle of Britain started, the poor buggers didn’t live long and I was lucky to be out of it.

I enlisted on 16 October 1939 and I was a crack shot so Rifleman Denis George Avey No. 6914761 was selected to join
the 2nd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, and was packed off for training at a barracks in Winchester.

Rain or shine, it was pretty rigorous. As a ‘regular’ mob they gave us new recruits a particularly hard time. There was an awful lot of drill, plus physical training and endless obstacle courses so we collapsed exhausted into our bunks each night and were pretty fit by the end of it. We were taught to use every weapon available to the British Army but I had grown up with guns. My father bought me my first shotgun, a ‘four-ten’, when I was eight years old. It had a specially shortened stock so I could get my arms around it and I have still got it on my wall.

My father insisted on strict discipline with guns. In the country you didn’t get the ‘yes possiblys’ – things were black and white. I grew up in a world of moral certainties and I was expected to stand up for what was right. He taught me to respect humans and animals. Birds were shot for the larder, not for sport. I learnt to shoot on clay pigeons and pretty soon I could throw them in the air myself, pick up the gun and knock them out of the sky before they fell to the ground.

Army rifle shooting was a different ball game but I quickly got the hang of it and I was soon hitting bulls on every range up to 600 yards.

At the end of one particularly long day of physical training, we were on the Winchester rifle range. I squeezed the trigger of the Lee-Enfield .303, felt the kick and hit the bull’s eye, no trouble.

The chaps operating the targets were hidden behind an earth mound. They pointed out the hits using a long pole with a twelve-inch white disc on the end. As the chap lifted the pointer hesitantly towards the bull to mark my hit, I pulled back the bolt and shot the white disk clear out of his hand.

The target man wasn’t in any danger, but I am ashamed to admit I was showing off. It got me a severe reprimand but it made me popular with the regular soldiers. I was made a ‘star’ man on
account of my marksmanship and wore a badge on my uniform to prove it.

The bayonet training had been pretty grisly. Bayonets are always known as ‘swords’ in the Rifles. We were being prepared to kill people up close where you could smell a man’s breath and see if he had shaved that morning. You were ordered to run at human effigies thirty yards away, screaming and hollering as you charged. You jabbed the blade into the guts, pulled it out and swung the rifle butt around so you could knock his head off as you passed.

Looking on disapprovingly was Sergeant Bendle. He was a thickset man, short and tough. ‘Louder, louder’ he bellowed at us until he was red in the face. And he wasn’t happy until we were screaming as much as he was.

It was psychological warfare and shouting helped you get through it but we still had to do it again and again until we were proficient. I knew if it was a question of me or the other feller, it wasn’t going to be me writhing in agony.

Man-to-man bayonet fencing was better because at least it felt like a sport. We had spring-loaded swords fixed to rifles with a protective bauble on the sharp end. If we got a thrust in without it being blocked, the blade was supposed to retract. But of course the Regulars would give it an extra push beyond the stop, giving you an agonising pain in the guts. It was a reminder of what was at stake if you let your guard down.

After Winchester we went to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain. There was one officer there who was especially popular with the lads. He was a dapper-looking gent, well turned-out with a dark pencil moustache and tidy hair. He was a 2nd Lieutenant at the time, I believe, and a cracking officer but he was better known to the rest of us as the gentleman thief, Raffles. The film had come out just before the war and posters were still around. The officer was the suave and sophisticated film star, David Niven.

After one exercise we gathered around him for a debriefing session but we all wanted the gossip from tinsel town. He was
comfortable with fans but he had trained at Sandhurst before the war and he was now adjusting back to military life again. He had just appeared opposite Olivia de Havilland in
Raffles
but it was ‘Ginger’, his co-star in
Bachelor Mother
, he talked about most and we all knew who he meant. There was a good deal of joking around before one of the lads chirped up with, ‘I bet you wish you were anywhere else but here, sir?’ There was a momentary pause then he said, ‘Let’s just say I’d sooner be tickling Ginger Rogers’ tits.’

Reality hit in the fourth week of May, 1940 when a hundred of us were specially selected and marched down to Tidworth railway station without being told why. We knew things were going badly in France. I was put in charge of about twenty men and told to allocate the mortars, the Bren guns and the rifles.

After an hour, the train came in, billowing clouds of steam and smoke. We climbed in amongst the civvies and began the haul towards the coast.

The British Expeditionary Force was in serious trouble, Calais was besieged and the German noose was tightening. The 1st Battalion, The Rifle Brigade was pinned down there and our unit from the 2nd Battalion had been put on standby to go in to help.

We sat there on the wrong side of the Channel. Staring into the intense coastal light from the safety of England, it was hard to imagine the disaster unfolding across that narrow strip of water but we could hear the concussion of the big guns – an eerie, melancholy sound.

The 1st Battalion had only been in France for two or three days, rushed over to try to keep Calais harbour open and help our army escape. They put up a tough resistance, fighting until there were no more bullets left. A handful of survivors were brought back by the Royal Navy but the rest were killed or captured. Winston Churchill thanked them later. He said their action tied up at least two German armoured divisions while the ‘little ships’ picked up so many men from Dunkirk.

For us, going in would have been suicide. We would have been wiped out in the water. Happily, the big noises realised that and the plan was abandoned. If I had a guardian angel, she had just appeared again. It would count as my second lucky escape after failing to get into the RAF.

I would finally get to mainland Europe but it would be as a prisoner.

Next, we moved north to Liverpool to camp on Aintree Racecourse, home to the Grand National, though now it was a sea of soldiers waiting to be despatched to who knows where.

We slept al fresco and even in early summer you’d wake with aching limbs and a bedroll damp with dew. Kipping at the Canal Turn with its famous ninety-degree bend was a treat for a lad who had lived and breathed horses on the farm. After three weeks of that we moved to a large civic building and at last we were out of the damp.

It was here I met Eddie Richardson for the first time. He was a fine fellow from an established military family so we called him Regimental Eddie, ‘Reggie’ for short. He was very well spoken, a little posh perhaps compared to the rest of us, and we shared a room. Months later he was to get into trouble in the desert on the same day as my fortunes turned south.

Training in Liverpool took on a different dimension. We were being prepared for house-to-house fighting in streets set aside for demolition. We learnt the delicate art of making and throwing Molotov cocktails, glass bottles filled with petrol. We mastered the Mills bomb, a hand grenade with a segmented steel shell and the appearance of a mini pineapple. I would become pretty familiar with them in the months ahead. They were mean and simple. You could alter the length of fuse, to give you three, seven or nine seconds before detonation but you had to time it right. The last thing you wanted was the other feller hurling it back at you. You’d pull out the pin, run forward and throw with a straight-armed bowling action as you dived on your stomach. If you didn’t blow
yourself to kingdom come, the grenade was supposed to end up in a huge pit where the explosion was relatively contained. I had been able to throw a cricket ball a hundred yards when I was sixteen. It was still a game.

We knew as we set off from Liverpool in the
Otranto
that we were leaving Britain in a sorry old state. France had fallen to the Germans in June, Italy had declared war on the Allies, there were regular dogfights between the Luftwaffe and RAF fighters over southern England and the Battle of Britain itself was just starting.

As I boarded the ship, above me the twin dark-rimmed funnels were belching smoke into the air and all around me in the breeze were the chaotic sounds of men searching for a berth. Some were carrying kitbags, hunting for cabins, others were calling out to their chums and finding their way around the ship. Down below us were the vehicles and heavy equipment.

Les Jackson was there from the beginning. He was a corporal then, a regular soldier – a first-class chap with a twinkle in his eye and a wicked sense of humour. He was older than most of us, over thirty, but we had a bond from the start and we would be together at the end, too. Eighteen months later I would be side-by-side with him when we drove head-on into a wall of machine gun fire.

Les had introduced me to his family in Liverpool and I had taken quite a shine to his sister, Marjorie. She was a very attractive fair-haired girl with a gentle Liverpudlian accent, a kind girl and an excellent dancer. I had taken her out a couple of times but we were innocence personified. In those days you could walk a girl home for miles at the end of an evening and the most you expected was a kiss on the cheek. It was still special. His family had shown me such hospitality. He liked his sherbet, Les’s old man, but it would be five years before I would cross that threshold again to take him out for a beer and it wouldn’t be a happy occasion.

I had Marjorie’s picture stuck on the wall of the tiny airless cabin a few decks down that I shared with four other soldiers, but hers wasn’t the only one. I had always had lots of girlfriends so I had quite a collection by then.

I was on the top bunk, with Bill Chipperfield below. He was a down-to-earth sort of chap from a very poor family in the south, as honest as they come and always good company. There were two other lads but the poor devils had to sleep on the floor. We were crammed in like sardines and it was impossible to move in the dark without treading on someone.

We had been allowed twenty-four hours’ home leave before embarkation, though I’d spent most of that travelling just to get there and back. My family lived far to the south, in the village of North Weald in Essex. They were successful farmers so we never went short and I had enjoyed a comfortable rural childhood.

My mother cried a lot as she kissed me goodbye. I had posed for photographs with my sister Winifred. I’ve still got that picture, her dark, wavy hair wafting in the breeze. She wore a knitted dress and a string of beads around her neck. I was in uniform, trousers hitched up high, my short tunic pulled in tight at the waist and a forage cap perched on my head at a jaunty angle. It never occurred to me on saying farewell that I might not make it. I felt I could look after myself. Such is youth. Winifred kept her feelings deeply buried. We didn’t know what the war would bring, so why worry?

The one who knew but said nothing was my father George. He had fought in the First World War and he knew what was in store: muck, blood, and hardship. He simply shook my hand and wished me luck. He was a fine, proud man with a head of thick, dark hair – a Christian with high standards and the bulging muscles to back them up. He had never been able to show me much warmth but some of what happened later was due to him because he made sure I grew up with the idea that principles had to be put into practice. He was clerk to the council at a time when that post brought respect and local omnipotence but he was popular in the
village because he would help anyone in a jam. I learnt later he paid the rates for some of the poor residents out of his own pocket.

He found it hard to show affection at home and praise was dished out sparingly. When I won a coveted sports prize as a child, all he said was, ‘Well done, lad’, and he never mentioned it again. I only realised how much he thought of me after the war. Shortly after I sailed, he joined up to fight too, lying about his age. I was told later he was always asking after me wherever he was stationed, trying to find out where I might be. I think he fancied he might be able to look after me but of course we never met up. He was captured in Crete and forced to do hard labour in Germany building a mountain railway, despite going down with pneumonia. He spent much of the time hurling nuts and bolts down the hillside to prove he wasn’t beaten. He could be stroppy, all right. That’s probably where I got it from.

Back on deck, I watched the crew preparing for the threats ahead, the submarines and the mines lurking below the waves, waiting to blast a hole in our side and send us to the bottom. The only real protection against mines was a paravane, a torpedo-shaped device with sharp fins. Hanging over the railings I watched it being lowered over the side and into the waves.

The shark-like object came to life on contact with the water and the fins pulled it down and away from the ship. The heavy cable was reeled out until it was a good distance from the vessel and parallel to it. The cable was meant to wrench the mine from its moorings, to be machine-gunned when it bobbed to the surface, or send it sliding down the wire to hit the paravane, blowing up in a tower of white water but sparing the ship. It gave us some comfort.

I was fascinated by contraptions like that. I had always tinkered with cars and motorbikes but I’d had my heart set on a proper engineering education while I was at still at school. I was uncontainable even then; I had to be the one giving the orders. It had
always been like that. As a boy I had my own kid’s army and we paraded around shouldering real guns though without ammunition. I was made Head Boy at school and I had the muscle to control the bullying, which I did. Later in life my wife Audrey would tease me that I had become the bully. She was only half joking I suspect. I was certainly fearless.