The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz (31 page)

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.

15 November 2010

T
he day began damp and grey but by mid-morning I looked out to see the cloud base had lifted, leaving patches of mist below Win Hill, the peak at the other side of the valley from the house. It was named, legend has it, by the victorious side in an ancient battle. The vanquished army had taken up position on another nearby summit now known as Lose Hill. Not everything in the Peak District is so polarised. It’s a friendly part of the world this, now I have mastered the dialect. Add to that a warm bed and three square meals a day and I reckon I’ve finally cracked it.

Rob arrived a little late and by then the sun had started to burn off the clouds and there were patches of blue sky over Hope Valley. He was bringing with him something I had waited twelve months to see: the full life story of Ernie Lobet – Ernst as I had known him – told in a video interview over four and a half hours long. I climbed the spiral stairs to the mezzanine floor, anxious to hear what became of the man I had known all those years ago. We settled down around the TV screen, Rob pressed play and Ernie began at the beginning and the beginning for him was a spacious eight-room apartment in what was, before the war, the beautiful German city of Breslau. The Lobethals were a prominent Jewish family. Ernie’s father was the chief executive of a sizeable rope-making factory and life was good. They even had a Nobel Prize winner in the family in the shape of his great-uncle, Paul Ehrlich,
who had developed a treatment for syphilis around the turn of the century.

Ernie described going to the Baltic Sea for a short holiday with their nanny in 1929 when he was four years old, then coming back to find that their father had left them. I could tell it was a painful memory for him. His father had converted the assets of the firm into cash and fled to South Africa with another woman; there was a scandal and the story was all over the papers, he said.

His mother Frieda and grandmother Rosa were left struggling with no idea where he’d gone. They moved into a much smaller apartment and eventually his mother tracked her husband down, sued him and won. It was, Ernie said, a pyrrhic victory because she never saw a penny.

Their troubles then descended on them in legions. His mother contracted tuberculosis and was sent to hospital. Children were not allowed to visit TB patients in those days so he saw her no more than twice before the disease killed her in 1932. She died, he said, of a broken heart. A family that had had so much saw it all slipping away and this was only the beginning.

‘He is absolutely gorgeous isn’t he?’ Audrey said, picking up on the compassion in his words as he spoke of his family. His grandmother Rosa struggled to bring up Ernie and Susanne alone. She was a remarkable women, but her family had been wealthy and she’d had servants most of her life. Now suddenly she was elderly and saddled with two children that she was ill equipped to raise.

‘She was full of love and she would take off her shirt for her grandchildren,’ he said struggling with the potency of the memory as if it had caught him unawares.

Eventually his grandmother gave in to pressure from the extended family and placed the two children in a Jewish orphanage. ‘It was a terrible, terrible place,’ Ernie said. He hated every moment of it and he became in his own words ‘a very destructive influence’. Being small and skinny he was forced to eat more than the others and had to find ways of getting rid of the food. He hid
piles of potatoes and gravy in a handkerchief and placed it in his pocket hoping to dump it later. He smiled as he described the sauce trickling down his legs as he ran to get rid of it after lunch.

Something strange was happening as he spoke. I felt I was really getting to know him for the first time and I liked what I saw. I think he was a more sensitive man than me but even relating that terrible childhood memory he managed to laugh.

He ran away from the orphanage several times and was eventually sent to live with foster parents. He said leaving that place was the happiest day of his early life. With his new guardians he had freedom to come and go as he pleased but the Germany he had known was twisting rapidly out of shape around him. He was eight when Hitler came to power in 1933 and two years later the Nuremberg Laws forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, accelerating the slide into the abyss.

As a thirteen-year-old he remembered the bicycle his grandmother worked slavishly knitting hats to buy him for his Bar Mitzvah. The ban on Jews working in universities and the professions had little direct impact on him as a boy but Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass – did. He recalled his fifteen-minute walk to school that day in November 1938, past smashed shop windows and ransacked properties. When he got to the beautiful synagogue in Breslau it was already in flames and the word spread that the Nazis were rounding up adult male Jews.

There was no more school after that. The desperate talk amongst the adults around him was of ways to emigrate, to get away. Susanne had won a place on the
Kindertransport
to England, but Ernie was left behind. He ended up working on a kibbutz-style project designed to encourage Jews to go back to the land and prepare them for a future life in Israel. They were tolerated for a while by the Nazis but eventually disbanded in the early years of the war.

Ernie, still only fifteen, came back home to look after his sick
and aged grandmother who was by now totally dependent on him. They lived crammed into one room in a third-floor apartment as the rules constricting Jewish lives got tighter and tighter. Even the quantity of gas and electricity was restricted, forcing them to cook on a burner fuelled by kerosene from a friendly merchant. Ernie evaded the round-ups a little longer and got a job with a tyre remoulding company so he could support his grandmother.

Watching him tell his story, I was amazed how long he had managed to remain free. I had always feared he had endured far longer in the camps. It was a blessing of sorts, I told myself, but I knew – we all knew – where his story was going. Neighbours and a shopkeeper helped them secretly with extra food but the net was closing fast. German troops returning from active service were already bringing home accounts of what they had done with the Polish Jews: the round-ups, the ghettos, the random murders. The stories spread quickly but they were so gruesome no one wanted to believe them, it was a glimpse of things to come.