The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz (3 page)

I went on to Leyton Technical College in East London and did all right. In 1933, as Hitler was becoming the Chancellor of Germany, I walked up on to a stage in Leyton Town Hall and collected a prize for my studies from a man standing behind a desk. I was just fourteen but he should have impressed me more than he did. He was the First World War soldier and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, then in his mid-forties, his hair still dark, swept across a high forehead. He spoke a few words of congratulation and handed me two wine-coloured volumes embossed in gold with a shield and a sword. I had chosen books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe.

That seemed a long time ago. On board ship the mainland was slipping into the smoky haze. The civilised world I had known with its rules and customs, its sense of decency, was also slowly sliding away.

L
es Jackson always knew the shortest distance between two points, he was that kind of chap. He walked into our cabin soon after the
Otranto
had put to sea, stepping over the sleeping bodies on the floor and managing to wake them up anyway. He looked at the row of girls I had stuck to the wall, including his sister Marjorie. I was expecting a sarcastic comment at least but none came. He knew I had a soft spot for Marjorie but he had something else on his mind.

‘Avey, I’ve got a job for you. You’re on lavatory-cleaning duty.’

‘What? You can’t be serious, old boy.’

‘It will be worth it.’

He roped in Eddie Richardson as well. Now Eddie was a public school type who could hardly bear to utter the word lavatory never mind clean one. When he found out the weapon of choice was to be the toilet brush he wasn’t best pleased but Les was right. Half an hour of toilet cleaning every day and we were rewarded with a feast fit for a king. Egg and bacon sandwiches – as much as we could eat. Splendid. More to the point we were excused all other work for the entire voyage. Les was an operator all right. He was always sailing close to the wind.

Seventeen ships had sailed that day, 5 August 1940. One turned back with engine trouble. The rest of us steamed out into the Irish Sea with our naval escort. We still had no idea where we were going; that information was restricted, even to us. We were barely
out of sight of land when the jarring sound of a warning siren, a U-boat alarm, pierced the air above the steady throb of the engines. The ship erupted into action, men running in every direction. I fought my way through the stream of bodies heading for my lifeboat muster station. Men with ashen faces combed the waves with their eyes looking for a periscope or, worse still, a torpedo. I could see signals flashing from
Otranto
’s bridge to faint grey shapes on the horizon. As time passed so too did the sense of alarm as nothing was sighted. They still left us standing around for hours. Life on board ship soon settled down into a monotonous routine.

I was woken from a deep sleep by a violent yank on my arm. The cabin was full of noisy squaddies and I was being pulled from my bunk. ‘Wake up, Avey, we’ve got one for you. It’s time to earn your money,’ someone said.

Before I could properly focus I was being carried along in the throng of uniforms. Men were chanting and shouting in high spirits all around me. ‘This should be one to see,’ someone said. ‘Wait till he gets a look at this feller. ‘

I knew I was being delivered somewhere and probably for sacrifice. We went along narrow corridors past countless cabin doors and up steep stairs onto the deck. The sea breeze caught my cheeks and I woke up properly. I was taken along the boat deck past lifeboats hanging in their slings and rows of giant, white tubular air vents like mouthpieces of old telephones. We dropped down towards the stern. To my right a spotty-faced lad was making animated punching gestures with his fists. I was beginning to get the picture.

I saw an open-air boxing ring on the rear deck, complete with ropes. An enormous mast towered over it. Word had got around that I was a boxer and in those days I would have fought anyone at the drop of a hat in or out of the ring. I’d usually come out on top but normally I knew who I was fighting.

My gloves were on before I spotted him and I guessed instantly I’d been set up. He strode into the ring. He wasn’t all that tall, maybe five feet nine, but he was well built and definitely strong. He was a Jock from the Black Watch, a hard Highland regiment, and it was clear I was expected to get a pasting.

He was obviously a street fighter, possibly even a professional boxer, but as I limbered up, I got a closer look at him and my nerves settled. His eyebrows were scarred, he had cauliflower ears and a flattened nose. Anyone who had been clobbered like that was either not very good or not very fast. Someone had misjudged but it wasn’t me.

I’d been in boxing clubs since I was a boy and I was fast. Where I was agile, he was lumbering around. He almost landed a few punches but I was strong on the left with a quick jab followed by a sharp left hook. I never went for his face but halfway through the second round I struck him hard in the solar plexus and he went down, gasping for breath. It was over.

After that I stayed on deck to watch the action but it wasn’t pretty. A Black Watch officer was soon inveigled into taking on one of his own men. He was clearly an unpopular chap and he was pretty hesitant – with good reason. When he finally stepped into the ring he got hammered to blazes, poor man.

Apart from that, most boxing on board ship was fair and pretty good-natured. I’d often do a few rounds with Charles Calistan, dear old Charles. He had trained with me and we had hit it off straight away. He was a handsome chap with a full head of wavy black hair, an Anglo-Indian who spoke Urdu and proved to be a true hero later. He should have got the Victoria Cross. He was also a talented boxer and I used to spar with him regularly on board.

After eleven days we dropped anchor off Freetown, Sierra Leone, the first land we had sighted since leaving the British Isles. It was clear we were going right round the Cape then
heading north for Egypt. Two days later, and without setting foot on land, we steamed south again to Cape Town where I looked up at the flat-topped Table Mountain, so familiar from school geography lessons, and dared to believe briefly that paradise was possible.

It was good to be on dry land again and it was the first time I had set foot on foreign soil, unless you count a cricket trip to Sheffield. Cape Town was quite cool at that time of year but it was a tremendous place. On the quayside we were split into groups. Eddie, myself and two others were handed over to a well-to-do middle-aged white South African chap with a light suit and a dark car. He had volunteered to show the lads around the city.

It was all new to me. I had only ever seen one black man before that and he was a chap selling something on Epping market. He certainly gave it some verbiage. He claimed he could stare at the sun without damaging his eyes.

As a first taste of abroad, Cape Town did the trick and we were in clover after being cooped-up four to a cabin designed for two. The man in the cool suit took us back to a colonial-style house with huge grounds and suggested we use the outdoor showers connected to the swimming pool. It made Eddie wonder how bad we smelt. After weeks of occasionally hosing ourselves down in seawater on board ship, I stood beneath a cascade of clean fresh water and felt the weeks of salt and sweat drain away. I could hardly bring myself to get out from under the shower.

Later the same day we stepped, courtesy of our guide, into one of the finest restaurants I had ever seen, right in the heart of the city. There, projected on the ceiling above us, was a pseudo-sky complete with moving clouds. We were awestruck, and there was decent grub to complete the day.

After four days we bade Cape Town farewell. Table Mountain slipped into silhouette and the convoy split once more leaving the
Otranto
as one of ten heading round the cape and up the
east coast of Africa. We reached the volcanic island of Perim at the entrance to the Red Sea on 14 September. From there, we set out on the last leg under cover of darkness still guarded by four warships. We would soon be within range of Italian planes and naval forces operating out of Massawa in Eritrea. All lights on the
Otranto
were extinguished, leaving the crew fumbling their way around the ship. The blackout was complete but the night sky was alive with stars and in the phosphorescent waters of the Gulf of Aden I picked out the menacing outline of a giant manta ray.

We were much-needed reinforcements. Anchoring off Port Taufiq at the entrance to the Suez Canal, surrounded by naval vessels, cargo ships, rusty tugs belching black smoke alongside tiny Arab dhows and fishing boats, we were taken to Genefa, a sprawling, tented camp near the Great Bitter Lakes. The battle with thirst had begun but there were huge earthenware jars placed all around the camp, large enough to drown a sergeant and brimming with cool water. That was the good news. The bad news was we were ordered off on a route march the day after we arrived, twenty-five miles out into the desert and round a barren rocky outcrop, nicknamed ‘The Flea’. Someone felt we needed entertainment.

While I was still in England, attacking straw dummies with a sword, 2RB, as we called the 2nd Battalion, had been sent into the desert.

The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini hadn’t yet declared war but it was coming. For six weeks Mussolini made bombastic speeches and the battalion kicked its heels. I remember seeing a magazine photograph showing some of his elite soldiers leaping over a row of razor-sharp bayonets and thinking to myself, many a slip between cup and lip.

The day after war was declared, 7th Armoured Division, which included 2RB, went right up to the Libyan frontier. It wasn’t the
most modern force in the world. Some of the armoured cars were still the old Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts that Lawrence of Arabia had been using back in the First World War but they quickly captured frontier posts along the border.

Mussolini made his first real move as our convoy was preparing for the dash though the Red Sea. Il Duce, as they called him, could see what Germany had achieved in Europe and he wanted a bit of the action for himself. He had his eye on the Nile, the Suez Canal and British supply routes to India and beyond. He ordered Marshal Graziani, named ‘The Butcher of the Desert’ for his savagery in slaughtering an Arab rebellion, to attack Egypt and the British. On 13 September 1940, 85,000 Italian soldiers poured into Egypt from Libya and the much smaller British force was obliged to withdraw. His troops didn’t stop until they got to Sidi Barrani, a settlement on the coast, sixty-five miles into Egypt. Il Duce soon claimed in Italian propaganda broadcasts that they had got trams running again in the town. Trams? They didn’t know how to spell the word. It was just a handful of buildings and a collection of mud shacks. There had barely been a proper road, let alone a tramway.

The Italians built a chain of elaborate fortified positions starting on the coast and sweeping south-west deep into the desert. Their camps had romantic, aromatic names – Tummar, Rabia and Sofafi – as if they lay on some desert spice trail. Now there were 250,000 on the Italian side and we arrived to join Allied forces which were vastly outnumbered in the air and on the ground, just 100,000 of us in total.

Cairo was our last interlude before the war became real, the last chance to relax before the true toughening-up began, the process that was to prepare me well for captivity and all that followed. Three of us, Charles Calistan, Cecil Plumber and I, set off to discover the dubious delights of the city with a couple of older soldiers who knew their way around. Cecil was a thoughtful
bloke, with a high forehead and a keen eye. I knew him as a brilliant wicketkeeper from my local cricket team, back in Essex. Now those breezy days on the village green were a distant memory. Instead of the thrushes and larks, black kites sailed across a city as exotic as it was mysterious, heaving with allied soldiers: New Zealanders, Indians and Australians as well as the British.

A horse-drawn gharrie overtook us crammed with lads dressed in khaki, all in high spirits and heading off for a wild night. I was pained to see the distress of the beast trapped between the shafts. They clambered out in front of us, shouted, ‘Three cheers for the gharrie driver’, then bolted without paying.

There were camels bearing improbable loads, donkeys being beaten with sticks by riders whose feet scraped the ground and all around us were street urchins calling for ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Small boys hawked trinkets of dubious value. Others pressed us to buy suspicious-looking fruit juices and second-rate figs. A dusty tram rattled by at speed, with sparks flying from its wheels. There was a yellow haze in the air, a mixture of fumes and airborne sand particles, all set off with the smell of open sewers.

Stepping off a noisy street, where the horse-drawn vehicles battled for space with trucks, we ducked into the Melody Club. They called it the Sweet Melody. Somebody had a sense of humour. The entrance was veiled by two musty blackout curtains, though outside there were blue streetlamps and lights shining from windows and doorways everywhere. Brushing through the first of them, I tripped on something sack-like on the floor. In the gloom, I picked out the body of an Australian soldier comatose at my feet.

We pushed through the second curtain into the dim light and smoke of a dingy bar. A band was playing on a tiny stage behind a barrier of barbed wire. They needed it. They were struggling to be heard in the raucous atmosphere. The place was crammed, with lads on leave from the desert looking for some kind of
release. There were bullet holes in the ceiling and heaven knows what else on the floor. The Australians were usually blamed for it. They were first-class men out on the desert but back in Cairo, drunk, they could be the worst.

There was a destructive excitement in the air. It was no place to relax. We had just got our drinks when there was shouting from a corner table. The lad in the middle of the rumpus picked up a chair and threw it backwards over his head to crash into another table of revellers. One of his own mates then knocked him out cold with a right hook. He might have been finishing the original scrap or maybe pre-empting a major brawl. It calmed things down and the unconscious chair-thrower was carried outside to join the chap blocking the doorway. The rest of them straightened the chairs and their uniforms and the buzz returned to its earlier, rowdy level.