My version: Paperback
Genre: Non Fiction, Auschwitz, The Holocaust
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
First published: 2011
ISBN: 978-1-444-71419-7
Pages: 259
Bought
From the cover:
The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into Buna Monowitz, the concentration camp known as Auschwitz III.
Denis Avey was Being held in a POW labour camp near Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could.
He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and smuggled himself into the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced at first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers had been sentenced to death through labour.
Astonishingly, he survived.
For decades he couldn’t bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams, but now Denis Avey feels able to tell the full story – a tale as gripping as it is moving – which offers a unique insite into the mind of an ordinary man whose moral and physical courage are almost beyond belief.
An ordinary man. Being an extraordinary man in circumstances that I can’t imagine, or imagine how I would have reacted. Certainly not as heroically as Denis Avey, that’s for sure. Really, just knowing that there have been guys like this alive at the same time as me, is enough.
What he wanted to do, was find out what was going on in the part of Auschwitz where the Jews and others destined for being worked to death and the gas chambers (the blurb up there makes it sound like he walked up to the main Auschwitz gates). He wanted to do that, for himself, for his comrades, for his fellow humans, to get the message out, to try and at leadt feel like he was helping doing something rather than just being passive. So he swapped places for a short while, with one of the Jewish prisoners he had managed to have some contact with. Which, if discovered, would also have sentenced him to death. As a western Allied prisoner of war (even though the Nazis weren’t really bothered with the ‘rules’ surrounding combatant prisoners of war – see their treatment of the Russian variety), Avey was still in a somewhat privileged position, and able to be curious about what was going on, rather than just existing. Trying purely to stay alive.
The story he tells of his life before and after, and the ‘present day’ links he managed to forge with people he met on the other side of that fence, will have you in tears. It did me.
It’s written in a very matter of fact way, which clearly reflects the guy himself. No nonsense, no messing about, no covering up any uncomfortable truths. A vital book for all of us to read.
You can buy The Man who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey with Rob Broomby from Amazon
*I once saw that there can’t be ‘rules’ of war. War is when the ‘rules’ are abandoned.
