Avey the Singular Hero.

The story is expressly configured as a saga of validation and rehabilitation for Avey. In the opening pages he meets Prime Minister Gordon Brown and is made a 'Hero of the Holocaust.' And telling the story now after waiting so long is presented as a way of excising the demons of his past:

'Back in 1945 no one had wanted to listen so I stopped talking about it for the best part of 60 years.' Page 1.

Many people have reviewed and read the book taking this statement at its face value. The British authorities weren't bothered about the horrors of Auschwitz and didn't want to know. It fits a convenient template of on-going Government amorality. Co-author Broomby should have questioned and qualified Avey's self-pity here.

The reality was far different. Several E 715 British POWs, including Charles Coward, testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1947:

http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/britische_kriegsgefangene_als_zeugen_im_ig_farbenprozess

Many other E 715 POWs signed sworn affidavits of what they had witnessed. Charles Coward’s Nuremberg testimony could once be read here:

http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/08/NMT08-T0603.htm (2022 update: dead link. Sadly, this site, one of the very best Internet resources on this subject no longer seems to exist.)

And some of these men's names, several with POW numbers very near to Avey, are listed for the first time in consecutive German POW number order on my website. here:

http://stalag4d.atspace.co.uk/page300.html

The courage and perseverance of these many other British E 715 POW eye witnesses should not be forgotten.

Avey wasn't one of these witnesses, though he says in the book this was due to serious illness in 1946-47. The authorities did want to know what had happened at Auschwitz. However, the other dimension of the 'no one had wanted to listen' argument is this. Imagine the scene in 1946 with an able-bodied and outwardly unscathed POW veteran of E 715 telling family and friends about the horrors he witnessed. One of his friends, perhaps, is a Far East POW a survivor of the Burma-Siam 'Railway of Death'. Another, perhaps, lost most of his family in the London Blitz. Would they really want to listen to an able-bodied POW’s self-pitying tale of woe, when they had so much hurt of their own to deal with?

The reality was that everyone in 1945 Britain was in some way touched by the horrors of World War Two. They just wanted to get on with their lives and leave the immediate past behind them. The modern audience may have forgotten, if it ever knew, but the wartime generation didn't need telling.

Auschwitz, postwar has, justifiably, become the very definition of the murderous brutality of the Nazi regime. Everyone has heard of Auschwitz now. But back then, it wasn't so, it was just of many, many places where the Nazi death machine was in action.

Rob Boomby has obviously sat down with Denis Avey and, over a period of many long talks and exhaustive note-taking sessions, fashioned a very cogent first-person narrative. Technically, this is a very well written book. Avey comes across as a thoughtful, sensitive and massively resilient man. His voice is loud, clear and sincere--though also very prone to retrospective self-celebration.

However, Broomby has signally failed to put a rigorous critical framework around Avey's reminiscences. He rarely challenges, corrects or qualifies Avey's comments in the way that a serious historian would. The Italian Armistice of September 1943, which led to many Allied POWs escaping against orders from their Italian POW camps isn't mentioned at all.: presumably because Avey wasn't one of the escapers. Instead, he was one of the many thousands of POWs transported north by rail from Italy into Germany, though this is implied rather than expressly stated. From his POW number, it’s clear now that Avey was transported to Germany from Italy circa July 1943, before the Armistice, along with a couple of thousand other British POWs, but again this is not set out clearly in the book. There’s only room for one hero. Thus one rarely gets a sense of the hundreds of other POWs Avey must have been with at each stage of his life a POW. Who were his friends? And his enemies? We never really find out. This is a one-man show.

Charles Coward, Missing Believed Prisoner of War

The book is fundamentally disingenuous in its conspicuous omission of Charles Coward, the senior British NCO and 'Man of Confidence' at E 715 in 1943-44. A British POW sneaking into Auschwitz is a wonderful story--but only so long as it's not spoiled by mentioning Coward's claim to have done exactly the same thing. So Coward isn't mentioned--at all. There's no index, which would have made it easier to cross-reference facts and personalities. Historical documents, Avey's service record, and his POW history--basic dates and camp details for British POWs are still on file with the Red Cross in Geneva--are ignored in favour of this kind of vague muddle:

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