'We weren't supposed to die here and they were. That was the difference.' Page 107.
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Whether Avey actually did swap place overnight with an Auschwitz Jewish inmate, to my mind is a trivial detail. If he did, then it was an utterly futile and foolhardy gesture. What would be the point of spending a night or two in a squalid, hideously overcrowded, disease-ridden hut? And if he didn't, it hardly matters. He served in the desert with the 2nd Battalion The Rifle Brigade. He was a British POW at E 715. And he survived to finally tell his tale and, after over 60 years finally bear witness. Those are the three incontrovertible facts that make this book worth reading.
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Making a Difference
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And Avey certainly did write home on behalf of Jewish inmate Ernest Lobethal who had a sister in Birmingham and possibly saved the latter's life with a carton of cigarettes. That's the cusp of the real nightmare of Auschwitz here: Avey was a witness to and on the edge of a murderously mercenary world where access to cigarettes, the universal currency of the camps, could easily determine life or death. Life was cheap, but everything else had a price. This to my mind is one of the most powerful moments in the book, when the two worlds, that of the British POWs and that of the Jewish slave labourers meet:
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'Just hearing the name of a familiar British city on the lips of one of those poor devils was unsettling.' Page 125.
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Lobethal's life was saved by a fellow Jewish inmate who would not have repaired his shoes unless he was paid in cigarettes.
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The undue emphasis on the outlandish 'swap' is unfortunate in that it invites all manner of odious Holocaust Denial cranks to call into question the entire narrative. Any search on the Internet will throw up incredulous reviews of this book which suggest that E 715 was a holiday camp and that the SS guards at Auschwitz were models of kindhearted courtesy. It would have been a better book without the story of the swap and without this dreadful title--though obviously a much less commercial one.
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Like so many other POW memoirs, not least The Password is Courage, this book talks up its hero into an assertive, wily operator who takes control of a desperate situation and always turns it to his advantage. That's the story people want to hear. The title is a glorious assertion of British pluck and bravado: The Man Who Escaped into Auschwitz. It sounds much better than the glumly passive and impotent Spectator in Hell.
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In commercial publishing, the feel good factor will always win out in the end. The unpalatable bigger picture for E 715 is not that one British POW, whether Coward or Avey, could make a tiny difference to the hell of Auschwitz, which both surely did, but that the difference counted for so very little. Over a million still died on one side of the fence, while on the other, the British POWs had the huge comfort, the advantage, and possibly also the postwar guilt, of the regular Red Cross parcels which undoubtedly kept them alive.
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'I did what I could.' is Avey's closing thought. Indeed, he did. But sneaking into the Jewish accommodation compound, whether fact or fiction, is a wholly irrelevant bit of grandstanding.
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This is a deeply flawed book, but it is a worthwhile one.
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Review copyright Tom Tunney, 2012. Slightly revised 2022. Not to be used in any shape or form without permission.
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