Denis Avey

Denis Avey (11 January 1919 – 16 July 2015) was a British veteran of the Second World War who was held as a prisoner of war at E715, a subcamp of Auschwitz.

While there he saved the life of a Jewish prisoner, Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling cigarettes to him.

Avey was born in Essex, England, in 1919.

As a boy he learned boxing, was head boy at school and studied at Leyton technical college.

He joined the army in 1939 at the age of 20, and fought in the desert campaigns of North Africa in the 7th Armoured Division, (the "Desert Rats").

He was captured by the Germans while attacking Erwin Rommel's forces near Tobruk, Libya, and saw his best friend killed next to him.

After his prisoner transport ship was torpedoed he claimed to have escaped to Greece by floating ashore on top of a packing crate, but was recaptured after landing.

After being retaken prisoner, Avey was placed in the E715 prison camp for British soldiers, next to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Jews were imprisoned.

He was there from 1943 until January 1945.

While there he befriended a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz, Ernst Lobethal, from the adjoining Jewish section.

He obtained cigarettes from Ernst's sister, who had escaped from Germany to Britain on a Kindertransport before the war.

He secretly passed the cigarettes to Ernst who used them as currency to help him survive.

Avey said that he twice exchanged uniforms with a Jewish inmate to smuggle himself into the inmate's camp in order to witness for himself the treatment of Jews, which he could see was completely different from the treatment of British POWs.

While British POWs were forced to work six days a week, they could use their free time to play football and basketball.

While their conditions were dreadful, according to one British inmate, "they were as nothing compared to what the Jews next door went through".

Avey agreed, and describes the plight of the Jews:

"I am telling you I know without exaggeration, nearly 200,000 prisoners in Auschwitz were worked to death. Not killed. Were worked to death and they claimed total innocence. They lived for no more than 4 months. They were clubbed and beaten every day without any justification whatsoever."

Avey explained to The Daily Telegraph that he was the type that needed to see things for himself:

"My mates didn't want me to do it but they agreed because they realised I was going to do it, and that was that. I had watched people being murdered literally every day and I knew someone would have to answer for it. I wanted to get in and identify the people responsible."

He was aware that he was taking "a hell of a chance", and states: "When you think about it in today's environment it is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. You wouldn't think anyone would think or do that, but that is how I was. I had red hair and a temperament to match. Nothing would stop me."

Avey escaped during the "death marches" in April 1945 which followed the Nazis' evacuation of Auschwitz.

Although suffering from tuberculosis he caught in the camp, he broke away undetected, then made his way through Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Germany.

During the march Avey saw an estimated 15,000 dead prisoners, recalling that "the road was littered with corpses."

He eventually ran into Americans who helped get him back to England, and to his family who assumed he had died.

After he returned to England, Avey spent the next year and a half hospitalised with tuberculosis.

Afterwards, when he tried to report what he saw in Auschwitz, he encountered resistance and indifference.

From then on, he chose to not to speak of it again to anyone:

"In 1947, I went to the military authorities to submit my information about Auschwitz. Their eyes glazed over. I wasn't taken seriously. I was shocked, especially after the risks I'd taken. I felt completely disillusioned, and traumatised as well. So from then on I bottled it up, and tried to piece my life back together."

The author Sir Martin Gilbert explains that by 1947, after the Nuremberg Trials were finished, "people just wanted to get on with their lives".

Average citizens were not interested in discussing the war anymore, nor were they interested in hearing war stories from veterans or former POWs like Avey.

"It must have been very painful", says Gilbert.

Besides tuberculosis, Avey suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before it was recognised as a medical illness, a condition few people were aware of.

For the following years he battled with nightmares, jumpiness, and an inability to speak about his POW experiences.

He suffered from a violent temper, stomach pains and loss of memory.

From a beating during his incarceration, he also lost vision in one eye which became cancerous and required being replaced with a glass eye.

The cause of the beating, Avey said, came when he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp.

For that he was made a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010.

Another matter is that Avey said that he exchanged uniforms with a Jewish prisoner and smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the treatment of Jewish inmates, whose camp was separate from but adjoined that of British POWs.

His claim has been challenged.

His memoir The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, written with Rob Broomby, was published in 2011.