by Denis Avey
We stopped for the night somewhere south of Pilsen where we were ordered to sleep in a large barn full of straw. The guards made their patrols but they were growing sloppy, their hearts weren’t in it. I watched and waited. I noted the gaps in their nightly routine and at the first opportunity I made a run for it.
I crossed fields and scrubland, half expecting the hue and cry, worse still the bullets. I kept going until I was a safe distance away. Then I plunged into a ditch and slept until first light.
There was no time for relief. I was in charge of my destiny again and I risked being captured and shot. Making a home run required a plan. I didn’t have one. I thought that mattered less, now the war was grinding to a close and the western allies were approaching. I did have a simple map, it would have to do.
I still had to eat. I came across a house, watched for a while then approached and found the door unsecured. Fear evaporates when you’re hungry. Had anyone got in my way that would have been it. They didn’t. I got away with a wheel-shaped loaf about a foot across. I found somewhere safe, hid myself away and ate the lot.
I set-off in a south-westerly direction, using the stars and the sunset for rough navigation. I walked mostly at night and lay low during the day. I was still in my battle dress and I could have done with a coat to hide it at least but I never found one. I kept away from settlements and off the roads and crossed the border into Germany over wild, open country.
I stole what food I could and took anything from the fields that might be eaten. It was no worse than on the march. I was getting deeper into Germany all the time and after countless nights of walking I made it as far as Regensberg.
I stumbled across a sprawling rail-marshalling yard and began searching the labels on the wagons in the vain hope of finding one heading north. I had it in my head to try and get to the British lines.
It was then I heard the drone of large planes overhead and the bombs began to fall. I knew with goods and troops on the move a railyard like the one I was in was a strategic target. I began to run and managed to get out and across a cemetery and kept going and going. I could hear the flak going up, the whistle of bombs coming down. One fell in that cemetery soon after I left.
I skirted along a hedgerow and came up against a well-camouflaged flak position. I managed to get around it and out into an open field. I thought I was safe. I wasn’t.
I heard planes overhead again and dived to the ground. I rolled over on to my back and saw an American Flying Fortress coming down in flames with one wing blown off. There was a whooshing sound above followed by a thud, I thought it was a bomb but there was no blast. Something from that bomber had smashed into the earth a short distance away. I went to look when the raid was over and found a baseball bat sticking out of the ground. I guessed it had been carried by one of the bomber crew, possibly for luck. It hadn’t helped. There were no parachutes in the sky that I’d seen. I pulled it out of the ground. This was one souvenir I would bring home.
I didn’t try the marshalling yard again and headed north instead on foot. I usually did things the hard way. That was just me. I reached the outskirts of a city, which I hoped was Nuremberg. I thought I might try my luck on the trains again and made one foray towards the town but the bombers had got there first. It was devastated. In some neighbourhoods there were hardly two bricks standing on top of each other. I retreated the way I had come and began to circle around the city before pushing on north.
I thought I was getting closer to the allied lines all the time but I had hardly seen any German troop movements so perhaps I was wrong.
I had almost got as far as Bamberg before my luck changed. I emerged from a copse of trees to find a tank unit deployed and ready for action with at least a hundred yards between each one. They were Americans. I approached carefully but in the open and trusted they had good binoculars to see me coming.
They wouldn’t waste a tank shell on an individual and why shoot a lone soldier heading towards them? If I was the enemy they’d have another prisoner.
I got close enough to shout out that I was a British POW and someone popped his head out of the nearest tank and greeted me. He disappeared again and I imagined he was on the radio. Then he jumped out and said I should follow him. We headed across the fields and after about 200 yards we got to another tank where the commanding officer was waiting.
He was out of this world. He had a couple of pistols and a knife down his boot. He came straight to the point. ‘Where are these goddamn Krauts?’
I couldn’t really tell him, I’d tried to avoid them myself. I had come from near Nuremberg, I told him, and I hadn’t seen much. He took another look at me, turned to one of his soldiers and said, ‘Give this man food and water.’ I’d been liberated.
I devoured the rations instantly. I have no idea what they were but they tasted wonderful. The tanks were soon on the move and I was ushered back down the line. Eventually I was put in a vehicle and driven some miles back in the direction of Nuremberg to a small airstrip in a field. I was told that a number of former POWs would be assembling there and that planes would arrive in a few days to fly us out.
I climbed out of the vehicle, and waved the Americans off as they left to rejoin their advancing units. It had been a brief interlude. I’d enjoyed their rations and now I was alone again. Had I really been liberated? The place looked abandoned. There were no other POWs. It was just a field. It was back to surviving again.
I circled the area until I found an abandoned house on the margin of the site and managed to get in. It was shelter at least but I don’t remember any beds. I curled up under a blanket on the floor. I had travelled hundreds of miles across central Europe on foot and scavenged for food. Even in my darkest moments I had hoped for a more uplifting liberation than this. I searched the house for something to eat and didn’t find much. There were no signs of planes. I sat tight.
As I waited, I wondered whether the other British lads on the march had been herded into another camp or whether they were still out there hiking cross-country at gunpoint. It was years before I learnt that the guards had marched them on until they too ran into the Americans. One of the lads then grabbed a gun from his liberators – the story went – and the German NCO Mieser was shot dead on the spot. He wasn’t the worst of them but I understood. I suspect leather-hand just slipped away. As for the Jewish prisoners, in my mind the men I had known – Ernst amongst them – had to be dead. I had seen so many corpses. I stopped thinking of them.
I sat on a wall at the end of that neglected garden and watched the sky for planes. I waited and waited, but none came. Perhaps I had been abandoned. After a while a small group of German girls walked past. I took a chance and called out to them. To my surprise they came across to talk. The girl who chatted most to me was blond, about twenty-two years old and very beautiful. They recognised I was a foreigner straight away and they wanted to know where I was from.
I explained that I was English and a former POW who was waiting to fly home. I didn’t tell them where I had been captive. Already it felt like Auschwitz was another universe. The experience couldn’t be carried into normal life. Even in Germany my experience didn’t apply.
We talked for a while as best we could and I asked if they had any food. They produced a sandwich of sorts, which I took gratefully and ate straight away. Looking back it was probably their lunch.
We were in allied occupied territory but there weren’t many troops around. The war was not yet over and they took a risk in being civil to me. They were curious and after talking a while they came in to see the abandoned house that was my temporary home. The girl who spoke most gave me her address in Nuremberg and her name, Gerdi Herberich. I promised to write and thank her when I got home and to send a food parcel. I am sorry to say I never did. By then I had other things on my mind and my world was twisting out of shape.
The friendly atmosphere in my shelter was soon shattered by the arrival of a group of Americans including some former POWs. The girls left quic
kly and I never saw or heard from any of them again. It was a small thing – just a sandwich or Brötchen as the Germans called it – but a human gesture to an enemy soldier and not without risk. They never asked for anything in return.
The atmosphere became more boisterous, but the new arrivals told me I was in the right place. I had stolen four tins of food from another empty house nearby and I kept one for myself and let the Americans have the others. They had no labels on them so when the Yanks opened theirs and got meat I expected the same. When I prised mine open it was a watery vegetable of some sort. I couldn’t have been more disappointed but it helped get me though. Nine or ten of us were kipped down there and all we could do was wait.
Chapter 17
It was two days before the roar of large propeller engines shook that desolate house and I ran outside to see an RAF Dakota coming in low over the field to make a bumpy touch-down. It had barely turned to the side of the green strip when a second plane came in, bounced a few times on its main undercarriage before settling back on its tail wheel to run along the grass.
There was no one in charge, no control tower and no ground support that I could see. I dashed back inside, grabbed what stuff I had and set off across the field trying to anticipate where the plane would stop. The Dakota was sleek for its time but a workhorse nonetheless. The first plane taxied slowly, turned and came to a halt with its nose tilted towards the sky and its twin propellers still turning.
More lads appeared from distant corners of the field and raced towards it. A hatch opened in the side of the plane and a man in a thick leather jacket leaned out and shouted something. I couldn’t hear over the engines but from his gestures I realised they weren’t going to stop for long. I was amongst the first to climb in. It hardly mattered where it was heading, I was going anyway. About a dozen lads got in before the hatch was closed and I sat down on the narrow seats along the side of the ribbed metal interior. I twisted around to look over my shoulder and saw through the tiny window that the other lads were rallying around the second plane hoping to get in.
By then we were taxiing towards the end of the field and preparing to takeoff. Smiles spread infectiously across faces and I knew I wasn’t the only soldier going home after a rough war. I heard later that a third plane coming for us had developed engine trouble and had crashed in flames on the approach. By then we were climbing up through the clouds and turning towards Brussels. I slumped down, fiddled with the baseball bat I had carried with me since Regensberg and dared to hope at last that I was homeward bound. Thank God. It was over. I was still hungry.
I stood up and walked around during the flight, checking the view from the tiny windows on each side. The war was not quite over but no one doubted that it soon would be. I gazed down at the miles of liberated European fields below and wondered what the post-war years would bring.
We touched down on a military airfield near Brussels. I was taken to an army camp close by and given proper food for the first time in weeks. I had a wash but no shower or bath. I stayed there no more than a night and spoke to no one about my journey or my time in captivity. We had all endured terrible things; we didn’t go on about it and no one asked.
The next day I was taken back to the airfield and emerged to see a large four-engine bomber with a glass bubble for the bomb-aimer at the front below the cockpit and a smaller one halfway down the fuselage like a swelling on its back. There was a gun sticking out of it.
I knew it was a Lancaster bomber though I’d never seen one before. I had been captured before it was in common use but it was exactly as I had imagined it from the talk of fellow prisoners.
It was being readied for take-off and I clambered in with the other lads. There were no seats and it was severely cramped. I knew instantly where I wanted to be for the flight but the captain told me the bomb-aimer’s position – that flying glasshouse up front – was out of bounds. I refused to give up; arms were twisted, favours were begged and eventually my wish was granted.
I lay flat on my belly in that vulnerable transparent nose and felt the heady vibration of the props as the ground rushed beneath us and we lifted again into the air.
We circled the field, the course was set for home and after a while land gave way to sea.
I had seen what planes like those had done to Nuremberg and I feared what state Britain would be in. As we flew low over the Channel what I saw didn’t bode well. There were shipwrecks and debris all along the coast and slicks of oil as far as I could see. Then the water cleared and in the distance I saw the white cliffs of England in the haze and I knew they couldn’t have destroyed everything. I would get home.
Soon I could see green fields bisected by country lanes below me and hedgerows racing in all directions. I lay there prostrate in the front of the plane and eventually a landing field came into view. We dropped lower and lower until the grass became a blur of racing green that loomed up into my face as we landed with a bounce.
We came to a halt, the door was opened and before we could stray the captain insisted we signed the fuselage with a pen before saying goodbye. He must have flown countless combat missions but bringing the lads back home meant something to him.
My ears were still ringing from the noise when I heard a strangely familiar sound and one I hadn’t heard for many a year. They were the strange voices of Englishwomen and they were serving tea.
I was taken to a barracks and allowed a shower at last. They gave me socks, underwear and a fresh second-hand uniform plus a pair of heavy-duty black leather boots with studs on the sole and metal rims on the heels. I still have them today. I didn’t stay long. I had been beyond military discipline for a long time and I didn’t wait for permission to go. I left a note in the barracks, walked out of the camp and got a train towards London.
I arrived at Liverpool Street station, changed trains and went on out to Essex without paying a ha’penny and without seeing the damage to the city. I wanted to get back to the people I loved. It was a day or two before VE Day and I hadn’t been home for almost five years.
I climbed out of the train at North Weald station and looked over the wall into the coalyard and saw a man with a cart shifting sacks of the stuff. I recognised him instantly as my uncle Fred the coal merchant who had once played football for Fulham. I jumped over the wall and his words on seeing me alive were unprintable. He finished unloading and said he would take me the mile or so home from the station and he talked all the way without pause. After all those years I arrived back at the farm as a passenger on a coal cart, which he turned around at the gate leaving me to go in alone.
I passed by the yellow privet hedge and began that thirty-yard walk through the flower beds and up to the double-fronted house where I had grown up. That place had lived on somewhere in my mind, though thoughts of home had been a burden in the desert and in the camps. I couldn’t get there back then so why torture myself with the memory and feeling of the place? But now I could embrace it.
I hadn’t warned anyone I was coming. I knocked on the large oak door. There was a pause before it was opened by a woman who, though familiar, looked tired and drawn. She gasped on seeing me and I said to her, ‘Mother, you do look old.’
How I have wished over the years that I could take those words back. She hugged me at the door as if she never wanted to let go. I was home but what a sight I must have been. I had weighed around twelve and a half stone when I joined up. When I got home I was a little over eight.
My mother had been left to struggle on alone. My father had been taken prisoner too. They had told her I had been wounded in Africa. In my letters I said I was fine, but she assumed I was putting on a front. Then the irregular mail from E715 had stopped. The death marches and my long walk across central Europe had begun. She had no idea I was alive and feared the worst. She had her own declining health to wrestle with.
In the few years she had left to live she never asked me about my war, my captivity or that long march. The thinking then was, don’t talk about it. Sol
diers and their families were encouraged to forget.
I don’t quite know when my father came home. He had lied about his age to join up and he had done so partly with the thought of looking out for me. He was wounded and captured when the German paratroopers dropped on Crete. He was taken to Austria and forced to build mountain railways, despite bouts of pneumonia.
I heard that he might be home soon but that could mean anything. Then one day I was occupying myself in one of the small rooms to the back of the house when I heard a shuffling noise outside. Someone was trying to get in the back door and having trouble. I opened it and there he was struggling with his kitbag. He dropped it when he saw me and embraced me for the first time since I was a child. He looked pretty haggard; I felt myself weeping and noticed he was too.
I remembered a time as a small child when I sat on his knee and he’d sing to me: ‘There will come a time one day when I am far away, There will be no father to guide you from day to day.’
The thought of him dying upset me as a child and I would hammer on his chest when he sang it until he stopped.
I had never seen him as an emotional man but I heard when his own mother died he went out into the middle of a field all alone and sang his heart out. His homecoming showed me we had both changed, though his embrace was still brief.
I never saw him meet my mother for the first time. I can only guess how it was. They were alone and that is how it should be.
I am sure he regretted leaving her to go and fight when he didn’t have to. I don’t think he ever picked up the pieces of his life after the war but if he was suffering the way I was, he never showed it.
He lived until 1960 but we never talked about the war, or compared our experiences of captivity. Not once. I don’t think he ever knew I had been in a camp near Auschwitz.
I wasn’t back long before the traumas began. By day I was in the friendly Essex village I had known, at night, in my sleep, I was thrown back into the obscenity of Auschwitz. The nightmares began; that boy being beaten around the head whilst standing to attention as blood streamed down his face. Countless times I relived that baby being punched by the SS guard. I would wake up with the sheets soaked with sweat, convinced I had smuggled myself into the Jewish camp and was about to be discovered.