The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

by Denis Avey

  On that day, as the TV crew fiddled around, it was as if all colour on the hill opposite had drained from the scene. The trees and bushes that give the fell its texture looked drab and tired. Autumn had yet to inflame the broad leaf trees lower down the valley.

  The TV lights were on again and we were ready to restart the interview. I had to gather my thoughts quickly. Rob was asking about Ernst again and what I thought had happened to him.

  My mind flashed back over the frozen, whitened corpses on the death march, the striped bodies we had walked over for mile after mile sixty-four years earlier. I could feel the cold again. There was not a shred of doubt in my mind that Ernst would have died like so many others. I was about to retell the story of that march and what I’d seen when I was interrupted.

  ‘We’ve done some research, Denis,’ Rob was saying. He was leaning forward in his seat and handing me something. ‘Ernst didn’t die.’

  My mouth fell open as I struggled to understand. Rob was saying that Ernst had survived the death march. Pictures were being thrust into my hand. I groped for the monocle on a red cord around my neck. The face of a handsome young man came into focus. There were the features I had known. His hair had grown back and he wasn’t as thin as I remembered but it was him, all right. The boy I had known all those years ago was smiling back at me.

  ‘Good heavens above,’ was all I could manage.

  Ernst had survived against all the odds. Rob told me that somehow he had struggled on when so many had perished. He had got to America and built a happy and prosperous life there for himself. He’d had a family and lived to be seventy-seven. Rob reached across and put an outline of Ernst’s life story in my hands.

  ‘Good heavens above,’ I repeated, ‘that is bloody marvellous.’

  There were pictures of him as a child alongside a little girl. It had to be Susanne. There were photographs of him in later years looking as mischievous as only a fun-loving man in his seventies can. In one photo he was with an attractive woman with distinguished grey hair and a sympathetic face. You could have knocked me down with a feather.

  I felt lifted and dashed in an instant. He had died only seven years earlier. I felt so close to him at that precise moment and yet I realised we would never meet. But the question was already forming in my mind. How could he have survived the death march?

  Chapter 20

  The TV crew wanted to film me outside so I put a warm jumper on. I walked in and out of the shot several times, opening and closing gates and repeating the movements from different angles. I fed mints to the two Shetland ponies, Oscar and Timmy, that we bought to prevent them going to France for meat. I can’t bear to see animals suffer. The filming took forever. I still couldn’t quite believe it. Ernst had survived the death march but how had they unearthed his story?

  Twenty-four hours earlier Rob and Patrick had been no closer to a breakthrough. They had arrived in Solihull on a damp and dismal day and stopped the car outside a comfortable suburban home. They had gone to meet Andrew Warwick, whose parents still lived at the house in Tixall Road. They were shown into the kitchen and, leaning against the units, he repeated the story of his chance meeting with a lady he was sure was the Susanne they had been looking for. To save them time he drove them to the spot.

  The Plume of Feathers was a large, comfortable pub with a dining room. It was a busy city establishment, not the kind of place where the staff knew many customers by name. One woman behind the bar had a vague recollection of an elderly lady fitting the description who came for lunch there with a friend. She usually chose the window seat but they hadn’t seen her for a long time.

  It wasn’t a great lead. As midday neared, the queue of smartly dressed elderly people waiting to order lunch wound round the pub as far as the door. Most of the women in the line fitted the description.

  Rob and Patrick went round asking what seemed a hopeless question. Had anyone heard of an elderly lady called Susanne who had escaped Germany as a child before the war, they asked? It was becoming farcical. They left phone numbers behind the bar and stepped out into the desolate car park feeling deflated. Patrick suggested finding a public library and checking the electoral register once more. But instead they set off for Tixall Road to thank Mr and Mrs Warwick for their help and to film the house. Their spirits were flagging. The listing for a Susanne James who had lived in Warwick Road eight years earlier was now the only lead left.

  They set off again. Rob was struggling to see the map without glasses and rotating it at arm’s length. Patrick pulled the car over to the side of a broad tree-lined road. ‘This is getting silly,’ he said, leaning over to see the map, ‘I think we want to be there.’ His finger did a swirl taking in half of Birmingham. He mumbled something about needles in haystacks and swung the car round and after a few miles the road signs started to make sense again. They were back on track.

  Even if it had been Susanne listed at Warwick Road, there were endless reasons why she might not be there any more. She might no longer be alive or she could be in a care home. If she had a son in the United States, she could have moved there.

  They stopped the car round the corner from the Warwick Road address and set off on foot. It had been a pleasant, residential street before the traffic had overwhelmed it. Now it was a busy arterial road, the A41 connecting Birmingham to Solihull. The steady stream of cars had produced a cleft in the neighbourhood. The residents on one side of road were unlikely to have much contact with those opposite. It didn’t bode well. The dust and smoke from the exhausts coated the paintwork, even the leaves on the shrubs. Some of the houses around had small gardens to the front that no one could enjoy because of the traffic.

  They checked the address one last time, headed for the front door and knocked hard. There was no response. They tried again, still nothing. They stepped around to the next house and did the same. No one was in; it was the middle of the day. They went along the street without getting a single answer. It was the kind of door-knocking journalism that no one does any more and you could see why.

  There was one last door they hadn’t hammered on and this time someone was at home. There was the sound of several locks being unbolted. The door opened to a crack and a middle-aged man peered cautiously around the edge. It wasn’t the kind of neighbourhood where people turned up unexpectedly.

  They smiled and began to explain. They were journalists and they were looking for an elderly lady named Susanne, possibly Susanne James, who had escaped from Germany before the war. He said little at first but his body language relaxed slightly and the door opened a little wider.

  They showed proof of identity and kept him talking. The man was intrigued by the unexpected visitors. He said he did remember a neighbour called Susanne James but she had left some years ago.

  ‘Do you think she’s still alive?’ they asked.

  ‘Yes, as far as I know,’ he said. The two men on the doorstep took deep breaths. ‘What do you want her for?’ he asked.

  They explained the story briefly and assured him she would want to be found. It had to do with her brother and the war. There was a pause, he was weighing them up.

  ‘You had better come in,’ he said. They entered into a narrow hallway. There was a computer waiting to be unpacked on the floor and cables and wires for it spread around. It was clearly a bad time. Shelves of books darkened the staircase. The man’s name was Michael and he was warming to Rob and Patrick. He had a wry smile on his face as if he was dealing with a couple of mischievous schoolboys who he might either choose to humour or send packing. They kept talking to smooth the atmosphere. And then he showed his hand.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I know Susanne James quite well. Our families were neighbours for many years.’

  Patrick almost managed a smile. There was another silence. Michael looked at the carpet and bit his lip for a second. He seemed unsure which way to jump. Rob pushed gently. ‘How might we get in touch with her?’ he asked. There was another pause before he came to a decision.<
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  ‘I could pick up the phone,’ Michael said.

  It didn’t need a response. Michael checked the number before dialling. Someone answered and he started to explain. He was soon in difficulty so he turned to Rob and said, ‘Why don’t you talk to her yourself? I’ll put her on.’

  He passed the phone over. On the end of the line Rob heard the delicate, friendly voice of an elderly woman. They had found the girl I had met sixty-four years earlier at a time when I was fighting for my sanity. She had arrived from Germany with the Kindertransport in June 1939 aged just fifteen. An unexpected phone call on a damp day in Solihull had begun to unlock the story.

  Michael warned them she was quite shy but she leapt over her own shadow that day. Susanne gave them her address there and then and told them to come straight away. Rob suggested a meeting in a couple of hours so that she had time to think. He didn’t want to rush it.

  They drove a mile or two down the road to kill some time, and found a Middle-Eastern café with chipped Formica tables. They ordered falafels with salad and Rob had a mug of strong builder’s tea. He was already grinning wildly and finding it hard to stay in his seat.

  Patrick, solid and dependable, was thinking about logistics and trying to pretend it was just another job. That was how he avoided disappointment. Should he film the meeting or would that scare an elderly lady who still didn’t know what they wanted? Neither of them was ready to trust their good fortune. Rob was starting to babble, ‘I think we might have crackled it. Do you think we’ve cracked it?’

  Patrick, who had been a top producer in Baghdad until recently, was wary of premature euphoria. He has a warm Blackburn accent and he chooses words carefully. ‘Let’s just see, shall we?’ he said.

  The car pulled into a quiet residential neighbourhood with tidy gardens. And there she was. A short pensioner with neat white hair and an open face was coming down the path from her house. Rob adjusted his recording kit, hoping to capture the greeting but decided the moment was too precious and introduced himself instead.

  ‘I can’t tell you how glad we are to have found you,’ he said once they were inside the house and settled on the sofa.

  I don’t think he really believed they would find her, but he hadn’t given up. The phone call had surprised her, but without too much time to worry she took it in her stride. Cups of tea arrived, they sank into the sofa and her story began.

  Susanne was born in 1923 in Breslau, a beautiful medieval city, then part of Germany. Her original name had been Susanne Lobethal and she had lived on Goethestrasse 45–47.

  They had been a prominent Jewish family but her father had deserted them and times had been hard. Then, on the eve of war, Susanne got a place on the Kindertransport to England but Ernst was unlucky. He remained in Germany and was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943.

  Now they were starting to understand why Susanne had been so hard to trace. It turned out that she had never adopted the name Cottrell in England. That was a wrong assumption of mine though she had regarded Ida Cottrell, who had taken her in, as a mother figure. Susanne had been naturalised as British after the war and cut her name in half becoming Susanne Bethal, a name which had never shown up at all in any of the research. A vital link had been missing. Without the Warwick family tip-off that her married name had been James, all would have been lost. To confuse things still more, her first husband died in 1994 and she had remarried changing her name again. Her new husband Richard, who sadly died about a year later, was sitting in his armchair bemused by all the activity but enjoying the company.

  She couldn’t be persuaded to record a TV interview, she was shy after all.

  ‘Oh, I look terrible in pictures’ she told them. It wasn’t true. She looked like the ideal grandmother.

  Sitting side by side with them on the sofa, she confirmed what they had only dared to dream. Against all the odds her brother had survived. He had come through Auschwitz and the death march. ‘Ernie’, as she now called him, had endured great hardship and made it through and it had something to do with the cigarettes. They hadn’t seen each other for many years after the war and then very rarely. He took on American citizenship and, like Susanne, he also cut the family name in half but where she became Bethal, he became Ernie Lobet.

  She recalled the letter to Auschwitz and the cigarettes sent off in uncertainty during the war but few details.

  She knew they had helped him survive but not exactly how. She remembered meeting a tall British soldier in 1945, a strange man who had come back from captivity and sought her out to say the cigarettes had got through. That was me.

  I’d had a rough war, a tortuous captivity and I had survived the march across central Europe to get home. By then I had lost a lot of weight and I was in danger of losing my mind. I am sure now that I made a terrible impression and had done little to ease her anguish. Sixty-four years earlier I had walked into her life and walked out again without leaving a trace.

  * * *

  After the filming there was a long lull. I never heard much from Rob or Patrick and I began to wonder what was going on. At this point, Susanne’s son Peter, who lives with his wife in the United States, became central to the story. Susanne had told them that Ernst had recorded his life story for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which collects the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Over the years it has grown into a vast archive of the darkest memories of the century. Peter had a copy of the interview that Ernie – as I will call him from now on – had made in 1995.

  Rob called Peter in America only to find that Susanne had got there first to pass on the news of the visit with great excitement. Rob told Peter the story as he knew it at the time and asked him if he would check Ernie’s interview to see if he had made any mention, however fleeting, of a British POW who might have helped him when he was in Auschwitz.

  I had told Rob that I would not have used my real name. If I had identified myself at all it would be with the nickname Ginger. Rob passed that on to Peter, who remembers his uncle with great affection. He agreed to look at the interview, which was many hours long.

  A couple of days afterwards, Rob was making his way home from work, later than usual via London’s Blackfriars railway station. It was already dark, winter was approaching and the breeze had a damp edge to it. To kill time he walked to the end of the platform, which extends over the Thames, to take in the view. He was looking across the black reflective water to the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral when his mobile phone rang.

  It was Peter’s voice on a crackly transatlantic line. ‘I’ve looked at the video and it’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Rob, you’re going to want to see this.’

  Chapter 21

  After all those years I was desperate to speak to Susanne. I had to know what had happened to Ernie and how he survived. I also wanted to explain my odd behaviour all those years ago.

  Rob had said he didn’t want me to talk on the phone. He said he was arranging a reunion and they wanted the first spoken words between us to be captured on camera. They had done the work to get me this far so I agreed.

  Then Rob called me to say there would be a delay. Susanne wanted to wait until her son Peter and his wife Lynn were over from America in a few weeks and then the three of them could come up to Derbyshire together. It seemed like a good plan. A few days before the scheduled meeting, Rob called to suggest we all went out to a pub for lunch after the filming. I didn’t see the need and I didn’t want our meeting to be in public. Audrey would make some food for us – what could be better? He told me later they had wondered whether we would have much to say to each other after all this time.

  I could understand their concern. It wasn’t as if we had been real friends in 1945. I had gone to see her out of duty and then realised there was nothing I could say to help. After sixty-four years even close friends would have to get to know each other again but we would be starting from scratch.

  The day arrived. I wanted to make an effort so I put on a blue and gold silk cravat wi
th a patterned waistcoat. I never really thought much about clothes but they were driving a long way to see me and none of us were getting any younger.

  Rob, Patrick and the cameramen arrived early. Audrey made them tea and we stood around chatting. They were more nervous than I was. Rob’s mobile phone rang and he stepped outside to get a better signal. It had rained overnight and the air was damp. He came in again to say the car had arrived then went back to show them the way.

  I wasn’t going to wait for the doorbell to ring so I went outside to look and there she was, wearing a grey coat with a fur collar and a red scarf. Six decades is a long time but she was walking briskly along the garden path with her son and his wife Lynn. She turned to climb the steps to the house, looked up smiled and said ‘Hello.’ I took her by the hand as she reached the door and I got the first chance to see her clearly.

  ‘Susanne,’ I said, leaning forward to kiss her, first on one cheek then the other, ‘how are you, my love?’

  ‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said, ‘lovely to see you.’

  I was holding both her hands now so we could get a decent look at each other, ‘It’s over sixty years,’ I said, ‘over sixty years.’ I led them into the house.

  ‘It’s a gorgeous place you have here,’ Susanne said, admiring the view from the window. ‘I am so pleased for you.’

  I had been warned she might be shy but she didn’t appear to be. She said later that the gentle hills of the Peak District had lifted her spirits and put her at ease as they approached in the car.

  ‘You were taller when I first met you,’ I said cheekily.

  ‘I have shrunk a lot,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, join the club.’

  ‘You were very tall,’ she added. ‘It’s the only thing I remember about you.’