Death-camp survivors
T he prisoner-of-war stalag at Auschwitz was close enough to the concentration camp to be stifled by the cloying, sickly fumes of the crematoria if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.
Though few British PoWs came near to entering the Jewish death camp, they were forced to work alongside some of the more able-bodied "men in pyjamas", and watched helpless as they were beaten and abused.
Any contact with them was forbidden – on pain of death as far as the Jews were concerned. But of course there were illicit, snatched conversations, and some of the atrocities those doomed men told of haunted our men for years to come.
"I had a recurring nightmare for years," says 89-year-old Brian Bishop, who lives in Winsham, near Chard. "It was based not on anything I'd seen, but on something I'd been told by a Jewish chap we called Paul.
"One day he said that when the Nazis came to round his family up, there had been a little baby crying in the house and a soldier had picked it up by the feet, swung it and smashed its head against a wall.
"I couldn't get the image out of my mind, and I'd wake up in terror, feeling I'd been splattered all over by blood."
Mr Bishop was one of hundreds of British World War II PoWs sent to E715 Auschwitz, close to the Nazis' giant IG Farben industrial plant, where they worked with both Jewish slave labourers and local Polish people.
The men survived beatings, hard labour and extreme cold while being fed on watery soup and inedible "fish cheese", and their final ordeal was to march hundreds of miles in the depths of winter to gain freedom in the spring of 1945.
Few of these men are still alive today, but Mr Bishop and two others have helped the Cornish-based broadcast journalist and film maker Duncan Little compile a short account, Allies In Auschwitz, which sets out to tell the "untold story" of their ordeal.
West Country Life has spoken to Mr Bishop and another West-based survivor, Arthur Gifford-England of Yatton, who along with Duncan Little's third eyewitness, Doug Bond, were unable for decades to tell of what they had gone through.
"In immediate post-war Britain, they coped with the trauma of their experiences with little support," says Duncan.
"I wouldn't have gone to Auschwitz if I'd known," Mr Bishop tells us, and the bizarre truth is that he really did have a choice.
One of the last to be evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, he was captured by the Germans in the African desert two years later and was sent to the huge PoW camp at Lamsdorf after an unhappy spell in captivity in Italy.
The food at Lamsdorf was terrible, and a fellow prisoner told him that the smart thing to do was to put in for a working camp, where you were looked after and fed much better. He did, and the next he knew he was in a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz.
The chemical plant where the men worked, IG Farben, at Monowitz, was still being built when they were there; with equal amusement and bemusement they noted that the iron ceiling rafters were made in Middlesbrough.
The factory was part of a huge conglomerate that included such global names as Bayer and Agfa. IG Farben also held the patent for the pesticide Zyklon B, infamous for its use in the gas chambers, but there is no suggestion that it was made at the Auschwitz plant.
Today, its organisation seems chaotic, with its mixed workforce of slave labourers and local people.
Brian Bishop remembers an intricate bartering system, with cigarettes the kingpin and chocolate from Red Cross parcels also playing a major role.
The Poles would pass on eggs, pork and even alcohol in exchange for chocolate or smokes, and Mr Bishop would write home begging his mother to send him tobacco.
"The problem was, she didn't approve of smoking, so was very reluctant," he says. "My letters were read by censors, of course, so I couldn't tell her why I wanted the stuff. It was frustrating, but she caught on in the end!" The men tried to keep their spirits up. They would do as little work as they could at the factory and try to carry out small acts of sabotage, and back in camp they organised football matches and put on plays and revues.
Arthur Gifford-England, who had a role in Sweeny Todd in December 1944, remembers a German censor sitting in the front row.
"We weren't allowed to sing the National Anthem, but we belted out Land of Hope and Glory instead, and two big fellows sitting on either side of Jerry made sure he stood up for it," he says.
But keeping positive was an uphill battle. There would be the regular sound of gunfire in the night from the Jewish camp, the stench of the crematoria – "at first, after the war, even a bonfire could remind me of it," says Mr Bishop – and one evening, walking back to their huts, they encountered gallows with four bodies hanging.
Most morale-sapping of all, an American air attack on the factory in August 1944 killed 38 of the British prisoners of war.
"It was on a lovely sunny Sunday morning, and the saddest thing was that on the night before, we'd had a concert," says Mr Gifford-England. "A sergeant in the medical corps who was there said 'Right, lads, I've finished with the army now. I've done my 30 years. Let's just hope we all get home'.
"Of course, he was one of the boys killed in the air raid."
Mr Bishop and Mr Gifford-England, who is 90, went on to enjoy long marriages, bring up children and work in a variety of occupations. Both are now widowers, living in warm and comfortable houses with outside help near at hand.
Even now, however, nearly 65 years on, their emotions are not very far beneath the surface.
"I look around today and ask what did my brother and all those other boys die for," says Mr Gifford-England. "Today, our Government have given themselves up to Jerry, haven't they?"
As for Mr Bishop, he admits: "I found it hard to adjust after the war. As a regular soldier I was given six weeks' leave, and then I had to report to a depot at Haywards Heath.
"All the guys in charge only seemed to have been in the army for a year or two, and soon after I got there I had to go to a doctor who told me 'We're going to send you to hospital. They might be able to sort you out'.
"All of which was news to me, since I'd no idea there was anything wrong in the first place.
"I was three months in a psychiatric hospital, after which they had to decide whether to send me on to somewhere more permanent or let me go. Either way, it was the end of the army for me.
"They let me go home, and when I said goodbye to the sister in charge of my ward she said 'When you came in here you were the most ill-mannered pig I've ever met'.
"Again, I simply couldn't recognise myself from that description. But looking back, it was 10 years before you could say I was normal again. They were terrible years. Even my wife Maud said there were times when she was scared stiff of me."
That was all a long time ago. So are things better now? "They're a lot better now."
And that terrible nightmare. Surely that's gone away? "Yes, that one's gone away," Brian Bishop replies quietly. "But it's funny, just recently, I've started waking up in the night and thinking a bit again.
"Yes, you do get to thinking about things in the middle of the night."
Allies in Auschwitz: The untold story of British PoWs held captive in the Nazis' most infamous death camp, by Duncan Little, Clairview Books, East Sussex, £7.99.
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