The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

May 23, 2011
Broomby is a BBC journalist who first chronicled the story of British Army veteran Avey, now 93, who was honored as a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010. After a comfortable rural childhood, Avey enlisted in 1939, serving in Africa with the 7th Armoured Division, known as the Desert Rats, sleeping in the sand, battling malaria, and engaging in bloody combat. Captured, he escaped over the sea, floating in a packing crate, only to be recaptured in Greece. In 1944, he experienced horrors at a POW labor camp near Buna-Monowitz (aka Auschwitz III): "I felt degraded by each mindless murder I witnessed... I was living in obscenity." His curiosity prompted him to swap uniforms with a Jewish inmate in order to sneak into the Jewish sector: "I was tormented by a need to know; to see what I could." Avey recalls it as "a ghastly, terrifying experience." His memory rarely lapses, and his vivid narrative places the reader in the middle of the action. The grim descriptions of despair and anguish inside Auschwitz are followed by Avey's poignant 1945 homecoming, making this an excellent memoir of survival.

September 26, 2011
During WWII, British soldier Denis Avey was imprisoned at E715, a labor camp near Buna-Monowitz, the concentration camp known as Auschwitz III. While at E715, Avey decided to break out of prison and into Auschwitz to see its horrors firsthand. After disguising himself as a Jewish inmate, Avey entered Auschwitz and even witnessed the death march, in which thousands of prisoners were slaughtered in the face of advancing Soviet troops. James Langton ably narrates this audio version of Avey and Broomby’s international bestseller. Although Langton’s mellifluous tones—his voice light, fluting, and delicate—are occasionally at odds with the brutal ugliness of the tale, his narration is well paced and steady. Additionally, Langton uses the silence between sentences to punctuate the narrative, allowing those pauses to remind listeners that behind the story’s excitement and valor remained a regular man who bore witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. A Da Capo hardcover.