Denis Avey (1919–2015)

Denis Avey was born in Essex, England. He studied at Leyton Technical College and joined the British army in 1939 at the age of 20. He fought in the desert campaigns of North Africa in the 7th Armoured Division, (the "Desert Rats") in World War II, and was taken prisoner by the Germans near Tobruk, Libya. 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. He was held as a prisoner of war at E715, a subcamp of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. While there, he saved the life of a Jewish prisoner, Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling cigarettes to him. For that he was made a British Hero of the Holocaust by the British government in 2010. Avey also has said that he swapped uniforms with a Dutch Jewish prisoner and smuggled himself into Auschwitz III, which was separate from but adjoining the British POW camp, in order to witness the treatment of Jews, but this claim has been challenged. Avey escaped the Nazis during the death marches out of Auschwitz in April 1945, near the end of the war. Although suffering from tuberculosis, he made his way through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, eventually running into American troops. They helped get him back to England, where he spent the next 18 months in hospital. Later, when he tried to report what he had seen in Auschwitz, he said, he encountered resistance and indifference. He said that after that, he kept his story bottled up. Avey suffered for years from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From a beating he had received in the POW camp, he had lost vision in one eye, which later became cancerous and had to be removed. Avey pursued a career in engineering, after which he retired to Derbyshire.
He became active among ex-POWs seeking compensation for wartime imprisonment and began to talk about his experiences at that time. In 2001, he described them in an interview with the Imperial War Museum, London. He was subsequently interviewed on BBC Radio Derby and included in a documentary. He wrote a memoir, The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, with journalist Rob Broomby, published in 2011, which became a bestseller.