"The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz" by Denis Avey (2012)

This is the most unlikely, yet true, true tale of World War Two you will ever read. Denis Avey, a young Englishman, joined the service, as he says, “not out of loyalty to king and country", but a sense of seeing things first hand. Brother, did he ever! After basic training in the Rifle Corps; he had been a crack shot since an early age; he was shipped to North Africa, where he saw some of the most intense fighting of the war. The temperature at Tobruk and El Alamein often topped 138 degrees Fahrenheit.

With water; and fresh provisions; in scarce supply, the going is rough against a numerically superior Italian force, yet they manage to capture tens of thousands of the enemy, and their weaponry. Corporal Avey is wounded, after losing some of his best mates, is embarked on a ship bound for the labor camps in Italy, working for the German war industry, in violation of the Geneva Convention. On the way they are sunk, and Avey finds himself washed ashore and on the run through Greece, and later Italy, where he is recaptured.

There, the prisoners do all that they can to sabotage the work to which they are assigned. Eventually they are shipped by rail to the infamous IG Farben plant which adjoined Auschwitz, outside of Oswiecim, as the town was then known. It is there that the story really picks up speed, boggling the mind in the process. For it is here, in the labor camp adjoining the death camp, in which an idea is born that will bear witness to what went on in that hell on earth. (IG Farben still exists in several different forms today. At the close of the Second World War it was split into different corporations, such as Bayer, Hoescht, BASF, the Agfa-Gevaert Group and Cassella AG., and they are among one of the largest political contributors in world politics today.)

First off, the author notes the difference between the 3 sets of prisoners at Auschwitz. There are the POW's, who are housed separately and subject to the Geneva Convention. Although they are not required to work for the enemy, they are, in violation of the treaty, forced to do so. And that brings the POW's, mostly British and Australian, in close contact with the two other groups; the Russians, who are treated with brutality and beatings, while being slowly starved to death as they work at tasks to which they are wholly unsuited. In addition, the POW's are working in close contact with the Jewish prisoners, whom the author describes as "moving shadows, shapeless and indistinct, as if they could fade away at any moment. I couldn't tell who, or what they were." These were the prisoners who would be shot on a whim, for nothing, save the amusement of the SS.

Avey works alongside of Hans, and later Ernst, two Jewish prisoners, and does the unthinkable. He changes places with Hans for a night by shaving his own head and swapping uniforms. He has studied the shuffled walk wearing the wooden clogs that the Jews are required to wear, and blends in with the returning prisoners, not knowing if he would be randomly selected for an execution that evening; several of which occurred each night. If you moved too slowly; or quickly; you could be clubbed to death on the spot. If not by the Germans themselves, then by the hated "Capo's", or Jewish guards, who for a crust of bread in that dreadful place, traded their last ounce of dignity, in a cowardly bid to survive.

After that adventure, he is still determined to go back again to the Death Camp for one more night, and again swaps places with Hans. This time though, fate takes a hand, and Avey is set forth on the Death March from Auschwitz, when the Germans tried to salvage what slave labor they could. Soon though, the whole plan falls apart as the war winds down. Avey, as well as the German soldiers, are left wandering around Germany looking for either homes that are no longer there, or in his case, Allied troops, so that he can be repatriated to England. Sick, malnourished and wounded, with a blow to his eye; which would eventually cause its removal; Avey finally returns home. It is there that his battles really begin, as he attempts to come to terms with all that he has seen.

This book is also an account of the 70 years it took the author to come to terms with all that he had experienced in the war. For decades after the war he suffered from PTSD, before it had a name. Most doctors dismissed him with some pills and advised him to "get over it." At one point he found himself waking up, in the middle of the night, choking his wife to death as the result of a nightmare. He turned himself into the Police, but they refused to take the charges seriously, and his marriage ended soon after that.

This book marks the first time in which Mr. Avey has finally spoken about his experiences during the war. He seems to be at peace with himself, and his actions. In that sense, it is also a book of healing, and the perspective which only the passage of time can offer.

In 2002, Avey was awarded the Medal of Valor by the Prime Minister at a ceremony which took place at Number 10 Downing Street in London. Fully documented, and written in a wonderfully readable prose, this book may be one of the best written accounts of the Holocaust, as witnessed by someone who lived it on both sides of the wire. A very unusual book, written by a very unusual man, you don't want to miss this one.

"Berlin-1961" by Frederick Kempe (2011)

I have always been fascinated by the Cold War. Particularly, I have always had a deep and abiding interest in Berlin at the time this book takes place. I was 7 years old when the TV show I was watching was interrupted with the news that the Soviet Union had closed the border with West Germany. Although I did not fully understand the implications at the time, the episode itself would remain with me until this very day.

In June 1961 President Kennedy met with Premier Khrushchev in Vienna for a summit. The items on the agenda ranged from the failed U2 flight of Gary Powers the year before, and the Bay of Pigs episode; both of which had been planned under the Eisenhower administration; to the major issue concerning the division of East and West Berlin. There was a "brain drain" occurring at the time, with thousands of East Germans simply crossing the street to West Germany, and never returning. The right of Freedom of Access was the issue most important to the Communists, who were seeking to revoke this right, and they were adamant in their position on it. The loss of their best technicians was to come to a halt, even if it meant war.

After the beating that President Kennedy took at the Summit in June, he was hard pressed to make the Soviet leader understand that the United States was willing to risk a confrontation over the issue of access, which was clearly a violation of the earlier 1945 agreement on that very issue. At the time there were people living in Communist East Germany who simply crossed the street to work at jobs, or owned businesses in West Germany. These people lived right on the border, taking advantage of the difference in the value of the respective currencies.

By August of 1961, all plans had been laid to separate the city of Berlin. By carefully ordering supplies of barbed wired and concrete pillars, the East Germans were able to stockpile these items at strategically located points for use in creating a temporary barrier at the appointed time. That time came in the early morning hours of August 13th, 1961 when the East German Police, along with the Army, encircled the city in the dark of night. The residents of East Berlin, who had gone to bed with free access to relatives and work in the West, would awaken to a cordon of barbed wire, reinforced by German Police and thousands of factory workers who had been mobilized to back up those Police. Behind those factory workers were Soviet tanks.

The author neglects nothing, covering East German soldier Hans Conrad Schumann’s iconic leap over the barbed wire to freedom, as well as the East German women whose homes opened onto West German alleys: allowing some to lower themselves to freedom by sheets; this book is a gripping account of one of the most impressionable events of my childhood.

The author also does an incredible job of making the chess like game of nuclear brinkmanship come to life, rather than providing only boring facts and dates. By using the quotes, and written accounts of the events, ranging from the preparations for the summit, all the way through the crisis engendered by Ambassador Lightner’s attempt to attend the ballet in the Eastern sector in October, prompting the most famous, and dangerous incident at Checkpoint Charlie, Mr. Kempe has taken a journey back in time, placing the reader right on the forefront of the Cold War at its height.

Conrad Schumann - Cold War Icon

This photograph is one that has been ingrained in my mind since I first saw it in August of 1961. It is of Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier who was standing guard on the Eastern side of the newly laid barbed wire, which would shortly after become the Berlin Wall. As all of the educated people of East Berlin began leaving East Germany in the years previous to this photograph, the Soviets decided to partition Berlin.

Schumann, who was only 19 at the time this photo was taken, made his decision to defect to the West based on two things. The first thing that he saw that morning was a young girl handing flowers across the wire to her mother, whom had been stranded in the Eastern section. The second, and deciding factor in his leap to freedom, were the people on the other side of the fence shouting to him in German, "Come over, come over!"

So, he did, and was immortalized in this photograph taken by Peter Leibing. Schumann quickly became a symbol of Communist oppression in the Cold War. He remained in West Germany even after the wall had come down in 1989. In 1998, suffering from depression, he killed himelf. He was only 56 years old.

Whether feelings that he had betrayed his homeland were responsible for his suicide, or not, will never really be known. But the gift he left behind is this image of a man, caught in circumstances beyond his control, making a split second decision to join the forces of light, leaving the darkness of oppression behind him.

This decision would affect him, and the lives of the scores of people who followed later, some in tunnels beneath the wall, for the rest of their lives.