Book Review of
The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz
Author: Denis Avey
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Publisher Summary:
The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the concentration camp, Buna-Monowitz, known as Auschwitz III.
In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labour camp, E715, near Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could.
He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and smuggled himself into his sector of the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced at first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers, had been sentenced to death through labor.
Astonishingly, he survived to witness the aftermath of the Death March where thousands of prisoners were murdered by the Nazis as the Soviet Army advanced. After his own long trek right across central Europe he was repatriated to Britain.
For decades he couldn’t bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams, but now Denis Avey feels able to tell the full story—a tale as gripping as it is moving—which offers us a unique insight into the mind of an ordinary man whose moral and physical courage are almost beyond belief.
Grace's Review
I have had The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz on my amazon wish list since right after it came. A friend who I share books with let me borrow her copy. I am so glad she did. It was such a neat story, and it gave me a different view of World War II as it comes from a British Vet who was in the very beginning of World War II. That part of it reminded me a lot of The Dog Who Could Fly.
The author goes into what happened to him as a prisoner of war. He says that he went in Auschwitz by trading places with a Jew. I know that some people doubt him, but I found the story fascinating.
He does have stories of what he saw in Auschwitz, and I found that to be gripping. He describes it differently then people who lived in it, maybe that is because he knew he was just there for a day and didn’t have to suffer for years.
