The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story Of World War ll By Denis Avey

Title:  The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War ll
Author:  Denis Avey
Contributor:  Rob Broomby
Publisher:  DaCapo Press
Release Date:  June 28, 2011
Pages:  288
About the Book:  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.

WC's Review:  No one in his right mind would want to break into a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, no one, that is, who wanted to survive instead of being slowly starved and worked to death. Mr. Avey, however, was different. Captured by the German army in Italy during the Allied invasion in 1945, Avey was incarcerated in a POW labor camp near Auschwitz III. Overwhelmed with a passionate interest that surpassed impending death in order to witness evil, Avery hatched a scheme to swap places with a Jewish inmate named Hans. He spent two nights there on two separate occasions and experienced first-hand the cruelty and nightmarish horror of the infamous death camp.
Amazingly, he survived, although it took him decades to express his feelings about the terrors that haunted his dreams. This recollection is a first rate retelling of one of the darkest eras in recent history.