Denis Avey was a British soldier captured in North Africa who ended up in a POW camp adjacent to Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where inmates were used as slave labor for the I.G. Farben industrial complex. Through the fence, he could see the emaciated prisoners and smell the acrid smoke from the crematoria.
Driven by an overwhelming need to witness what was happening—and to tell the world—Avey conceived a plan that defied all reason. He arranged with a Jewish inmate named Ernst Lobethall to swap identities. On two separate occasions, Avey bribed a kapo, exchanged clothes with Lobethall, and entered the Jewish section of the camp while Lobethall took his place in the relatively safer British POW section.
What Avey experienced inside shook him to his core. He witnessed the brutality of the guards, the dehumanizing conditions, the selections for the gas chambers, and the utter despair of the inmates. He saw things that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
After the war, Avey tried to tell authorities what he had seen, but nobody wanted to listen. He spent decades tormented by his memories and by what he considered his failure to do more. It wasn't until he was in his 80s that his story was finally documented and verified by historians.
Ernst Lobethall did not survive the war. Avey carried the guilt of this for over 60 years. His story was published in 2011 and he was recognized by Yad Vashem as a British Hero of the Holocaust. He died in 2015.