The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

Denis Avey · Rob Broomby

Apr 2025 · Hachette+ORM

About this ebook

The extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the concentration camp, Buna-Monowitz, known as Auschwitz III.

"Denis [Avey] is a hero in a time of terror, a man of limitless moral and physical courage." —Pulitzer Prize–winning author Henry Kamm

Foreword by award-winning historian Martin Gilbert

In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labor camp, E715, near Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and was determined to witness what he could. Swapping places with an inmate, Denis smuggled himself into the Jewish sector of the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers had been sentenced to death through labor.

Astonishingly, Denis survived to witness the aftermath of the Death March where thousands of prisoners were murdered by the Nazis during the Soviet Army's advancement. 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.

"Important and profound." — Washington Times

"An excellent memoir of survival." — Publishers Weekly

About the author

Denis Avey fought in the British army during World War II and was captured and held as a prisoner of war in a camp near Auschwitz III. In 2010 he received a British "Hero of the Holocaust" award.

Rob Broomby is a British Affairs correspondent for the BBC World Service. He was formerly the BBC Berlin correspondent and has worked as a broadcast journalist mainly with BBC Radio for more than twenty years