The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz Read Online Free PDF Page A

follower. I was determined to get a field commission and Shepheard’s looked more like the life for me.
    Later in the cool bustle of the evening, we crossed the English Bridge over the Nile, guarded by four enormous bronze lions. ‘See those?’ shouted one of the lads. ‘Every time a virgin crosses the bridge they roar, so watch it.’ There was uncomfortable laughter. With the desert approaching, there was endless talk about girls. Gnawing away at us was the knowledge that we would be facing bullets soon enough. Not surprisingly, sex came up quite often. It turned out that most of us were still virgins and prepared to admit it. I was twenty-one and sex before marriage wasn’t on back then.People wouldn’t believe it now. Many of the lads were in the same boat. We were old enough to die and yet sexually we were still innocents. I was super-fit and of course exhausted at the end of a day of training so maybe I didn’t think of it. For some it became an obsession.
    One street name was often on soldiers’ lips. The Berka was the centre of Cairo’s oldest profession. It was out of bounds to all ranks, ringed by large, white signs and black crosses and often raided by the military police. That didn’t stop the lads but the whole thing offended me somehow. I could understand that young men going into action might want to go there first, but it appalled me and I never followed them. Now, on the eve of heading off into the desert, I knew deep inside I was starting to close down. Distraction could mean the bullet and I was determined to survive whatever they would throw at me. That meant staying focused.
    ‘Pick up your parrots and monkeys, you’re off.’
    The order sounded comical but we knew what it meant. We were leaving for the desert. They called it going ‘on the blue’ because it was an exotic, dry sea, a place of wonder to a boy from a green, rainy country. We were joining the 7th Armoured Division, resilient and nomadic, the Desert Rats.
    The slow train trundled through stations with improbably playful names like Zagazig. Then it was west along dazzling white sand dunes bordered by a sharp, blue sea, past a stagingpost with a name that meant nothing to us then, El Alamein, and a station named Fuka, which attracted much more comment.
    We arrived at Mersa Matruh where the British had dug in, creating a fortress, and were living a troglodyte existence in anticipation of a further Italian advance. We were there to upset the Italians so we headed deeper into the desert. The rutted track south soon widened as convoys of trucks jinked around the trickier patches.
    My fantasy of undulating sand dunes sculpted by the wind was replaced by a stony reality: arid and inhospitable with occasional scrub and patches of dull coloured sift-sand. They called it ‘porridge country’ and this was to be the scene for our struggle.
    A tremendous escarpment of great strategic importance dominated the landscape. The 600-foot high Haggag el-Aqaba runs parallel to the sea and eastwards towards Sollum, where its rocky cliffs jut out over the Mediterranean with the hairpin bends of the Halfaya Pass. The British had already seen action there as the Italians advanced. We rechristened it Hellfire Pass.
    The battalion was testing Italian positions with night patrols. I was in ‘B’ Company and at the end of October we began cutting telegraph wires and mining roads to stop Italian reinforcements coming to assist the remote desert fortresses.
    I was learning to understand the desert better, feeling the immensity of Africa with its 180 degrees of sky and roasting daytime temperatures that could plunge to near freezing as you lay out below the star-spangled night. There was no escaping the desert dust storms when they arrived. The billowing wall of sand of a
khamsin
would climb high into the air like a moving mountain and sweep across to hide the sun, stripping loose paint from vehicles like a blast of heated iron-filings. The driving grains of