The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz

The incredible story of one British soldier s brave choice to exchange places with a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz.

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the notorious concentration camp.

In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labour camp, E715, near the site of 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 first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers, had been sentenced to death through labour.

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 where no one took his story seriously. For decades he couldn't bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams.

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.