Nothing can prepare you for the emotional turmoil you experience when entering Auschwitz. Even today, you feel the anguished voices of survivors, their terror, and the dark testimony of the dead shadowing you. Auschwitz remains a symbol of pure evil, a place of genocide and inhumanity, of total disregard for the sanctity and dignity of life. An estimated 1.1–1.5mn men, women, and children died there, 90% of them Jewish. Others included Roma and Sinti people, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, and LGBTQIA+ people.
Perhaps less well known is the internment of 1,400 British prisoners of war (POWs) at Auschwitz in 1943. Among them was Ron Jones, who had joined the South Wales Borderers in 1940. He was captured in Benghazi, Libya, and was initially transported to a POW camp in Italy.
The experience of Ron Jones
Before the war, Jones worked in a reserved occupation as a wire drawer in Newport, South Wales, and was surprised when he was conscripted into the army. It was a clerical error, it seems – his form had been put in the wrong tray.
Three years later, Jones found himself interned as a POW. He said, “Italy was a terrible place. Conditions were very poor and the amount of food allocated was pitiful. If it wasn’t for the Red Cross parcels that came now and then, I don’t think I’d have made it out.”
One day the prisoners were asked if any of them were engineers, as the Italians needed workers for their car factories in Milan. With the prospect of better food, Jones put his hand up. But instead of being sent to Milan, POWs were crammed into cattle trucks for several days without food or water. “Imagine the humiliation, only your shirt-tail to wipe your backside.”
They arrived at Stalag IVB Mühlberg, where they were deloused, had their heads shaved, and their uniforms were cleaned. Shortly afterwards they were moved to Stalag VIII Lamsdorf in Poland, then to their final destination. When they disembarked, they were marched down a road and came to barbed-wire fences. They saw people in pyjamas.
The prisoners had no idea where they were. It was October, and very cold. When they asked a guard who the people were, he said “Juden”, as if they should have known.
The British at Auschwitz
There were three main sections of Auschwitz: Auschwitz I, the administrative centre for the huge complex; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the extermination camp; and Auschwitz III, also known as the Monowitz-Buna site. The British prisoners were housed in forced labour camp E715, opposite Monowitz-Buna.
They worked alongside Jewish slave labour and Polish civilians at the IG Farben factory. The plant produced synthetic petrol and rubber from coal. The same company also manufactured Zyklon B, infamously used in the gas chambers.
The British labour camp was some distance from Auschwitz-Birkenau, “but there was always a terrible smell in the air”. It took the POWs a while to understand what was happening. Being opposite the main Monowitz-Buna site they saw hanged bodies, and heard shots at night. E715 was administered by the Wehrmacht (old or wounded soldiers), unlike Monowitz-Buna which was run by the SS, who showed no mercy. The life expectancy of Jewish workers there was three to four months at best.
Initially, the POWs refused to work. They argued that, under the Geneva Convention, POWs weren’t to be involved in the production of war materials. They were told that if they didn’t work they’d be shot. Despite this violation, British POWs were treated much better than the enslaved Jews, who were forced to work beyond exhaustion. Jones worked 12 hours a day, six days a week.
From time to time, the POWs received Red Cross parcels. On one occasion, Jones didn’t need the German ration of a piece of sausage, and secretly gave it to a Jewish man, Josef. A few days later, Josef gave him a signet ring made from a piece of steel pipe. That was the last time Jones saw him. Josef had been sent to the gas chamber.
Degradation and distraction
The POWs were divided into small groups at the factory. Jones’s group was supervised by a German engineer called Meister Beave, who treated them well. Not all meisters were so accommodating. He presented them with a list of jobs each day and, if they achieved them, they could return to camp earlier.
But the British soldiers weren’t immune from Nazi brutality. A Corporal Reynolds was ordered to climb a cylinder of 60 feet in height to change a filter. He tried to explain that he was scared of heights, didn’t have the appropriate clothes, and would fall off. A camp guard called Benno Franz was summoned, and shot him in cold blood.
Despite relying on Red Cross parcels, POWs still suffered from malnutrition. The parcels were meant to arrive monthly, but were often stolen by guards. Jones was constantly covered in boils and abscesses due to his poor diet.
English cigarettes were the best currency to have. Despite being a non-smoker, Jones asked his wife to send him cigarettes, which he could exchange for items like bread or eggs with some of the civilian workers. One day he was offered a Rolex Oyster watch by one of the Poles, which he exchanged for several hundred cigarettes. This would later prove to save his life.
Sunday was different from the rest of the week. Jones attended a Sunday service performed by a lay preacher, then might do some sewing, cleaning, or reading and, in the summer, play football in the afternoon. The Red Cross provided four sets of kits – Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England – and two footballs. Jones played in goal for Wales, customising the Welsh shirts by embroidering badges of the Prince of Wales feathers using old socks. Hundreds of people turned out to watch the matches. Perhaps it provided a distraction from war and misery.
The death march
Sunday, 29 August 1944 was a different sort of day: the US Air Force bombed the IG Farben factories. One bomb fell on the British POW camp, which didn’t have an air raid shelter, and 38 prisoners lost their lives. Other raids followed, but the POW camp was never hit again. By 1945, if not sooner, the POWs knew through their illicit radio that the Germans were losing the war.
The Red Army approached Auschwitz and the British prisoners were forced to leave. The POWs were divided into three columns, and headed off through deep snow, with temperatures dropping below -20ºC. “All I had to eat was what the animals ate. I remember kicking a pig out of the way and pinching the potato it was eating,” said Jones. The ’death march’ took them over the Carpathian Mountains through Czechoslovakia, Saxony, and to the Austrian border at Regensburg.
During the 17-week ordeal, Jones’s boots fell apart, and he wrapped sacks around his feet. Luckily, a German officer spotted his Rolex watch en route. The soldier could have taken it, but instead exchanged it for a sack of bread, which probably saved the lives of Jones and some of his comrades. Of the 230 prisoners who set off, Jones estimated that only 150 were alive when American soldiers discovered them in a barn in Regensburg. Their guards had abandoned them.
Jones eventually returned home to Wales. “I was 13 stones when I left for war and seven stones when I returned five years later. I remember when I finally got home and my wife Gwladys put me into a bath. I looked into her eyes and saw tears rolling down her cheek.”
“I said, don’t cry my love. I’ve come home. I’ve left men out there who will never come home.”
The Auschwitz goalkeeper
Ron Jones was a special man, modest and unassuming. He thought no-one would be interested in his story, and just resumed a purposeful life in Wales. After retiring at 62 from his dock job, he raised considerable amounts of money for the British Legion, selling poppies until he was 101. For this he was awarded the British Empire Medal. He shared his story publicly for the first time when he was 80.
Jones was a keen Newport County supporter, following them at home and away well into his 90s. He and Gwladys had one son, Leighton, born in 1947. Gwladys sadly died in 2005. Ron Jones lived to be 102, dying in 2019.
I met him a number of times, and visited him in his Bassaleg home shortly before his death. He was as lucid as ever, and added other details to his story. He explained how he’d reluctantly returned to Auschwitz with his nephew in 1998. He was told the Russians had knocked down all of the Monowitz-Buna site. But this wasn’t the case – one of the factories was still in use – and this brought back awful memories. His greatest fears were realised and for weeks after the visit he hardly slept, haunted by terrible nightmares.
Nevertheless, Jones returned again in September 2013, at the invitation of the BBC programme The One Show, which screened a biopic about him the following month. I think that, by then, he’d realised how important it was to share his experiences, especially with young people in schools. In writing about and telling his story, and talking about the inhumanity he witnessed, he hoped they’d realise that a choice always exists between good and evil when it comes to the treatment of our fellow human beings.
