Shropshire Magazine

Charlie Evans of Presteigne.

The tenacity and instinct for survival shown by prisoners in the most notorious concentration camp of World War II went far beyond heroism. But Ben Bentley still finds warmth, humour and humility in the person of Charlie Evans, one of our last living Auschwitz survivors. Pictures: Mike Hayward

What those eyes have seen. Piercingly blue, they are the eyes of a man who, despite having been subjected to unspeakable horrors, still shine. Eyes that smile when there seems to be no cause to smile; the eyes of a man to be reckoned with, unblinking in their honesty.

They are not the eyes of a man who dies easily; these are those of a fighter and a survivor.

Charlie Evans simply refused to die. During five years of imprisonment and torture at Auschwitz, he was beaten, kicked and starved, ‘fed’ a daily diet of just two pieces of bread made with sawdust, and forced to wear an old cement bag as a shirt and rags for shoes.

But Charlie, from the border town of Presteigne, never gave up hope.

Charlie Evans pictured with comrades before he was captured. Charlie is shown at the right-hand end of the back row.

Now aged almost 90, Charlie is one of only a handful of living British survivors of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp and the Second World War Holocaust.

He picks up a photograph of the concentration camp, with the familiar barbed wire and the railway line that brought more than a million people – mainly Jews, Poles and Soviets, but among them around 500 British prisoners of war – to their deaths.

“I remember that arch,” he says. “I was up that line with a Tommy gun in my back and an Alsatian by the side of me.

“That barbed wire, that railway line . . . I’m lucky to have survived because I could have been shot there and then.

“It was hell, but never mind. I’m here today.”

In March 1940, at the age of 19, builder Charlie signed up with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and two months later he was fighting on the beaches of Dunkirk. Private Evans was shot in the leg on the first day of his campaign. But like many of our brave boys, he was strapped up and thrust back into the front line until enemy shelling split his left arm almost in two and he was captured by German forces.

Charlie could not have imagined what would happen next after he became one of the first to be marched to Poland and down to the end of the line at Auschwitz.

“I was marched with rags on my feet and I had to eat grass to keep going,” he recalls. “When I was there they gave me two slices of bread made out of sawdust and that’s what I had for five years.

“Things were very grim but I had to put up with it. Not eating was the worst thing, I was nothing but bones. I was 13 stone 6 when I signed up and when I left I was just five stones.”

At the camp, Charlie was imprisoned in one of the labour camps and assigned to working parties, manufacturing industrial goods and mining coal to fuel the Nazi war machine. But despite knowing the consequences of disobeying Nazi orders, he told SS soldiers who ran the camp that with his injuries he couldn’t work – and, on principle, wouldn’t anyway.

Not for the first time, he stared death in the face.

“I was put up against the wall plenty of times but I was telling the truth,” he says. “I only tell the truth. I was not going to work. I couldn’t.

An iconic image: Modern-day visitors to the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp walk along the railway lines.

“I’m not working for any Jerry, I’m British through and through – true British to the core. They,” he says studying a picture of Hitler and camp commandant Rudolph Hoess, “were bastards.”

At first he didn’t understand why the SS were bringing so many people in on trains, herding and prodding them like cattle.

He says: “I watched the trains going up and we thought they were taking troops to the front line in Russia, but they weren’t. They were not troops but civilians.

“I saw women and little children coming off the train and they were being shot as they got off.”

Charlie’s voice trails off as he recalls seeing the ultimate horror of women and their children being marched to the gas chambers.

“We used to see them queuing up, poor beggars; they thought they were going for a shower,” he says. “The little children, if they did not go one way and went the other they were shot and their bodies put on a fire. It made my blood boil.”

Not for the first time, Charlie, a modest man who takes time to choose his words carefully, is angry beyond expression. What went on at this hell hole, he still can’t believe today.

Like other prisoners of war here, the only way he could endure his ordeal was to anaesthetise himself mentally and exist from moment to moment.

At the end of the war, five years after he was imprisoned, Auschwitz was liberated; Charlie was coming home.

“I’ve been to hell and there’s nothing worse,” he says. “I don’t know what heaven is like but I’ve got a lot of friends up there when I get there.

“I never thought I would get back home but I never gave up hope – that’s what I’m like. I’ve been shot, put up against the wall and beaten – if they had finished me off it would have been a good thing.”

His good friend, Douglas Jones from nearby Knighton and himself a veteran of the Second World War, has a theory on what really kept Charlie going during those five long years at the camp.

“It was his sense of humour that kept him alive,” he says, “that’s one of the things for sure.”

And it’s Charlie’s humour that comes across in his conversation; a joke is never far from being fired across the bows.

At his home, Charlie, an impeccable host, takes endless attempts at making a pot of tea, failing miserably as he is too busy prodding fun at Douglas.

Douglas Jones, Charlie’s close friend and himself a Second World War veteran.

“Don’t believe anything he says,” Charlie announces with a wicked glint in his eye. The banter between the pair continues before one of them almost ends up with Charlie’s tea cosy on his head.

There is sadness in Charlie’s voice, and in those penetrating eyes, too. His wife, Freda, who had been his constant companion since 1948, died six years ago, and his good pal, the Shropshire war hero Jimmy James who lived in nearby Ludlow, died in January. Having been held in Nazi concentration camps, the pair shared common ground, and Jimmy’s bid for freedom from the notorious Stalag Luft III camp in 1944 inspired the script for the classic movie The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen.

Charlie recalls how he and Jimmy would meet up and take long walks together in the woods with their dogs.

“All my friends have gone, all my buddies have gone,” reflects Charlie finally.

But it’s not long before he picks himself back up and the moment is broken, appropriately, by his secret weapon – a bon mot.

Following a spell in hospital in France immediately after Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers in January 1945, Private Evans was greeted back home in Presteigne with a brass band and a hero’s welcome.

“It was very strange coming home,” says Charlie. “The biggest thing of all was that I was free and I could go where I wanted to. I fought hard for my freedom and here I am, free.

“I never thought I would come out alive but it would have been a bad job if they had finished me. You get to the stage when you have had enough of being kicked and knocked about. They gave me up for dead, but I’m still here. I’m a funny old beggar.”

Hope, humour and a refusal to be defeated are what kept Charlie Evans alive. Today, with his health diminishing – he is profoundly deaf from the shelling at Dunkirk and has breathing and sight difficulties – Charlie bravely recognises that he may not be long for this world.

But having been what he has been through, he has nothing to fear. With a smile he tells how his final resting place will be a pretty cemetery not a mile up the road from home, 65 years after it was very nearly a living hell hole in occupied Poland.

“I’ve booked my place and paid for the spot, it’s just over the bridge there,” says Charlie. “I’ve had my day. My days are numbered, but I have done my duty.”