Two amazing friends from the Shropshire-Wales border have opened their hearts about their time at the most notorious Nazi war camps of the Holocaust. In the first of a two-part special, Ben Bentley discovers how Charlie Evans was tortured and starved at Auschwitz.

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.

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, Charlie signed up with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and two months later was fighting on the beaches of Dunkirk.

He was shot in the leg on the first day of his campaign. Like many of our 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.
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 detailed to go on working parties manufacturing industrial goods and mining coal to fuel the Nazi war machine, but told SS soldiers who ran the camp that with his injuries he couldn’t – and 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.

“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 train.”

Charlie’s voice trails off as he recalls seeing women and their children 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.”

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.”

What kept him going, he says, was his sense of humour. A joke might be the last thing you would expect during the Holocaust, but for Charlie it was his secret weapon – and still is today.

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 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.”