In 1962 the actor Dirk Bogarde starred in a film entitled The password is courage (Password is value). The plot is surprising:during World War II, a British sergeant is captured by the Germans and, due to his stubborn and extraordinary ability to escape again and again, he is sent to a concentration camp neighboring Auschwitz. Q>
There he will not be satisfied with continuing to try to escape but will help several Jews in the same effort. The really curious thing is that everything is based on an authentic character who made a cameo in the film and whose last name did not match his experience:Sergeant Major Charles Joseph Coward .
Coward was born in 1905 but his entry into history occurred in 1937 when he enlisted in the British armed forces and, more specifically, in May 1940, during the so-called Battle of France , in which the German army, in a brilliant implementation of the Manstein Plan, entered the Gallic country through the Ardennes without the planned defenses being able to stop it.
In this context, Churchill ordered Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force), which was carried out in Dunkirk because there was the largest beach in Europe. But, by then, Coward, who was part of the 8th Royal Artillery Regiment, had already fallen into enemy hands in Calais.
His adventures began soon, since during his transfer he tried to escape a couple of times to no avail. It was only the beginning of a long and stubborn series in which he added seven more attempts as they moved him from one prison camp to another.
Some of those attempts were so outrageous that they must be discovered before the sergeant's imagination and audacity, the most unheard-of episode of his being the one in which he managed to get hold of a German uniform and he pretended to be a wounded soldier -he spoke that language perfectly-, although that same audacity ruined his plan when he was admitted to a field hospital; The funny thing about the case was that he was awarded the Iron Cross! !
Coward, who was not content to try to escape but tried to sabotage everything he could, became a considerable nuisance to his captors and in December 1943 he was sent to southern Poland, to the labor camp of Monowitz , one of the three main ones that made up the Auschwitz complex; It was characterized by the fact that the manufacturing facilities of the IG Farben company were located there, which produced synthetic rubber and fuel.
Some 12,000 prisoners gathered there, mainly Jews but also criminals and political opponents, for whom there was an arbeitsausbildungslager or rehabilitation center. All of them were used as slave labor , although the worst part was taken by the first ones because they had to work in nearby mines and their life expectancy did not exceed four months. Those who were not fit for work were transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau , which was only eight kilometers away, for its extermination.
British and Commonwealth POWs (there were 1,400) were not in Monowitz itself but in a task force called E715 and belonging to subcamp Stalag VIII-B , which had already been used for this purpose in the First World War and in the Franco-Prussian War.
The regime wasn't as harsh as in the neighboring camps because it wasn't run by the SS but by the Wehrmacht, but it wasn't a rose garden either; one corporal is known to have refused to work because he lacked cold clothing and was simply shot dead. Also, the prisoners got an idea of what was happening in the other camps by hearing the shots and seeing the captives being hanged.
But they could receive food packages from the Red Cross , for example, and Coward precisely became vertrauensmann u liaison officer with that organization, thanks to his command of the German language, so that he had a certain freedom of movement to the point of being able to leave the countryside under surveillance to the surrounding cities. Thus he was able to discover the trains that took Jews to Birkenau and get in touch with some of them to supply them with food and other items covertly.
This activity, in which other British prisoners collaborated, took a further step when the audacious sergeant began to send encrypted messages to Britain in letters he sent to a certain William Orange, who was actually a code name in the War Office. In them he included military information about what he observed, as well as descriptions of the living conditions of his companions, the dates and numbers of the trains that transported Jews, the location of the gas chambers, etc.
Some of the information he provided was first-hand, as he once obtained prison clothing and spent a night in Monowitz to try to take with him to E715 a British naval doctor named Karel Sperber who was being held by the Nazis because he was Jewish. What he saw convinced him to increase aid and he began bribing SS guards with the Red Cross's chocolate and drugs to pass on the clothing and documents of deceased non-Jewish captives, using that material to give the Jews he helped escape an identity that could keep them safe outside.
It was said that thanks to this they saved the lives of four hundred people , although today such amount has been significantly reduced. He even acquired some corpses to supplant the escapees in the counts after the marches from one place to another.
A year after his arrival at E715, before the advance of the Red Army, the place was closed and the prisoners transferred to the main headquarters of Stalag Luft VIII-B, which was in the current village of Łambinowice (Silesia), for later, in January 1945, moving again through Czechoslovakia to Bavaria .
Three months later the US Army released them. Back in London, Coward wrote an affidavit with testimony of everything that was used in the Nuremberg trials and even testified in a famous case:the lawsuit that a former inmate, Norbert Wollheim, filed against IG Farben demanding the salary for forcedly working for them those years and compensation.
While several books about his adventures were published and despite the fact that some questioned the veracity of his odyssey, partly due to the scarcity of witnesses and the fact that almost all those he helped ended up captured and killed, Charles Joseph Coward became the first British named Chasidei Umot Ha-Olam (Righteous Among the Nations), a distinction granted by Israel to Gentile (non-Jewish) heroes who had exceptional behavior during the Shoah.
In 2010 he was also awarded by the British government as a British Hero of the Holocaust along with twenty-six other people; posthumously, as he had died in 1976.
Recommended book
This War Is Mine:The True Story of Sergeant Charlie Coward (John Castle)