The LA Times has a piece out today that is entirely worth reading, about a brave and crazy Englishman who, contrary to all self preservation instincts, sneaked into Progressive Socialist death camps during WWII.
Bearing witness to Nazi horror
Reporting from Bradwell, England – The men in stripes came in looking like boxers and ended up like skeletons. Denis Avey could see them wasting away in a place so evil that even nature had abandoned it, without a bee or butterfly in sight.
They were the Jewish inmates housed in the ghastliest part of Auschwitz, subjected to brutalities and atrocities that Avey, an English prisoner of war confined to another section of the camp, could barely imagine.
But then, he thought, why only imagine them? What if, somehow, he could see those horrors for himself — see them, remember them, bear witness to the world about them?
So the then-25-year-old pondered and plotted, soon hatching a plan so audacious that, more than 65 years later, he shakes his head at its absurdity. While so many Jews and others held at the infamous extermination camp were desperate to get out, Avey was actually devising a way to sneak in.
It is a hell of a story, which would only be more compelling if it included the context that makes it especially relevant to today’s political climate. The Nazis were Progressive Socialists.