Spectator In Hell: A British Soldier’s Story of Imprisonment in Auschwitz

In 1942 the young soldier Arthur Dodd was taken prisoner by the German Army and transported to Oswiecim in Polish Upper Silesia. The German name for the place was ‘Auschwitz’: a name now synonymous with man’s darkest hour. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous German death-camp of the Second World War, functioned for the incarceration and extermination of those that the third Reich deemed “undesirables”: Jews, homosexuals, Communists. What is less known is that it was the fate of hundreds of British POWs to find it their prison, and to behold the atrocities meted out by Hitler’s SS. This is the true story of one of those witnesses. Forced to do hard labour, starved and savagely beaten, Arthur thought his life would end in Auschwitz. Determined to go down fighting, he sabotaged Nazi industrial work, risked his life to alleviate the suffering of the Jewish prisoners, and aided a partisan group planning a mass break-out.