Customer Reviews

The Password Is Courage

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Password is Courage is a great book. It is written in the style of the 1950's which means that the violence that Sgt. Major "Charlie" Coward must have seen is more hinted at than harped on as it would be in a modern rendition.

That provides the service of allowing youngsters to read this book. Even so, as a kid I remember being scared by the story that I read. I cannot imagine having to live the story as Coward, in fact, did.

Having just re-read the book, it is interesting to see a different reaction. I am mesmerized by the chances that this man took and the dangers he exposed himself to. I guess I did not understand them as a kid when they seemed more cartoonish. The story of Auschwitz is better known to me now so that wasn't really a surprise but the almost casual violence of everyone in the book (including Coward himself at times) is more shocking.

All told, I recommend this book to anyone over the age of ten. It seems to me that while we know more about the Holocaust in this day and age, we appreciate it less. This book brings it to a personal level by telling the story of someone who sneaked into Auschwitz looking to bring out a fellow countryman. Instead he brought out an unbiased eyewitness account for future generations.

It is a shame that Hollywood hasn't rediscovered this story.

It is a rousing good adventure novel.

THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE is the fictionalized account of the real life adventures of Sergeant Major Charles Coward, a British POW who became a uniquely privileged prisoner at E715, the work camp assigned to British POW's at the Nazi's giant synthetic rubber project at Monowitz, part of the huge Auschwitz complex. Coward, assigned as the Red Cross representative, had unusual freedom of movement between Monowitz, Osweicem and other nearby towns such as Kattowice (though always under guard), and got to see more of the place than any other British prisoner, though he was never in the Auschwitz Stammlager, and never saw Birkenau where the Krema's where.

The book is actually written by "John Castle", the nom de plume of Ronald Charles Payne and John William Garrote, and better than fifty percent of the book is their contribution. First published in hardcover in 1955, the cover of this 1979 Bantam War Book edition has the bold headline HE WAS THE SERGEANT MAJOR WHO RESCUED JEWISH PRISONERS FROM AUSCHWITZ AND LIVED TO ACCUSE EICHMANN. It soon becomes clear that Coward never accused Eichmann of anything and indeed never heard of him until after the war, and the American historian Dr. Joseph Robert White has uncovered new information about Coward that credits him with possibly helping no more than two-three Jews escape from Monowitz.

For the book was written in 1955, at about the same time as the Hungarian Uprising and other crisis in the Cold War. After the war, the Polish and Soviet Communists hunted down and destroyed any member of the Polish Home Army they could find; indeed, they even hunted down members of the Communist resistance movements. Anybody who had fought for a free Poland was a potential political enemy, so like most war books from the 1950's the people and incidents in the book are fictionalized to prevent Communist retaliation. Any agent from the GZI, the Polish Communist equivalent of the NKVD, trying to run down, say, the optician in Kattowice who allegedly smuggled guns to Coward would find a dead end.

And it's not just Cold War issues disguised in the book. The story given is that Coward is first clued in to armed resistance at Monowitz by a man named "Clatterbridge", but no British prisoner named "Clatterbridge" was ever at Monowitz. There is good reason to suspect that the real "Clatterbridge" was in fact Yitzhak Persky, a member of the Palestinian Jewish Brigade who was at Monowitz as a British POW. Coward's collaboration with Persky was not revealed in detail until 2001 (by White), and for good reasons. Persky was the father of Shimon Peres, a President of Israel who was also a member of the Haganah. In 1955, British public opinion was still raw from Haganah and Stern Gang terrorism committed against the British from 1945 thru 1948, and the revelation that Coward had collaborated with the father of a major Haganah figure would have created no small amount of ill will. Persky had also been a Polish citizen before immigrating to Palestine in the early 1930's, and relatives and contacts in Poland would have been endangered if his identity had been revealed.

So most of the book is fictionalized to protect people and the British foreign policy of the 1950's, as well as to create a red herring for the Polish security organs. The book is also fictionalized in other details. In 1955 British covert warfare techniques were still a secret and revelations about them would not come until the late 1970's, so Coward's resistance procedures are also disguised, often times as methods so inept you have to wonder how the war was ever won. Resistance contacts cheerfully volunteer the source of contraband weapons; ridiculously transparent codes are put in personal letters; the guards are universally deaf, blind, dumb and corrupt, and some things are simply impossible. For instance, there is no way that he could have arranged the escape of Jews from Monowitz by substituting dead bodies, the prisoner accounting system that marked off a prisoner's tattoo against a registry was designed to defeat exactly that. How he and Persky arranged the escapes, if they ever happened, has never been revealed; and may never be revealed. Nothing was put in the book that would provide leads to Communist security organs, or that would reveal the true nature of British secret warfare techniques, so trying to find out what's true and what isn't is mainly a lost ambition.

Some of the stories clearly do come from Coward, but are also obviously exaggerated (a good soldier can always embellish a war story). Coward's description of the uprising at Krema IV at Birkenau is so wildly inaccurate that it soon becomes clear that he is repeating the camp rumors that swirled around camp after the incident. When possible, comparing events in this book to the modern historical record reveals that while Coward was genuinely talented at bribery and covert resistance, he was still cheated out of many a cigarette and chocolate bar by his German guards, who answered his sly inquiries with equally sly misinformation.

But one story is not only true but celebrated. Coward really did borrow a prison uniform and slip into the Jewish camp in Monowitz (not Birkenau as "John Castle" inexplicably claims), across the wire from E715, to pose as a Jewish prisoner for one night. He was searching for a doctor now known to be Karel Sperber, a Czech refugee who had escaped to Britain and was serving as ship's doctor on board the SS Automedon when it was captured by the German raider Atlantis. Coward didn't know that Sperber was serving in the Monowitz Revier (infirmary) as an anesthesiologist, and so wasn't able to find him. But he did get an upclose and personal look at Jewish life in Monowitz that enabled him to give a grim eyewitness account of conditions there that is exaggerated, but probably not by much.

So THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE is not a history, it's a war adventure novel, and on that basis, I'll give it a three. It is an entertaining novel, but as a history it has been sanitized for somebody else's protection. Read for fun, not as an accurate account of Coward's adventures. That account still has to be written, and when the British POW archives are finally opened in 2020, perhaps it will be.

Sgt. Major Coward's adventures are amazing. Some were depicted in a movie of the same name, but the book reveals much more. While Coward's life in the POW camps was not unlike that described in other books on the subject, his description of life in the POW camp next door to Auschwitz is really incredible. I've never read anything about the Holocaust as evocative as his description of sneaking into the death camp itself for one night. It was almost unbelievable, even to him, as he sat in the dark of the barracks crammed in with the soon to die prisoners. You won't forget this chapter after you've read it.

Coward's other escapades are more in the vein of other POW books, with the exception that he succeeded in far more sabotaage than I've read about elsewhere. He not only escaped and was recaptured many times, but while in captivity he had a knack for comitting acts of sabotage that could not be traced back to an individual. Stuff like loosening nuts so rail cars would fall apart AFTER they left the camp.

An inspiring story, and try to catch the movie too. Dirk Bogarde does a fine job of recreating the indominitable spirit of Coward.

You will want to learn more about Coward after reading this book. I know I do.

...Coward was
a witness in the Holocaust denial case of Canadian Nazi Ernst Zundel.
It might serve as a point of reference today in the dispute about the
status of detainees in Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray.
A Google search for Coward brought up only a few mentions, one for
the Zundel testimony and one for a review of this book. The others
were in other languages.
Briefly, Coward was a British army regimental sergeant major who was
taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940. By insisting that the Germans
treat him in accordance with the Hague and Geneva conventions, he won
favorable treatment as a senior non-commissioned officer and as a
trusty. He constantly escaped, citing his rights under the convention
for the right of escape and pointing out that the conventions limit
punishment to a month of solitary confinement.
He took it upon himself to assert the rights and privileges of his
men to the Germans.
Held first at a Stalag at Lamsdorf, he was, at last, assigned to Auschwitz.
During his frequent walks into town under supervision of a German
NCO, he managed to buy guns and explosives which were intended for
the Polish resistance but which Coward decided to hand over to the
Jews in Birkenau. (Coward's account of these trips to town completely
baffled the unbelieving German defense lawyers at a later war-crimes
trial.)
He also worked out a scheme whereby he would buy Jewish corpses from
the Germans which he used to help an equal number of live Jews to
escape. The currency for all this was coffee, cigarettes, and other
things that he persuaded his British comrades to give up for a good
cause.
He complained through his chain of command about IG Farben's
mistreatment of Jewish slave laborers and later testified at the
war-crimes trial of the Farben criminals against Dr. Duerrfeld (who
was acquitted because he knew nothing about gas chambers,
extermination, slave labor, or anything else).
Apparently, although this is not clear in Castle's book, he was
elected to Parliament after the war and was also named a Righteous
Gentile by Yad Vashem.
According to Castle, Coward drew much satisfaction in the nickname he
was given in Auschwitz, the "Count of Auschwitz."
I am mystified by a few things in the book, chiefly a run by American
bombers that dropped leaflets on Auschwitz warning the inmates that
they were about to be bombed. (One wonders what they were supposed to do, dig air-raid shelters?) And tales of the actual bombing of
Auschwitz made me wonder about Coward's accuracy.
Finally, I was surprised by Coward's successful entry into the
extermination camp at Birkenau for a day while he searched
unsuccessfully for a British naval surgeon who was supposedly held
there. I had only heard previously of Jews who had smuggled
themselves into Auschwitz to confirm its horror. (I have written
about that in "Mala's Last Words," which is available from me.)
But above all, I was taken aback by German observance of the treaties
concerning the treatment of POWs, although Castle does describe the
special harassment of Canadian POWs, who were first bound and then
shackled from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in retaliation for the Dieppe raid.
Castle says this was because the Germans wanted the Allies to treat
their own POWs well. This does not tally with the events at Malmedy
in which the Germans deliberately mowed down American prisoners;
events on Juno Beach, where the SS killed Canadian prisoners, or with
the mistreatment of Allied prisoners in Mauthausen where at least 31
Allied flying officers are known to have been murdered on the Stairs
of Death and where other Allied prisoners were forced to dig the
tunnel through the Alps at the Loibl Pass.