Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.
There are two kinds of cowards.
Charles Joseph Coward was a British soldier who grew up in Edmonton, London, and enlisted in the British Army in 1937. During the war, he was wounded and captured by the Germans at the fall of Calais in 1940 while serving as a battery sergeant. He tried to escape several times, twice before even arriving at the POW camp. Between attempts, he sabotaged German efforts. He was unable to escape, and after passing through several POW camps he was sent to Auschwitz, the notorious labor camp in Upper Silesia. At Auschwitz, he was posted at the IG Farben plant, at one time the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world. The company relied on cheap labor from the concentration camps nearby. The company was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and Mauthausen. One of its subsidiaries manufactured the poison gas Zyklon B, which killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
Because of his knowledge of German, Coward was assigned to labor detachment E715 as British Man of Confidence. His task was to deal with the German Wehrmacht –the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany which guarded the camp from 1939 to 1945–, and act as spokesman for the British POWs. At Auschwitz, Coward saw the brutal treatment of prisoners and became aware of the gas chambers at Birkenau. His work as a liaison officer for the Red Cross allowed him to distribute food and medicines to the inmates, and to smuggle food to prisoners most in need.
In what camp authorities later regretted, they allowed Coward to write letters to a “friend” called William Orange back home in Great Britain, but which in fact was a code name for the British War Office. He informed them of the brutalities taking place at Auschwitz and gave them details about the Jewish prisoners who were arriving there. At risk of his life, Coward was able to smuggle Jewish prisoners out of Auschwitz by swapping their identities with those of non-Jewish inmates who had died at the camp. Although it is not known how many Jews Coward saved, it is believed to be in the hundreds.
Coward was liberated in 1945 and returned to live in Edmonton. While living at Chichester Road, his sensational testimony was instrumental to condemn Nazis at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1947. Coward’s heroic efforts to save Jews earned him the nickname ‘The Count of Auschwitz’. He lived the rest of his life in Edmonton, where he worked at a timber factory until he died in 1976.
At the camp, Coward had befriended Yitzhak Persky, the father of Israel’s President Shimon Peres, with whom he coordinated some of his activities to allow prisoners to escape. Persky’s personal testimony was told to a researcher at the Yad Vashem archive in 1965 and was made public in 2015.
In 1963, Coward was named one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” by the State of Israel, a unique honor given to non-Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews from death; he is only one of two Englishmen to have received the Israeli Peace Medal. In 2008, in a speech to the House of Commons, Shimon Peres credited Coward for saving his father’s life. At the ceremony Peres also said, Coward was not only the savior of many Jews but our father’s brother-in-arms.”
British soldier Charles Joseph Coward represents one end of a spectrum. At the other end are the
Cowards who kill thousands of children,
Who kill women, mothers, the aged and those with disabilities,
Who destroy homes, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship with two-thousand-pound bombs,
Who ignore worldwide protests to stop their genocidal actions,
Who assassinate with total impunity,
Who can kill with pin point accuracy but destroy whole towns and chase away their inhabitants,
Who in their genocidal madness control the lives and livelihoods of others,
Who kill journalists trying to report events in war zones,
Who kill those who aim to provide food for thousands of innocent civilians,
Who ruthlessly kill medical and paramedical personnel trying to attend the injured,
Who obstruct the provision of food, medicines, and water to thousands of people, and
Who make a mockery of international law.
The British soldier Charles Joseph Coward honored humanity. The other are cowards, acting cowardly.
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