CHRISTOPHER BURNEY
1946
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY gave rise to the literature of the concentration camp, and it will be remembered for this special branch of historiography, perhaps for little else. The mindset of anyone with claims to be human is already conditioned by the century’s central political experience as recorded for example by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Hanns Mayer (writing as Jean Améry), David Rousset, Tadeusz Borowski, Etty Hillesum, Emanuel Ringelblum, and Primo Levi. Christopher Burney has his place in that select company. From August 1944 till the end of the war, he was in Buchenwald. How the British would have behaved under Soviet or Nazi dictatorship is an unspoken question about the identity of the nation. Only a hundred pages long, Christopher Burney’s The Dungeon Democracy is about staying true to oneself and surviving. Like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, it was written in the immediate aftermath of the war and published in 1946 when the world was not yet ready to come to terms with atrocity on the modern scale.
Burney’s story begins conventionally enough. Born in 1917, he was the direct descendent of Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814), the composer and leading musicologist of his day. Charles’s daughter Fanny was a popular novelist who in the revolutionary year of 1794 married the French General Alexandre D’Arblay, and went to live in France. (London’s Soho still boasts its D’Arblay Street.) Pentwyn is our family farmhouse twenty minutes from Hay-on-Wye, and every time I drive to that bibliophile town I pass Oakfield, the handsome red-brick house that used to be the Burney home. At the age of seventeen, Christopher Burney ran away from Wellington in the hope of becoming a soldier rather than the classical scholar that the headmaster intended him to be. Rolling stone, laborer, mechanic, exile in Paris most of the time, he was undergoing just the right preparation for joining the wartime Special Operations Executive, whose purpose, as Churchill himself put it, was to set German-occupied Europe ablaze.
In 1942 Burney parachuted into France. He was 25. One or another instance of carelessness had allowed the Abwehr, German counter-intelligence, to round up all those with whom he had been due to cooperate. After he had been on the run for eleven weeks, the Gestapo succeeded in capturing him. To be in their hands, he found, was “absolutely terrifying.” They were within their rights to sentence him to death by a firing squad. Condemned, he was sent to Fresnes prison in Paris, where he spent more than 500 days alone in a cell. Spared from execution probably because the Germans hoped to trap other SOE agents through interrogation, he then had to endure deportation in a cattle truck and the ordeal of Buchenwald. “I could have told accurately what it is like to walk the last few steps on this earth,” he wrote in Solitary Confinement, his second and final book, as much of a masterpiece as his first.
His writing is lit with glimpses of the inner self that enabled him to confront Buchenwald. Sunday churchgoing in lost Herefordshire summers had formed his character, along with Shakespeare and The Wind in the Willows and roast beef. “I had been left free to scan the horizon of existence,” is how he saw himself. As for the concentration camp, “The most striking characteristic of the S.S. was their crass stupidity. They were all men who had seen in Hitler a man who offered them the means of living by the only gift they had – brute force.” To nickname them the Toad, Bat-ears or the Kindly One was to mock their stupid brutality. The Commandant SS Sturmbann-führer Koch was a sadist with a side-line in embezzling Party funds. Frau Koch was the pervert whose lampshades had to be made of tattooed human skin. The SS doctor, Hoven by name, was “a small dark man with shifty eyes… a murderer of no mean talent.” Among the prisoners were some fifty British pilots who had been shot down and as the war was coming to its end the Commandant started to hang two of them every day. With extraordinary altruistic courage, Burney went into hiding under the floor of one of the camp’s huts and through intermediaries he offered the Commandant a bargain. When the camp was in British hands, the Commandant would have to answer for his crimes. If he stopped these executions, Burney promised to speak for him in court. In horrific circumstances, he had done the right thing and it worked. Burney’s testimony was duly heard and judged not to be enough to spare Koch from the gallows. “If we follow only our emotions and our appetites, it will mean Back to Buchenwald for me and a maiden trip for most of you,” are the closing words of The Dungeon Democracy.
Liberated, he was skeletal thin. In due course he made a life for himself, with a wife and children and various jobs, at one point in a bank and at another point writing a report for the United Nations. Friends had lent him a house with the pleasing name of La Carrotière in a small town in Normandy, about an hour by car from Paris. In the summer of 1973 I visited him there. He looked fit. Over a meal, I drew out of him things he had left unsaid in his books but which recurred in his dreams. He had carried corpses from the transports and laid them in piles. Once he was sent for punishment to the Buchenwald stone quarry and would have died there if an elderly Viennese socialist had not used his influence and rescued him. One morning four Russians in his block suspected a fifth of informing, and they bounced him to death.
To ask him why he now lived alone, as it were in self-induced solitary confinement, seemed to put me on a level with Toad or Bat-ears; besides, I couldn’t help noticing that his car had a yellow GIG badge, the initials standing for grand invalide de guerre. The French Government paid him a full pension as a former officer with the Resistance. A less grateful government awarded him the MBE, of all inopportune medals.
Back in London and angered by the indifference of officialdom to Burney, I took his case up with a ministerial pen-pusher. Mightily pleased with himself and hardly able to button his trousers over his belly, this oaf held that Burney had been on active service, and nothing need be done for him, certainly not in respect of a pension. I found I was talking to someone unable to imagine the Buchenwald ordeal or ask himself if he could have survived it. “Don’t incite the hornets” was his way of telling me in a letter that he had no expectations.