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Ron Jones spent two years as a prisoner of war at Auschwitz, and was one of the many on the forced Death March as the Germans fled the advancing Russian army. They were on the road for seventeen weeks, walking 800 miles during one of the coldest winters on record. He never talked about his experiences until he was in his eighties. Now 96, Jones has worked with journalist Joe Lovejoy to produce a book that combines his own personal story with Lovejoy’s carefully researched historical account. Inevitably, The Auschwitz Goalkeeper is a shocking read, but Jones’s quiet, unembellished narrative eases the reader’s journey through the pages, while Lovejoy’s recounting of the facts embraces some of the less well-known aspects of the Auschwitz story. For instance, ‘it is a little-known fact, even today, that IG Farben, not the Nazi government, financed and was therefore responsible for Auschwitz and all its works, including Dr. Josef Mengele’s inhuman medical experiments’. IG Farben, a huge chemicals conglomerate, was still in existence in 2012, as a ‘corporation in liquidation’. In the 1930s, it was the largest company in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, and it payrolled the Nazis. Its Auschwitz plant produced synthetic rubber and fuel, and Zyklon B – the pesticide that was used in the gas chambers. The plant needed cheap labour, and guinea pigs for its research, both of which it purchased from the concentration camp on its doorstep. In turn, this arrangement provided the Nazis with much-needed funding for the continuing war effort. Auschwitz wasn’t just about a ghastly ideology and ‘the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe’, it was about money and big business and corporate power. Lovejoy also tackles the perhaps unanswerable question of whether the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz to disrupt, if not put an end to, the exterminations. They bombed the IG Farben factory next door to deprive the Nazis of fuel, but claimed fear of too much collateral damage if they targeted the gas chambers and crematoria. A US colonel is on record as saying, ‘we are over there to win the war, and not to take care of refugees’, while a British Foreign Office subordinate wrote, ‘in my opinion, a disproportionate amount of time at the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews’ – ‘wailing Jews’ whose only remains at Auschwitz were 368,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes and 7.7 tons of human hair. In his preface, Jones promises to ‘tell it exactly as it was’ – ‘no exaggerations, no lies’. Facts like these need no embellishment. Suzy Ceulan Hughes (Review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council) -- Publisher: Y Lolfa

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Ron Jones, who has passed away since this book was first published in hardback, was from Newport in Wales. He was in a reserved occupation, as an engineer, at the start of the war, and only called up to join the Army due to an administrative error. Captured by the Germans in north Africa, he was a POW in Italy before ending up in Auschwitz. Joe Lovejoy has been a journalist for over 40 years, the last 30 with national newspapers in England. He was the chief football writer for the Sunday Times for 15 years and before that for The Independent. He is now semi-retired, but continues to freelance, mainly for The Guardian.

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