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A name can be deceptive. Sergeant Charles Coward was far from a coward. In 1940, during the battle for France, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped several times, but, like many escapees, was caught and sent back to a PoW camp. Finally, as punishment for his repeated escape efforts, he was sent to a camp for PoWs attached to the notorious Auschwitz III slave labour camp.
Auschwitz III was only a few miles from the gas chambers. The slave labourers there worked on a project to create Germany's largest synthetic oil and rubber factory, Buna-Monowitz. At any one time, as many as 10,000 Jews were being held in the barracks of Auschwitz III, among them Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, sent out each day to the factory to harsh toil, often worked to death.
Coward had an ingenious idea. He persuaded other British PoWs to give him the precious chocolate from their Red Cross parcels, which he then used to bribe one of the SS guards, a sergeant major with a craving for Swiss chocolate. The SS man would then give Coward the bodies of prisoners who had died, including Belgian and French civilian forced labourers, whose non-Jewish identities Coward then gave to Jews - a few each night - as they were being marched back to their barracks from the factory. These 'substituted' Jews were then smuggled out of the camp altogether.
At least 400 Jewish slave labourers are believed to have been saved as a result of Sergeant Coward's efforts. When he died in 1976, the head of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem wrote to his family: 'We will long remember and pass on to our posterity Mr Coward's heroic and selfless actions, which he rendered in service to his fellow men.'