Spectator in Hell Colin Rushton (and Arthur Dodd) Summersdale, 255pp, £7.99 ISBN 1840241438

Arthur Dodd was serving in Tobruk, supplying ammunition to the tanks of the 7th Armoured Division, when he was captured by the Nazis. After gruelling marches and a series of short internments in various concentration camps, he ended up in Auschwitz, where he spent nearly two years until Liberation.

Colin Rushton's narrative is the ghost-written remembrance of Dodd's time in the worst extermination camp of them all. The story is one of despair, as you might expect, even if the vicarious narration distances the reader from Dodd's recollections. But, too often, particularly in the opening sections, Rushton descends into ugly tabloidese. An SS guard is a "sadistic monster"; "the Jews were dying like flies" (an ill-chosen cliche, because that is exactly how the Nazis viewed the Jews); and, after a portentous prologue, Rushton claims to be disclosing the "dark, satanic secrets of evil Auschwitz". In addition, much of the reported German - often in the form of guards' orders - is incorrect.

Spectator in Hell improves greatly, however, once Rushton overcomes his desire to simplify and sensationalise, and allows Dodd's own voice to emerge. As an English POW, Dodd fared better than the vilified Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, and therein lies the book's chief interest. What could Dodd do to alleviate the suffering of his fellow prisoners? And how, to echo Primo Levi, could he cope with the "feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist"?

Through Rushton, Dodd relates how English POWs did what they could for the Jews, saving them food, offering clothes, arguing with SS guards (at great personal risk). But, in the end, they were powerless to prevent the relentless killing.

Employed as skilled labourers by the German chemical company I G Farben, the English POWs (at one time, there were 1,100 of them in Auschwitz and its subsidiary camps) did their best to sabotage the production of synthetic rubber. In this, they were quite successful.

Dodd's story is a tale of courage, catastrophe and luck. He was severely beaten by the SS for trying to build a radio. He helped local Poles dynamite the chemical factory. He once even escaped the camp, only to be recaptured, his crime miraculously overlooked. His experiences form a visceral remembrance: the death of 15 fellow prisoners at the hands of their own bombers close to the end of the war, and, most vividly, the death-marches to freedom, passing the bodies of emaciated, murdered Jews.

For Dodd, it was his faith in God that kept him going through the two years of his internment - he hid a Bible in his block, which he read twice. He has since been haunted, like most survivors, by nightmares, which try to make sense of the horror and helplessness he experienced. Indeed, aided by survivor testimonies, which bring a human dimension to the inhuman scale of the Holocaust, trying to make sense of it is perhaps the best we can do.

James Hopkin worked on the English translation of The Jews of Bedzin, which was published in January by the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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