The Great Escape (33 page)

There didn’t seem to be any common factor in the shooting. Why shoot some and send others back? Al Hake had had badly frostbitten feet and was in no condition to try to escape again. Yet he’d been shot. And no one was wounded. So they certainly hadn’t been shot trying to escape again. We began to think once more it must be a bluff.

And then the Germans brought back the kit of the fifty that they had taken on the morning the repatriates left. A couple of days after that, they brought in some of the personal belongings of the missing fifty — photographs, and things like that. Some of them were bloodstained.

A fortnight later it was all put beyond doubt. The Kommandant informed the new S.B.O., Group Captain Wilson, that there had been delivered to him the urns carrying the ashes of the fifty. No need to ask why they had been cremated. It destroys the evidence of the manner of death.

Engraved on each urn was the locality where death had occurred. Four were engraved “Danzig,” and just four of the escapees had been making for Danzig. Four were marked “Hirschberg,” two more with the name of a town near the French border. There were several from Leignitz and a lot from Breslau. Still we couldn’t find any common factor in the shootings. The only clue was the round number of fifty. It was pretty clear they’d just taken fifty and shot them as an example. God knows that was logical enough under Hitler.

There was only one bright point in the whole affair. Bit by bit we pieced together information brought in by the tame guards and eventually established the fact that the rather staggering figure of 5,000,000 Germans had spent some of their time looking for the prisoners, and many thousands of them were on the job full time for weeks. That meant that the break was some sort of success, if one could overlook the heavy cost.

The Kommandant got us some stone and let a working party go to a near-by cemetery to build a vault for the urns. There was already a row of graves in that cemetery where other victims from the camp had been buried.

Fifty were dead. Fifteen were back with us. We wondered what had become of the other eleven.

In June a letter came in the prisoners’ mail signed with two prearranged fictitious names. Rocky Rockland and Jens Muller had made it back to England, via Sweden.

They had got to Kustrin, near Frankfort on Oder, the morning after the break and changed trains there. By evening they were in Stettin. Everything went smoothly. They met some Swedish sailors whose ship was about to sail for home, and the sailors took them on board and hid them. The Germans checked the ship before it sailed but did not find the stowaways. At dawn the next day they landed in Sweden, and a few days later the R.A.F. flew them back to England. It was the perfect escape.

Weeks later another letter arrived signed with another fictitious name. Bob Van Der Stok had made it too.

Van Der Stok, Number 18 out of the tunnel, had traveled alone, wearing a dark-blue Australian Air Force greatcoat, Dutch naval trousers and a beret. As he came out of the woods by the station, a German soldier stopped him and asked him curtly who he was and where he thought he was going. Before the shaken Van Der Stok could answer, he went on, “Don’t you know there’s an air raid on? You should be in a shelter.”

“I know,” Van Der Stok apologized, “but I am a Dutch worker and do not know where the shelter is.”

“Well, you’d better come with me,” the soldier said. “You’ll be all right. The police won’t touch you because I’m an armed guard from the prison camp back there.”

Van Der Stok went with him, feeling most peculiar, praying he wouldn’t be recognized. The guard took him right into the station booking hall and left him with an amiable smile. He brought his ticket to Breslau, looked around and recognized several prisoners from the camp standing around. He thought it would be safer to get into conversation with a German and began talking to a girl standing near by. She shook him considerably by telling him she was a censor from the camp and on duty at the station watching for officers trying to escape.

After a while she called a German military policeman and asked him to question two men of whom she was suspicious. She pointed to Kirby-Green and Kidder. The policeman crossed to them, and they started talking fast in Spanish and waving their hands. After a while the policeman came back to the girl and said she needn’t worry. They were only Spanish workers. Van Der Stok was sweating.

He was thankful the train to Breslau was so full that he could only just squeeze himself in. It meant the security police couldn’t walk through it checking papers. By 4 A.M. he was in Breslau and, producing his papers at the booking office, bought a ticket all the way through to Holland. On the station he counted ten other escapees. There was no trouble going to Dresden where he changed trains, and at Halle he changed again to a through train for Holland. The journey took thirteen hours, and every four hours the Gestapo walked through checking the papers of every passenger. The funny thing was that the Germans, including the soldiers, had much more trouble than Van Der Stok. One poor little gefreiter who had one stamp missing from his pass was handed over to the military police.

At the Dutch border the Gestapo peered very closely at his papers but again he was completely unsuspected. He got off at Utrecht and found some old friends who sheltered him. It was just thirty-six hours after he had left the tunnel.

He waited six weeks in Holland till the Dutch underground fathered him to the south of Holland and smuggled him into Belgium across the Maas in a skiff. On the other side they gave him a bicycle and he pedaled to Brussels, to a Dutch family, and lived with them another six weeks before the underground could get him on a train for Paris, traveling now as a Flemish employee of a big Belgian firm. It was just before the invasion and during an “alert” they stopped outside a station on the way. Just as well. A formation of American Fortresses pattern-bombed it and wiped it out.

He had been told to make for Toulouse, and at St. Lazare Station in Paris, where he bought his ticket, they told him he must get it stamped at German control in the station.

He took it to the German who said, “You must have a special permit to go to Toulouse before I can stamp this.”

“I’ve
got
a permit,” Van Der Stok said. “Otherwise how could I have got my ticket?”

“Oh,” said the German, “of course,” and stamped it.

In Toulouse Van Der Stok found a group of guides who were taking refugees across the Pyrenees — for a price. He sold his watch for 10,000 francs, handed the money over, and was taken to a farm high up in the mountains. Three days later he walked to the rendezvous on a hill and down the road saw a German barrier with sentries and machine guns. Standing watching, he saw the car with his guide and three other men race toward the post, and as it got near, the men in the car opened up with Sten guns and shot their way through, killing all the sentries. A moment later they drove into machine-gun fire from another German post down the road, and the car stopped and burst into flames. No one got out.

At the farm there were now twenty-seven of them stranded — two Dutchmen, two American pilots, two Canadians and twenty-one German Jews. That night Van Der Stok made contact with a band of Maquis on a near-by hill. They provided another guide. The Maquis did not trust the refugees. On the way to the frontier the refugees walked in single file, four Maquis just behind them with Sten guns.

The Maquis stopped after a while and pointed to a saddle back in the mountains.

“Beyond that,” they said, “is Spain. Good luck,” and left them.

A few days later, Van Der Stok was in Madrid. The British Consul sent him on to Gibraltar, and he was flown back to England. It was just four months since he had crawled out of the tunnel.

So eight were still missing. It wasn’t till after the war we found out what had happened to them. Plunkett and the two Czechs, Tonder and Dvorack, were sweating it out in Czech concentration camps. The Gestapo had arrested all of Tonder’s relatives. Van Wyeermisch was held in another concentration camp. The Gesatapo shot his father in Belgium.

Wings Day and Tobolski had been taken to the police chief in Stettin. He was an affable man and told them they had been caught through a young Frenchman in the labor camp where they had sheltered. The young Frenchman had got 1,000 marks for betraying them.

“That’s a bloody dirty trick,” said Wings, disgusted. “I’d like to wring his neck.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said the police chief, who was a very practical man. “When we’ve no more use for him, we’ll tip off his friends about him. They’ll wring his neck for you.”

Day and Tobolski were taken by train to Berlin, and there, on Stettiner Bahnhof, Tobolski was taken away and Wings didn’t see him again.

They took Day to Kriminalpolizei headquarters and escorted him into an office where a thin-lipped, white-haired man covered in braid and badges (it was General Nebe) said to him, “You’ve been giving us a lot of trouble.”

“It’s my duty to escape,” Wings said.

“Well, we’re sending you where you won’t give any more trouble.”

Wings thought it was a polite way of telling him that he was to be shot, and did not feel very comfortable when he was taken out and put in a car. They drove for an hour and pulled up outside a high stone wall that encircled Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp north of Berlin. Day was pushed into a small compound close inside the wall, and there he found the Dodger, Dowse, and James. In the same compound were some Irish soldiers (always fighting), some Russians generals, Italian orderlies, and a British commando, Major Jack Churchill.

There were no ferrets in the compound. They had never been needed. No one had ever escaped from Sachsenhausen, except horizontally in a wooden box. Two weeks later, the five Britons started tunneling, without telling any of the others, because they were not sure they could trust them and there would have, been an enormous row if the tunnel had been found.