Then came the sirens, and the three escapers pushed their way through the civilian workers in front of them before jumping a fence and running across a scrub field. Beyond it was a railway embankment, which the escapers climbed up. As they fought to catch their breath, 20 guards with police dogs approached, prompting Prouse and his comrades to slide down the other side of the embankment and run into a dense evergreen forest.
Since the dogs weren’t bloodhounds and couldn’t pick up the scent, the guards fired shots in the hope of flushing out the escapers. Over the course of his six long hours in hiding, Prouse, misremembering his high school Shakespeare, imagined, “a thousand deaths.”119 By mid-afternoon the searchers had given up, but the escapers didn’t leave the wood until near 10 p.m., when they walked through an unusually cold late-April night to a freight yard, where they climbed onto a boxcar. Sometime before dawn they jumped from the moving train, and found a deserted shack in which they grabbed a few hours’ sleep, then a shave.
This last was important, because Kassel, the town they walked to upon waking, was a good size and still undamaged, and its residents prided themselves on their propriety. The escapers’ appearance and Kriegie Tom Glassey’s German passed muster at the ticket counter and on the train to Warburg—and in the Warburg station’s restaurant, where he ordered a round of beers. Before long, they were sleeping, their heads resting on the table.
When he awoke, Prouse didn’t have time to worry about his bruised pride at having been put under by a single beer; of more concern were the German soldiers who had bedded down on the large round table. After slinking away to the toilets, where the escapers again shaved, Prouse nearly blew their cover by asking a station agent if the train pulling out of the station was going to Warburg. Prouse realized that in his poor German he’d asked if the train was going to the town he was already in. He ran to the train that was then boarding passengers for Arnsberg. A few moments later he spotted his companions, who had just boarded the train. Prouse sat next to a German soldier so enamoured with his own voice that, for the entire two-hour trip, he didn’t notice that all the Canadian ever said was “ja” or “nein.”
When they climbed down from the train in Arnsberg, Prouse was so focused on looking out for police and soldiers that he didn’t notice a woman. After knocking into him, the motherly-looking Frau whispered “Aufpassen!” (Watch out!), signalling that his disguise was anything but perfect. A short while later, after several worrisome looks from soldiers in the beer parlour, the escapers quietly got up and left. Years later, Prouse joked that when, once back on the street, they saw a troop of German soldiers walking toward them, and “cowardice being the better part of valour” they turned into a side street.
The side street ended at the foot of a hill, at the top of which they saw the ruins of the town’s castle. An “apparition in the shape of a very old man seemed to emerge from the ground,” Prouse recalled. The man, it turned out, was the caretaker of the castle, parts of which dated back 900 years. Napoleon had visited the castle during his bid to conquer Europe. The caretaker gave them something to eat and drink, and then a tour, never asking who they were, what they were doing there, “nor commenting on Tommy’s quiet translations of the commentary.”120
CHAPTER SEVEN
May–August 1943
The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of perdition assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me.
— PSALM 18 : 4 – 5
2 MAY 1943, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
PRIVATE JOHN GROGAN GIVES A GRAMMAR LESSON
For a moment, it looked as though the pretty Fräulein at the gate would put an end to his home run before it even began. “Prison life suits you. You look much better than your photo,” she said, signalling some doubt that she believed she was talking to Frank Hickey, a British soldier captured at Dunkirk. John Grogan’s compliment made her smile, and she waved him on.121
Grogan’s next few minutes were an idyll. For the first time since being captured at Dieppe nine months earlier, the man who had grown up just east of Algonquin Park saw ahead of him not barbed wire and watchtowers but something soothing and familiar: tall pine trees. He tamped down the fear that swept over him when he realized his escape partner hadn’t made it through the gate by concentrating on the wonder of “civilians moving about their ordinary tasks.” It is a measure of how artificial life in a POW camp is that four decades later, Grogan remembered the details of an old man smoking a pipe and girls skipping rope.
The “strange feeling of freedom” extended even to his meeting with some Hitlerjugend who showed off their “Sieg Heils” to the soldiers marching the POWs to the train station and the English they learned at school to the “Engländer.” “Who, whom … is going to win the war?” asked one brown-shirted teen, who was as surprised by Grogan correcting his shaky grasp of the distinction between the subjective and the objective case as Grogan’s grade eight teacher back in Renfrew, Ontario, would have been pleased. “Who is correct, not whom.” As for who was going to win the war, Grogan answered, “England.”
3 MAY 1943, STALAG VI-G/Z, ARNOLDSWEILER, GERMANY
ROBERT PROUSE SEES THE WALKING DEAD
Czech workers, Robert Prouse and his escape partner later discovered, were barred from Munich, but it wasn’t their cover story that aroused suspicions: it was the faded Red Cross on the bag holding their provisions. Later, the backwards swastika on their Arbeitspass gave the Gestapo a chuckle.
There was nothing funny about their body search, which included a painful examination of their penises, or about POW camp in Arnoldsweiler. The factory manager at Arbeitskommando 1049 violated Prouse’s Geneva rights by making the NCO work, but during the long winter months he allowed the prisoners to mount plays, concerts and boxing matches. By contrast, the 13 days at Stalag VI-G/Z seemed something out of Dante’s Inferno.
Shortly after arriving, Prouse was led to a shower room, where he saw a group of Russians, most just “naked human skeletons, so far gone that the force of the showers knocked them off their feet.” A short while later, another POW stopped him from passing them some food, saying, “It’s a waste … they’re going to die soon anyway.”122 Starvation did not kill all at the same time. Each day, men with sunken cheeks and collapsed buttocks, their bodies, having burned off what fat they could find, cruelly mocked by their bloated bellies, carried dead comrades to ditches outside the camp, where the bodies decomposed in the open.
LATE SPRING 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
VERNON HOWLAND’S JOB
Although a year earlier Vernon Howland had helped dig a tunnel, at Stalag Luft III he wasn’t assigned to work under RCAF Pilot Officer Wally Floody, who put what he learned working in the mines of Ontario to good use engineering the three most famous escape tunnels in history: “Tom,” “Dick” and “Harry,” all nearing the 60-foot mark and equipped with electricity and air-circulation systems. Each was shored up with slats taken from bunks and had rail systems to remove spoil. Nor was Howland one of the “penguins” who disposed of the earth, packed into eight-pound bags in each of their trouser legs.
Rather, as a member of the Communications Committee, at eleven o’clock each night, he was in Father Goudreau’s room listening on the hidden radio to the BBC news, paper copies of which were distributed to the barracks in the morning. (Goudreau never asked what the news was and found out only when the news sheet was delivered to his barracks.) If the goons burst into the hut, Howland’s job was to eat the message sheet, destroy the coils and hide other parts of the radio under the barracks’ toilet before sitting on it, hoping that the delicacy of the situation would carry the moment.
6 MAY 1943, ARBEITSKOMMANDO E192, OELS, POLAND
GROGAN MEETS THE KRANKER
The “Kranker” was every bit an Allied soldier. Most of the time, all he needed to do was apply just enough force to dislocate a finger or shoulder and voilà, a Kriegie passed muster on the sick parade. (Krank i
s German for “sick.”) RCAF pilot Ken Hyde recalled one time, however, when a Kranker’s art stymied the Germans who found the body of an informer naked in the latrine with no signs of violence but quite dead.
In the moments between when Grogan realized he’d been surrounded and when the barracks leader, “Taffy,” called out in his Welsh accent for the Kranker, Grogan fought to keep his story going. Fearing that he might be a German plant, but thinking that he might be a swapover from the RAF, Taffy asked, “What squadron do you belong to?” Grogan answered, “The Second Eleventh”—an Australian tank battalion. A rough voice called out, “What’s your fucking game?” Grogan didn’t answer, and his throat went dry when the Kranker arrived carrying two pieces of wood and an iron rod, asking if he should start with “two fingers.” Seeing that he was unable to speak, Taffy gave Grogan some water, saying, “You are not an Australian, and you do not belong to the Second Eleventh battalion,” adding that if Grogan’s response wasn’t acceptable, he’d be turned over to the Kranker.123
Not knowing how he’d substantiate his story, Grogan said, “I am a Canadian, taken prisoner at Dieppe…. I swapped over with Frank Hickey of the Second Eleventh Australian battalion to get to a work party.” He was trying to escape, he continued. The words “Good old Canada” were music to Grogan’s ears but cut no ice with Taffy, who called a soldier named Reggie over. Grogan answered his first question, “Who is Jiggs’s wife?” without missing a beat. When he answered the second question equally quickly, the men who had been ready to kill him cheered. Later, Reggie told him that they were alarmed because no one in the barracks could place his accent. Grogan asked, “Did you ever visit the Ottawa Valley?”
Over the next few weeks, Grogan practised his German with the German and Polish workers with whom he unloaded bags of wheat. On the railway line that ran by the siding where they worked, trains passed that were made up of hundreds of cattle cars. Through the slats, Grogan could see teenaged girls, their hair shorn and with yellow Stars of David pinned over their breasts, staring through the barbed-wire covered openings. A guard told him that they were being moved to a “new modern camp, where they would be treated well,” just outside the Polish village of Oéwięcim, known in German as Auschwitz.
10 MAY 1943, BRNO, EASTERN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
ANDREW CARSWELL AND HIS ESCAPE PARTNER SURPRISE THEIR JAILOR WITH THEIR EXERCISE REGIMEN
The camaraderie of their first few nights in custody didn’t last long. Their first jailor, a Czech, fed them well out of his own rations and, after John Donaldson asked whether his Blaupunkt radio could pick up England, listened with them to a BBC show, the English escaping the jailor, while Red Skelton’s North American humour escaped Donaldson but not the Canadian, Andrew Carswell. Their second jailor, a German, was a “good-natured, heavy-set scoundrel,” who at least shared the cigarettes he had confiscated from them, though he saw no need to augment their diet of turnip soup and hard black bread.124
After a few days of sharing a cell that was so small they had to take turns pacing it, and disagreeing about every subject they talked about, and despite the fleeting pleasures of seeing their jailor’s buxom daughter, their nerves reached a breaking point. When Donaldson began his favourite rant—that RCAF sergeants merited less respect than a British Army private—Carswell said something insulting about Donaldson’s parentage.
The British soldier stopped in his tracks, turned and punched Carswell. Thanks to his boxing training, Carswell recovered quickly and landed a blow on Donaldson’s nose. As they rolled on the floor punching madly at each other, their stool and a bucket paid the ultimate price. When a guard rushed in yelling, “What’s going on?” Donaldson replied, “We were just exercising … We do this to keep fit.”
Their anger unspent, they refused to speak to each other for several days, until they realized the ridiculousness of preferring to speak only with their captors. The guard who took them back to Stalag VIII-B a few days later was surprised that they had taken express and freight trains instead of ordinary passenger trains, on which they could have blended in with workers.
25 MAY 1943, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
FATHER GOUDREAU IS GIVEN A TYPEWRITER
Even Hermann Glemnitz, the guard nicknamed “Dimwit,” knew something was up. So it is impossible to believe that Father Goudreau, notwithstanding his protestations to Father Ducharme about the monotony of the camp, knew nothing about the plan for some Kriegies to escape by walking out of the camp in faux German uniforms. Wally Floody definitely knew, and his time in captivity and his good German should have merited him a chance to escape, but the Escape Committee said he was more valuable directing the digging of the tunnels.
The German censor familiar with Goudreau’s recent letters could be forgiven for thinking that the priest was something of an ingrate. A week earlier, he complained about the vulgarity of answering a friend’s letter in the scant seven lines allotted to a card. Now he was writing a typewritten letter of several hundred words, and he could think of no better way to begin than by grousing about the mail delivery: Father Ducharme’s December 1942 letter arrived at the same time as his February 1943 letter. By mid-1943, censors had read thousands of complaints about being “cooped up behind barbed wire.” Few, however, were as eloquent Goudreau’s: “After three years of walking around like a bear in a barbed wire cage, your ‘directives’ are necessary for a compass that has gone crazy.”
If noted at all, the sentence that ended a card the priest wrote a week later must have seemed just one more example of pious nonsense. But the elegant writer of French made sure that Rev. P.J. Forget would notice it. “When we cultivate flowers that are too beautiful, the divine gardener comes to pick them” is even more awkward in French than it is in English. Goudreau knew too that Forget would catch the echo of the final sentence of Candide, “Let us cultivate our garden,” written by the arch-atheist Voltaire, and thus ponder Goudreau’s garden just at the time it was one of the places Floody’s men used to hide spoil from the tunnels.
29 MAY 1943, PARIS
IAN MACDONALD IN THE CITY OF LIGHT
The beat-up tam-o’-shanter was dark brown and not tartan, so it could do duty as the ubiquitous French beret, which together with the dark shirt, worn trousers, old jacket and small suitcase constituted Ian MacDonald’s disguise on the train trip from Sainte-Flavie to Paris. Six months earlier, Sydney Smith relied on Tante Dédée’s wiles to protect him on the train to Bordeaux. If MacDonald and “Parky” Parkinson were stopped, their hopes lay with their forged documents, as both were well aware as they followed at some distance their helper, another young French woman risking her life for the Allies, onto the train to Paris.
“I’d been in Occupied France for a month and a half, and through Dr. Lupanov’s window I’d seen many gendarmes, but it was only when we got off the train in Gare du Nord that I saw a German soldier in the flesh,” recalls MacDonald. “Not just one but dozens, seemingly of every rank. Our instructions were to look at the crowd as though we were looking for familiar faces.”
They did but with their hearts in their mouths. As the minutes passed, MacDonald worried that their contacts weren’t there. His stomach tightened when a German soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder started toward them.
Seventy years later, the scene still unrolls for MacDonald in slow motion. He was scanning the crowd. The soldier started toward them, looking as if he was going to ask a question. Not knowing any German and fearing that only a fool would miss the Nova Scotian accent behind his “Je ne sais pas,” MacDonald took what he hoped looked like the most natural of steps backwards, thus putting him slightly out of the soldiers’ line of march and making it more natural for the soldier to speak to the man behind MacDonald. To his surprise, it worked: the German soldier walked by and spoke to that man. MacDonald was still silently catching his breath when he noticed a couple discreetly signalling to him.
The street signs themselves signalled danger, for atop the French stood th
e street’s name in German Gothic script. Still, MacDonald found being in Paris exhilarating as he and Parkinson followed Louis Vion and his wife down likely what is now rue de Dunkerque, across a wide boulevard and then onto the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Montmartre, to 7 rue Tardieu, a shabby five-story sandstone building with small shops on the first floor.
MacDonald marvelled at both the beauty of the Sacre-Coeur Basilica, which rises over Montmartre like a Catholic Taj Mahal, and the bravery of the men and women who risked everything for young men so far from home. Had he known that the boxes behind the shop windows were empty and that, according to the collaborationist general René de Chambrun, the food situation in Paris had “reached its critical point” and that on the black market potatoes went from six times their official price of 148 francs a kilogram, MacDonald would have been even more impressed with the personal sacrifice undertaken by the family that hid him and Parkinson.125
As had Smith, Parkinson and MacDonald posed as visitors coming to see the sights, which explained why they spent so little time in the apartment (thus limiting the chances neighbours might overhear an unguarded English word or two). On one of their walks, the Vions’ daughter took them to a photographer’s shop, where each was supplied with an identity card and a travel pass to the south. MacDonald became “Guy Labourer,” a barber, and Parkinson a schoolteacher.
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