This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  23 October 2010

  I am to play you. Not an escaped POW, not one of the snob RAF, not some straight-bang Nazi. But the real you. Michael Paryla. I’ll live with the pressure. No bouts of insomnia. No fear of failure. No barbiturates. No milk. Nary a scar to my myocardium. I promise: eight o’clock, tomorrow, on location I will be. Look out the window onto the street. Look for a man your height. Pull back the curtains—eight-thirty at the latest—if not I’ll do this without you.

  The situation calls for an understudy.

  1 I gather it’s understood, there was a War on Steinmetz before the War on Michael.

  2 I’m no trapfuehrer, actually. I don’t like the sound of that word. I’m more like the camp forgers who work in relative safety under a window, using the daylight and an old fashioned typewriter and making the hand-lettered passes and tracing the juvenile insignias, without ever setting out on the journey itself.

  Incompleteness

  ON THE EVENING OF 20 JANUARY 1967, Michael Paryla was slated to perform in the role of Sempronius, a royal secretary, in Shaw’s The Apple Cart at Hamburg’s illustrious Thalia Theatre. Instead, that same evening, he was found in a coma in his apartment and rushed to the St Georg Hospital, where he died. On the bed table the firemen discovered a bottle of pills and a glass half-full of whiskey mixed with milk. He did not leave a suicide note and the police investigation into his death found no evidence of foul play. After the autopsy, his body was transferred from Hamburg by train to Munich and buried at Waldfriedhof, in a plot only kilometres from the giant sound stages at Bavaria Film Studios, where the camp interiors for The Great Escape, including the tunnels sequences, were filmed.

  Three years after my trip to Germany, I often revisit the hour I spent at Waldfriedhof. I remember, I stood by the side of his grave and, as his father had, many years before, I spoke to his memory. What did I ‘speak to his memory’? Alas, poor Michael, something less Shakespearean than Karl Paryla might have contrived on the spot. Still, there I stood, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the sky, when I hit an impasse, staring too long at his headstone. He had escaped with hardly a scratch. Michael Paryla. No date of birth and year of death. So I addressed some final words to him and then, as I was leaving the spot, I kissed my hand and pressed my palm to the stone. Ruhe in Frieden. I felt my tears coming and I let them go. Sleep in Peace.

  Well, the point is, it is no longer a reliable memory. I have put myself back there, so many times, under different guises, it is a wonder I have not been left in Waldfriedhof in place of Michael, and him returned instead of me, to finish the story, one way or other, once and for all.

  His life, like many true stories, feels incomplete. That’s the thing. Not because of how he died, under circumstances I have done my best to describe, and not because he departed young without making good on his promise and potential. I don’t believe his life was cut short; hadn’t it already begun to reveal a recurring pattern? We might retrace his steps—we may owe it to him to follow every trail to the end—and try to guess at the meaning of his life, but the fact of the matter is some truths are unprovable, and maybe our fundamental dissatisfaction with open endings has to do with this: our desire for closure exceeds what is knowable. More devastating, perhaps, is that neither physical or circumstantial evidence nor proof of cause or natural history can be relied upon for human understanding.

  Whenever I feel lost, I read from Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape. On page 121 begins Brickhill’s Ode to Al Hake and Stalag Luft’s Compass Factory.

  Al Hake made his compass production line in a room in 103. He made the compass casings out of broken gramophone records, heating bits until they were soft as dough then pressing them into a mold. Artists painted the points of the compass accurately on little circles of paper, and they fitted neatly into the base of the casings. He sank a gramophone needle in the center of the base for the needle pivot. The direction needle itself was a bit of sewing needle which he rubbed against a magnet. With a great delicacy he soldered a tiny pivot socket to the center of the magnetized needles. (The solder came from the melted joints of bully beef tins, and he dug the resin for the soldering out of the pine trees, and after the pine trees were cut down, out of the resinous wood of the huts.) Valenta even got him some luminous paint for the needles so they could be used at night without the danger of striking matches. 1

  Glass for the compass tops he took from bits of broken window. If there weren’t any broken windows handy, he broke one himself and then cut the pieces into circular disks under water so the glass didn’t crack or chip. He made a little blow lamp out of a fat lamp and some thin tubing rolled out of old food tins. Through the tube he blew a gentle jet of air against the flame, playing it around the rim of the compass case, and when it was melting soft he pressed in the glass and there it set, tight and waterproof.

  Al Hake’s factory produced more than 250 compasses in this manner. The POWs professionally engraved an inscription in the bottom of the casings, ‘Made in Stalag Luft III’.

  I sit at a table with the book flat before me using a pencil to underline text, drawing my own subterranean network for emphasis, until I realize how useless that is: with Brickhill there is nothing superfluous. What is, is, and what is not, is not there. When I turn back several pages, I read aloud about how the POW’s hid the tools they had amassed while digging the tunnels and working on their escape plan. False walls and trap doors concealed storage spaces. In hut 110, Brickhill tells us, a prisoner nicknamed Little S “cut out bits of the inside of books so the chisels and pliers fitted flush inside and were never noticed unless the book was opened; and the ferrets, fortunately, never went in for literature.”

  *

  There is no saving Michael Paryla. I accept, I do accept that. Off camera, he was free to make the world his stage–at liberty to play the clown or fool or tragic hero, the prodigal son, or an absurd minor character in search of meaning and his creator. I appreciate the old Stanislavski trick that the first truth in acting is circumstance, and understand that off the mark circumstances can be difficult, for some, unbearable, prohibitive, agonizing. I do understand, I do, that at times to continue moving forward, through the day, and through the night, amounts to a severe challenge on par with tunnelling 350 feet horizontally under the watchful eyes of a tight-knit community of Hundfuehrers and Ferrets, from inside a camp built by a group of future Hall of Fame War Criminals.

  What comes to mind is Michael’s grand exit, his all-time-forever escape from money problems and bouts of insomnia, from simmering insecurity and feelings of inadequacy, from stage fright and sideswiping gusts of despair. His escape from a broken heart, for too long locked from the inside.

  Escape. What is it about escape? Appell is taken early at my desk in the forgery factory. I pass the hours in the compound of this desire. How shall I put it? I remember well that it is every prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. In Brickhill’s world, this was part of ‘carrying on the war by other means.’ Prisoners were bound by a sense of duty and tactical motivations: escape attempts created chaos inside the enemy territory, and diverted attention from the front lines. The more brazen an escape attempt, the more it invited reprisals from the enemy power, often in the form of harsh collective punishments.

  In 1929, the International Committee of the Red Cross drew up a draft of the Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and presented it at a high-level diplomatic conference meeting in Geneva. Germany was one of the first nations to sign the Geneva Convention, expanding upon the protective rights of prisoners of war and making escape attempts from prison camps legitimate. Article 50 of the treaty stipulated: “Escaped prisoners of war who are re-captured before they have been able to rejoin their own armed forces or to leave the territory occupied by the armed forces which captured them shall be liable only to disciplinary punishment.” The fair-minded language of Article 50 is a long way from the v
erbal communication of the Sagan Order, commissioned in 1944 by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. The Sagan Order sealed the fate of the recaptured prisoners of Stalag Luft III. The murders were premeditated. The executions were to be justified under the false pretence that the recaptured officers “were shot while trying to escape.” Would it be too much now to borrow the wording of this specious defence to describe Michael’s death, i.e. Michael was ‘killed while trying to escape’, which, if not a hapless description of suicide, is a useful variation on the theme? Thus we might understand that Michael was not trying to end his life, only trying to escape it. There is a difference. A legitimate difference.

  Art. Art carries on with life by other means. That’s what I say. Even failed breakouts free the spirit.

  In 2017, when stone comes down, I plan on being there, in Waldfriedhof, to see that everything goes according to plan. And when another goes in, after Michael comes out, he just might want to read from this.

  *

  2017

  -Ihre Pässe bitte?

  -Yes, of course. Here they are. My papers. Naturally I cannot say no. Take them from me at once.

  1 Flight lieutenant Ernst Valenta was one of the tunnel specialists, and was one of the 50 shot by the Gestapo after the March 1994 escape.

  Acknowledgements

  This book contains quotations from multiple sources, beginning with The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill, Faber & Faber, 1951; for my uses I referred to the Cassell Military Paperbacks edition of 2004. Line quotations from “The Seagull” are from Anton Chekhov Plays translated by Elisaveta Fen, Penguin Classics, 1951. Quotations from George Bernard Shaw’s “The Apple Cart” are taken from Project Gutenberg. Quotations from Ursula Hegi are from Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America by Ursula Hegi, Touchstone, 1998. Additional background information on the escape came from various sources, including A Gallant Company: The True Story of ‘The Great Escape’ by Jonathan F. Vance, I Books, 2003. For a knowledge-base and information on most everything and anything: Wikipedia. For an update on the so-called dead I visited the Rudolf Steiner Archive at www.rsarchive.org. For a guide to the making of the movie, I read Steven Jay Rubin’s Combat Films. American Realism: 1945-1970, Jefferson: McFarland, 1981. I visited time and again Rob Davis’ excellent website The Great Escape: www.elsham.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gt_esc/; and Don J. Whistance’s wonderful The Great Escape Locations Site: www.thegreatescapelocations.com. My time signatures in the chapter Movie Time refer to the 2004 MGM Home Edition Collector’s Set Special Edition. The Great Escape © 1963 Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. For a history of barbiturates I would like to acknowledge Dimitri Cozanitis’ “One Hundred Years of Barbiturates and their Saint”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Volume 97, December 2004.

  Over the ‘war’ years, I relied on many people for their support, knowledge, and generosity. I would like to thank and acknowledge the professionals who helped me tunnel through the research material: Mary E. Houde (McGill University Archives), Eric Berthiaume (Goethe-Institut Montréal), Edward Ned Comstock (USC Library), Dr. Christian Riml and Helma Türk (Tiroler Filmarchiv), Dr. Michaela Giesing (Hamburger Theatersammlung), Sandra Asche (Thalia Theatre). I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the escape committee: Dan Birkholtz, Simon Dardick, Mark Frutkin, Christoph Geyer, Joan Harcourt, Stephen Henighan, Robert Hutcheon, John Koensgen, Alen Mattich, my agent Hilary McMahon, Merle Moja, Ruediger Müller, Alice Petersen, Michael Robinson, for translation Claudia Rathjen, Carmine Starnino, PJ Tarasuk, Sonya Eva Tarasuk and Emil Tarasuk, Miriam Toews, Jonathan F. Vance, my parents Nicolas and Birgitta Steinmetz. For their openness and witness, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Michael H. Kater, Ken Taylor, Lois Rodger, Buddy Yukich, Sybille Sidden, Janine de Salaberry (Blum), Robert Carmichael, Terry Taft, Stephan Paryla-Raky, Nicolas Steinmetz, and Eva Stehr (in memoriam). Special thanks to John Leyton, aka Willie ‘Tunnel King’, for answering my call. And, for a cameo and his many truly astonishing insights and comments on an early draft, thank you so much Clayton Bailey.

  I could not have endured the long winters without camp serenaders, most of all Tallest Man on Earth, Bon Iver, Frank Ocean, Chopin, Gonzales, Miles Davis, and The Necks.

  There would not have been light at the end of the tunnel without the inspiration and encouragement of Dan Wells, and the care and craft of Chris Andrechek, Tara Murphy and Kate Hargreaves of Biblioasis.

  Most of all, I owe this great escape to my wife Jill Tarasuk for her encouragement and love and strength, and for making a fine martini.

  I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and City of Ottawa Arts and Culture Funding.

  About the Author

  Born in Montréal, Andrew Steinmetz is the author of a memoir (Wardlife) and two collections of poetry (Histories and Hurt Thyself). His novel, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, tells the story of his great-aunt Eva, who performed in one of the first touring productions of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera in 1928. An unusual fiction about memoir, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre won the 2009 City of Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Steinmetz is also the founding editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press.