Escape (11 page)

After the escape

Once they had reached Rome, Mussolini and Skorzeny took a larger plane on to Vienna, and from there on to Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler was at the airport waiting to greet them when they arrived. He was overjoyed to see his friend again.

But Mussolini's escape merely prolonged Italy's misfortunes in the war, and did not prevent Marshall Badoglio's government from changing sides in October, 1943. Ironically, the escape sealed Mussolini's fate too. When they met in East Prussia, Hitler was shocked at how old and dejected the Italian dictator looked. He seemed to have shrunk and become almost unrecognizable. Hitler was disappointed to see that Mussolini had also lost his appetite for power. All he wanted to do was go home to his family in Romagna and retire. But Hitler would have none of this.

With so many troops in Italy, particularly in the north, Germany was able to hold onto much of the country, and a reluctant Mussolini was set up as leader of a fascist republic in the north. He grew to hate Hitler, and for the rest of the war he remained little more than a German puppet. When the war ended he was captured by Italian guerrillas. As they placed him before a firing squad, he regained some of the spirit that had driven him to rule the country for 20 years. He unbuttoned his shirt and defiantly told his executioners to shoot him in the chest.

After his death, his body was taken to Milan and hung upside down in the main square. Hitler was determined that his remains would not meet a similar fate. With Germany on the brink of defeat, he shot himself and left orders for his body to be burned.

The raid at Gran Sasso brought Otto Skorzeny instant fame. In Germany his daring rescue made him a national hero, but to his enemies he became “the most diabolically clever man in Germany”. Skorzeny led several other daring missions before the war ended, including one in northern Europe where English-speaking German troops, wearing American uniforms and driving captured tanks and jeeps, spread panic among the Allied front line troops.

After the war, Skorzeny continued to lend his special talents to evil forces. Like many former Nazis he made his way to South America, where he helped to organize the Argentinean police into the most brutal force in South America. He was also said to have been involved with the “Odessa” organization, which smuggled former Nazi war criminals to countries in South America, where they would not be prosecuted for their crimes.

He eventually settled in Spain, which at the time was another fascist country sympathetic to former Nazis. Here he became a successful engineering consultant. He died in 1975, after a long, painful illness.

In the past, thousands of convicts from France were sent to prison camps in French Guiana, also known as Devil's Island. The main character in this story is fictitious, but all the events and circumstances described here are based directly on conditions in the prison camps and on actual reported incidents.

OK, so I'm a villain. I've done a lot of breaking and entering in my time. We did a villa near Nice in 1905. The owners had gone off on a cruise. The stuff they had in there… silver cutlery, a gold clock on the mantelpiece, and those paintings… Renoir, Rembrandt, and that modern one, Picasso. I don't know much about that stuff, but my friend Jean-Marie did. And he knew who wanted to buy it on the quiet. Frightening people, most of them, but they paid good money. We made millions of francs from that job. It even made the papers. “Priceless Paintings Vanish in Villa Break-in” said
Le Figaro
.

After that we settled down, and melted into the background. It was a nice life. But one of our gang got drunk in a bar and started bragging about it all. The next thing we know he's down at the police station. The cops beat him up and he told them everything.

The trial was brutal. The police painted us as super villains – really evil. Well, we're not. We might be villains, but we never killed anyone, and we never robbed anyone who wasn't stinking rich. They sent us all out to the prison colony in South America. You've never seen villains 'til you've been out to French Guiana. Some people call the place Devil's Island… Those prison camps are the most horrible, stinking, evil places on Earth.

At the end of the trial we all got ten years apiece, and then another ten on top of that, as “colonists”. That's the law. You do your sentence, then you stay there for the same amount of time, as a resident. No one in their right mind would stay in that cess pit voluntarily. That's why they turned it into a prison colony. France took over the country in 1817. No one went out to live there, so they sent convicts instead.

My wife Bernice, I let her go. We got divorced. A lot of couples did that when a man got sent there, even though they still loved each other. I said goodbye to her in 1907, just before they sent me over. We never thought we'd see each other again, and we haven't. My boys, they'll be men now… I daren't see them either. They wouldn't give me away to the cops, but someone else might, and I'd kill myself rather than go back there.

The trip over nearly did me in. They send a boat, the
Martinière
, twice a year. They shaved our heads, gave us these striped outfits, and marched us out to the docks at bayonet point. Then they packed us all into cages below decks, 90 at a time. It was horrible. You're fed from a bucket, and hosed down every morning with sea water.

As for my “companions”… what a lot! Thieves, swindlers, thugs, murderers. Even I would have sent most of them to the guillotine. I went over with René from our gang. We looked out for each other, but the things we saw. The man in the next bunk got stabbed in the night with a knife through his hammock. We found him in the morning, eyes wide open, stiff as a plank. They say he got robbed of 20,000 francs he'd smuggled on board. Another fellow, a crooked accountant, he went crazy. He started screaming. The guards sprayed him with a hose to calm him down and left him shivering. He got ill, and wouldn't eat or drink. They still left him in the cage though. He died on the morning we got there.

That's a moment I'll never forget. Eighteen days we spent at sea. There's nothing out of the portholes but flat, dreary ocean. Then, the boat reached the coast. As we made our way up the estuary to St. Laurent, the main town, the air changed. Instead of a salty sea breeze, we got something thicker and sicklier. Air that leached the strength from your body. Air that smelled of disease. We all knew we'd arrived in a hellish place.

I jostled for a look out of the porthole in our cage. The river was wide and I could see the bank about half a mile away. The jungle was an amazing shade of emerald, and so thick you wouldn't believe it.

“I'd hate to think what kind of snakes and insects are slithering around in that,” said René.

Every now and then, red and blue parrots would break cover above the trees and shimmer by. As we watched, we saw a huge eagle sweep from the sky and grab one. It was over in a second. It seemed like an omen.

The ship's crew started to look busy as we approached St. Laurent. All along the quay it seemed like the whole town had turned out to meet us. Chinese shopkeepers, the bushmen, the wives and children of the guards, all the prison officials in their spotless, white uniforms. They were all craning their necks towards the ship, curious to see who was arriving.

As we got closer, I saw something that made my flesh creep. Among the crowd were a few scarecrows… scrawny, dead-eyed men. Heaven help me, they looked like the walking dead in their ragged clothes, and they were covered head to foot in tattoos. These were prisoners who had survived their time as convicts, and were now serving out their time as colonists. I turned to René and pointed them out. He didn't say anything, but I could see him swallowing hard.

They herded us off the boat and we were marched through the prison gates, which were right next to the dock. We stood there in the main square of the prison, standing stiffly on parade in the stifling heat. There was a guillotine set up in a corner of the square, and I wondered how many times a year that got to do its horrible work.

The prison director was waiting for us. He was a little man in a white suit, and he climbed up the stairs of a platform in front of us and started to speak.

“You're all worthless scum,” he said, “sent here to pay for your crimes. If you behave yourselves you'll find life is not too unbearable. If you don't behave, you'll find yourselves in more trouble than you can imagine.”

He paused and looked over to the guillotine.

“Most of you here are already thinking about your escape. Well forget it! You'll have plenty of freedom in the camps and town. You'll find the real guards here are the jungle and the sea.”

That was that. We were marched off to the prison blocks and allocated a place in a dormitory. René and I got split up, which made me feel very, very anxious.

The first few weeks were a horrible haze, but I learned very quickly. I'm not a big man, but I'm solid. You wouldn't think I'm a pushover, but I had to fight for everything. You'd lose the blanket on your bed if you didn't stick up for yourself.

I don't know which was worse, the night or the day. By day you had to go out in work parties to the jungle, clearing away the trees and the creepers, so they could build roads, or set up farms. That was horrible. Sweat would pour off you, and insects would eat you alive. The guards kicked you or beat you with their rifle butts if you stopped to get your breath back.

I heard tales of men being shot on the spot by guards. These people had the power of life and death. Nothing would be done if they decided to bury you alive. One work party all hanged themselves rather than spend another day working for a guard they called “The Scourge”. Some of these guards were psychopaths. One of the prisoners in my dormitory, Henri Bonville, was a history professor who got sent here for murdering his wife. He told me our Emperor Napoleon III set the camps up in 1854. One of Napoleon's courtiers said:

“Who sire, will you find to guard these villains?”

Napoleon said:

“Why my good man, people more villainous than they are!”

And then there were the nights… We got locked in our dormitory. It was a huge, long room, and the heat was stifling. I'll never forget the stench of all those people. But the gang fights were the worst. I kept out of that, but barely a night would go by without someone being murdered.

After about six months René and I had found out all we needed to know about the place, and we reckoned it was time to escape. St. Laurent, where we were, was one of the better places to be. You could come and go during the day if you weren't on work duty, but you had to be back at the camp at night. The worst camps were deep in the jungle, and few of the convicts who were sent out there ever came back.

When we got to the colony in 1907, the word around the camp was that Venezuela was the best place to go. It's just up the coast, and they let you stay if they found out you were an escaped convict. At least they did until 1935. Then, the army wanted to get rid of the President, so they paid an escaped convict to kill him. He messed it up, and the President had all the convicts rounded up and returned to the camps.

Dutch Surinam, next to French Guiana, was a good place too, until another escaper burned down a shop that had refused to serve him. After that everyone from the camps got sent straight back. In Brazil they send you straight back if they catch you, but it's such a big place, it's easy to just disappear there. Argentina's good, though. There's lots of work in Buenos Aires for people like us. It's just an awful long way to get there.

René and I thought we'd try for Venezuela, so we hooked up with these two brothers Marcel and Dedé Longueville. They were huge, tattooed thugs. Not ideal companions, but handy if you're in a spot of bother. We all put up money we'd managed to smuggle in, or make while we were there, to buy this boat from a local fisherman. Another man joined us, a Parisian villain called Pascal, and his young friend who was only about eighteen. Then this fellow, Silvere, who was a sailor, joined us. He didn't put up any money. He said his sailing skills would pay for his place on the trip.