The Great Escape (31 page)

“No,” snapped the interpreter. “Forged papers and identity cards. Don’t be stupid. What did you do with them?”

Marshall looked surprised.

“Did the others have them?” he asked. “Lord, I wish I’d had some. Where did they get them? How could they possibly have got hold of identity cards —” and he rattled on and on. He talked garrulously and aimlessly, misunderstanding some questions, deflecting others, and branching off onto new subjects, trying as hard as he could to give the impression of an amiable and voluble pinhead. It was the same when they asked him about maps. (He’d had several good detailed maps.)

“Map?” he said. “Yes, I had a map. I made it myself from a war map of Europe in the
Voelkischer Beobachter
. It wasn’t very good. I think that’s why I was caught…” and off he went again on a long monologue.

The same with his clothes. He was wearing one of Tommy Guest’s suits, and it was one of Guest’s best efforts, dyed dark gray, and it had been topped off by a ski cap till they took his cap away.

“Of course you realize,” said the interpreter, “you can be shot as a spy for wearing civilian clothes around Germany.”

“Oh, this is only a uniform I changed about,” Marshall said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. “See, I recut it, put boot polish on it, and changed the buttons.”

“That’s a civilian suit,” the interpreter said.

Marshall denied it again and tried to show where he had altered it. “Bring in someone who knows about cloth, and they’ll tell you it isn’t a proper suit.”

The interrogator pressed a button on his desk, and his stenographer walked through the door from an adjoining room. The brusque man behind the desk pointed to Marshall and spoke to her in German, telling her apparently, to examine Marshall’s clothes. She stood in front of Marshall diffidently rubbing the cloth of his coat between bony fingers and looking at the seams inside. She was a gaunt, unhappy-looking woman, nudging the forty mark, with untidy gray hair and long features like a tired horse.

Covered by her head from the interrogator, Marshall smiled into her eyes, and faintly surprised, she smiled back. Turning to the man behind the desk, she said they were not proper civilian clothes but — demonstrating with her fingers — had seams where one usually found them on uniforms. She left the room, and Marshall answered more questions, but his diarrhea of words exasperated the German so much that he slapped the desk with his hand and called the guard from outside, and Marshall was taken back to the jail.

After four days when everyone had been questioned, prisoners were all depressed. They had no idea what was going to happen to them and could get no clues at all from the hostile wardens. Hunger was worrying them all the time, as they only got three or four thin slices of black bread a day and a little thin soup. By the fourth day there were hardly three words spoken an hour in any cell. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say, and there was nothing to do except lie there and think about food and what might happen to them.

A warden caught one of them standing on someone’s shoulders and looking out of the window. He hauled him roughly down and told them that the next man who looked out of the window would be shot. On the fourth afternoon, after all the sorting-out process of prisoners leaving one cell and being put back in another, Marshall found himself in the same cell as Royle, Ogilvy, and McDonald, a Scot with a patient and prematurely lined face.

In the morning they heard tramping along the corridor, and there was the sound of abrupt voices. Down the corridor cell doors were opening and there were sounds of shuffling feet as prisoners walked out. Ogilvy banged on the door till the guards came to take him to the latrine bucket, and on the way down he saw six of the prisoners being escorted out by several heavily armed men.

One of the prisoners was limping a little behind the others. It was Al Hake, and Ogilvy managed to whisper a few words to him. Hake said he had frostbitten feet. He thought they were going for another interrogation, and then the guards shouted angrily down the corridor and broke up the conversation.

“By God, they’re plug-uglies,” Ogilvy told the others when he got back to the cell. “Look like the same bunch that brought us from Sagan — same coats and black hats over their eyes. Must be Gestapo.”

One of them risked a bullet by standing up and looking out of the window and saw the six, surrounded by the guards, standing in the courtyard below. He watched as they climbed into the back of a covered truck, followed by the guards, and then the truck moved off and rolled out through the archway.

The next morning the four in Marshall’s cell heard more tramping feet and shouting in the corridor and more cell doors opening. They heard another party shuffling down the corridor and, looking out of the window again, saw ten more of their prisoners below herded into a covered truck with guards. They sat around all day tensely waiting their turn, but no one came for them. That evening when the cell door opened and a warden brought in their cabbage water and bread Marshall saw a big “S” had been chalked on the door.

“Good show,” he said. “
S
for
Sagan
. That must mean we’re going back to the camp.”

“Maybe it means
S
for
schiessen
” (shoot), said one of the others dryly, and there was a slightly hollow laugh.

That evening three Luftwaffe guards arrived in the jail and slept the night in the room opposite them. They told the four prisoners they were taking them back to Sagan in the morning. It was true. About 9 A.M., the cell door opened and the Luftwaffe guards escorted them down to the station and took them by train back to Sagan where they were pushed into the cooler for three weeks. This time it wasn’t solitary confinement. The cooler was so full that everyone had company in his cell.

After a couple of days they found out who else was in the cooler — Rees, Noble, Baines, Hutson, Reavell Carter, Langlois, Trent, McBride, and several other naughty boys, but none of the sixteen whom they had seen taken away in trucks from Goerlitz Jail.

It was curiously quiet in North Compound for a week after the break. We woke up every morning waiting for reprisals, and none came. It was a faintly unnatural atmosphere as the days passed, and we wondered what was going to happen to us. And on the seventh day the Gestapo arrived to search the camp — about six of them, hard-faced citizens who walked into the compound and looked at us coldly.

They hadn’t come across Air Force prisoners before, which probably accounts for their innocence. Presumably they’d only dealt with their own population and the nameless victims they collected in their dungeons — people too terrified and in no position to differ with them. We were, I suppose, privileged (if you could call it privilege). So long as we didn’t stick a nose over the warning wire or make public reference to Hitler’s ancestry, the Luftwaffe doled out the black bread and potatoes and didn’t go around the compound squirting tommyguns just for the hell of it. We were still under the Luftwaffe and generally outside the orbit of the Gestapo, and Goering wanted it kept that way.

The Gestapo curtly brushed aside any help from the ferrets and said they’d do the searches their own way. They let it be known, according to Eichacher, that they didn’t regard the ferrets as being either intelligent or efficient.

They dumped their coats and hats in the entrances of the huts and prowled around the rooms, emerging now and then with some of the nails we’d pulled out of the walls or a lump of iron they didn’t think we shoud have. These they piled beside their coats, and as they vanished again into the rooms one of the boys reached around the hut door and took away anything we particularly wanted to keep. I don’t think it ever occurred to the Gestapo that anyone would do that to them.

It seemed to be so successful that he got a little more daring and swiped one of the Gestapo hats. A couple more people joined in the game, and the idea seemed to snowball. One of them, with more zeal than discretion, rummaged in the pocket of one of the Gestapo overcoats and rushed up to Canton a minute later, grinning all over his face. He pulled his hand out of his jacket where he had been holding it like Napoleon, and there he was holding a little automatic pistol.

Unbidden, a little squawk of horror came out of the onlookers’ throats.

“For God’s sake,” said Conk, “put it back. Put it back. You’re making it too hot. You’ll start ‘em shooting.”

Nervously the man replaced the pistol, and luckily for him he wasn’t spotted. The Gestapo went off eventually, taking nothing we had particularly wanted to keep but leaving behind in the “X” secret cupboards a hat, two scarves, some gloves, another torch, and some Gestapo papers. I imagine they were too embarrassed when they found out to do anything about it. Besides it would have caused German casualties. All the ferrets would have died, laughing.

They descended on the other compounds then, both British and American, and searched them, presumably more cautiously, but again finding nothing of importance. Lamentably they were faced with failure of their mission, an unthinkable disgrace; so, in Gestapo fashion, they decided to search their own people in the kommandantur.

And, behold! Success at last! They unearthed a little blackmarket organization involving — you’ll never guess — Von Lindeiner and Von Masse. A Luftwaffe major who flew transport aircraft used to bring in choice wines and foods from Denmark, and they had a little store of the stuff under the kommandantur cookhouse. We heard that a German who wasn’t in on the game spilt on them to the Gestapo. Von Lindeiner was removed for court-martial.

The Gestapo got three more victims in their stay. They could not understand how we had obtained eight hundred feet of electic cable for the lighting system in “Harry.” Being Gestapo, they could think of only one thing. Someone had betrayed the Reich. They looked through the inventories of the camp electricians and found that eight hundred feet of cable had been lost. Too late for the electricians to protest that the cable had been stolen from them while their backs were turned. The Gestapo, soaked in suspicion for years, took the two electricians and also the chief electrician, who had been too scared to report the loss of the wire, and they shot all three.

A new Kommandant arrived. His name, we heard, was Oberst Braune, but we didn’t see him in North Compound. The expected reprisals came a couple of days later. He shut the camp theater, put on three appells a day, and refused to let us have Red Cross boxes or food tins. There seemed to be somthing wrong somewhere. These were only pinpricks. After thinking about it for a while we concluded that the new Kommandant wasn’t going to extremes, probably, because his own personal reputation had not been affected by the break.

Rubberneck was still around, having successfully talked himself out of trouble. According to a voluble ferret, Rubberneck had claimed that we must have finished the tunnel months before and bided our time to break it. We couldn’t have dug it recently because we couldn’t have dispersed the sand. They had found none under the huts, and we couldn’t have put it on the snow. It must have been dug at the same time as “Tom,” said Rubberneck.