The Great Escape (32 page)

And how, inquired Dr. Absalon, could so many people get into Block 104 on the night of the break without being detected? Rubberneck said we must have dug small tunnels from near-by blocks leading into 104. To prove it, he put on several surprise searches of the near-by huts, which proved, of course, nothing but gave time for official wrath to subside.

After the unfortunate effects of blowing up “Tom,” they didn’t quite know for a while how to destroy “Harry,” but settled it finally by pouring sewage from the honey wagons down the 104 end, sealing it with concrete, and then blowing up the other end. Rubberneck resumed his patrolling of the compound with a churlish glitter in his eye, though no one bothered very much about that except the other ferrets who became more prudent in their lead-swinging.

We heard that Marshall, Ogilvy, Royle, and McDonald had arrived in the cooler. Jennens saw Pop Green and Poynter going into the cooler too. Then eight more were reported in the cells, having returned, it was said, from a town south of Sagan called Goerlitz. Next we heard Neely was locked up there. That made fifteen returned out of the seventy-six who had got clear of the tunnel. It was puzzling; hard to believe that only ten had been caught, considering the tough conditions for the hardarsers. We assumed that some had been purged to other camps — perhaps to Kolditz Strafelager.

A fortnight after the break it seemed that things were more or less normal again. The thaw had come and people were pounding the circuit without their greatcoats, reveling in the crisp air. With spring we were expecting the invasion almost any moment, and invasion meant the end of the war. We were just beginning to understand that release, some day, might actually become a reality instead of a dream.

On a morning in early April, Pieber walked into the compound, went straight to Massey’s room, and saluted politely. Would the Group Captain be good enough to wait on the new Kommandant in the kommandantur at 11 A.M., bringing his official interpreter.

“What does he want?” asked Massey. “Is he going to announce more reprisals against us?”

Pieber’s face was unusually solemn as he answered.

“I cannot tell you, Group Captain Massey, but it is something very terrible.”

That rumor spread round the compound. No one worried very much. There had been fifty rumors since the break, some of them much worse than this one, and anyway Pieber was an old woman!

Just before eleven o’clock, Massey was escorted out of the gate with his personal interpreter, Squadron Leader Wank Murray. They were kept waiting only a few moments in the kommandantur, and then they were shown into the Kommandant’s office, a normal barrack room, but with a carpet, a leather chair, a large desk, and on the wall behind it the standard décor of Luftwaffe offices — photographs of Hitler and Goering.

Oberst Braune was standing behind his desk, a fairly tall man of about fifty with a lined, rather sad and patient face, fair, thinning hair and the Iron Cross, first class, on his left breast pocket. Usually, when the Kommandant and the Senior British Officer met officially, there was a formal handshake and the usual military courtesies. This time, no handshake. Braune gave a stiff, slight bow and indicated to the two officers that they were to sit on two chairs that had been placed by the desk. Simoleit and Pieber were standing beside the desk and looking at the carpet.

The Kommandant stood up very straight and spoke in German.

“I have been instructed by my higher authority to communicate to you this report….” He paused and Murray translated so far to Massey. Braune continued: “The Senior British Officer is to be informed that as a result of a tunnel from which seventy-six officers escaped from Stalag Luft III, North Compound, forty-one of these officers have been shot while resisting arrest or attempting further escape after arrest.”

Murray felt himself going red in the face. Unbelieving, he asked, “How many were shot?”

“Forty-one,” the Kommandant replied. Murray slowly translated the passage to Massey.

Massey listened in silence and made almost no sign that he was hearing except that he stiffened slightly in his chair and the lines of his face tightened. At the finish he said briefly, “How many were shot?”

Wank answered, “Forty-one.” He felt his face was bright crimson and the scene in the room seemed unreal.

There was a long heavy silence. It dragged on and on as they waited for Massey to do something, and Massey just sat there looking unseeing in front of him. The tension was nearly unbearable when he raised his eyes slowly and turned them on Murray.

“Ask him,” he said, “how many were wounded.”

Murray put the question to the Kommandant. The German looked uncertainly at a paper on his desk and then looked out of the window. He hesitated and then said, “My higher authority only permits me to read this report and not to answer any questions or give any further information.”

Massey said doggedly, “Ask him again how many were wounded.”

The Kommandant looked painfully uncomfortable. He looked out of the window and then down to his desk, trying to make up his mind, and after another hesitation he slowly said, “I think no one was wounded.”

“No one wounded?” said Massey, his voice rising a little. “Do you mean to tell me forty-one can be shot in those circumstances and that all were killed and no one was wounded?”

“I am to read you this report,” the Kommandant said, “and that is all I can do.”

Simoleit and Pieber had not taken their eyes off the carpet.

Massey asked for the names of the dead.

“I cannot give them to you,” Braune said. “I have not got them. I have only this report which I am to read to you.”

“I would like to have the names as soon as it is possible to get them,” said Massey.

“Yes, I will do that,” the Kommandant answered, and then, after another little hesitation he added more quickly, holding a hand up, palm out in a slightly appealing way, “I must remind you that I am acting under orders and may only divulge what I am instructed to by my higher authority.”

“What is this higher authority?” Massey asked.

Braune made a futile little gesture.

“Just higher authority,” he said.

“I require to know what has happened to the bodies so that I can arrange for burial and the disposal of their effects,” Massey said. “I demand that the Protecting Power also be informed.”

The Kommandant said that this would be done. He would let the Senior British Officer have every possible scrap of information as soon as he received it, but reminded him again he was always limited in action by “higher authority.”

He rose to his feet. “I think that is all, gentlemen.” Stiffly the two British officers withdrew, and as they emerged into the fresh air again Massey said to Murray, “Don’t mention this dreadful thing to anyone till I have released it in the compound.”

Murray still felt his face was crimson. Neither man felt like speaking, and Massey’s face was grimly set. On the way back to the barbed wire Pieber joined them. He seemed nervous and distressed, and said in a low voice, “Please do not think that the Luftwaffe had anything to do with this dreadful thing. We do not wish to be associated with it. It is terrible…terrible.”

Pieber at times may have been a hypocrite, but he wasn’t this time. He was a shaken man.

Half an hour later, back in the compound, Massey sent word around asking the senior officer in every room to report to the camp theater for an announcement. With the order came a rumor that “something dreadful” had happened. We were a little uneasy but it was only a rumor. We thought it meant reprisals were going to start in earnest — possibly we were going to lose Red Cross food parcels for a while. God knows that would be serious enough. German rations were just enough to ensure starvation in its most prolonged and unpleasant form.

About three hundred officers crowded into the theater for the announcement. Massey walked onto the stage, waited a few seconds while the rustling died down, and then spoke without preamble.

“Gentlemen, I have just come from a meeting with the Kommandant in which he told me the unbelievable, the shocking news that forty-one of the officers who escaped from the tunnel on the twenty-fourth of March have been shot.”

There was a stunned silence. A lot of people felt suddenly sick.

Massey went on to describe the meeting briefly. He would announce the names of the victims as soon as they were available. Just now there was little more that he could say. There would be a memorial service on the coming Sunday.

Still in a stunned silence, we filed out of the theater, and within two minutes the news had spread to everyone in the compound. Horror lay over the camp. Mass murder was something new in the quiet backwater of prison camp, however unpleasant the life was. A lot of us wouldn’t believe it. “I know the Huns are murderous bastards,” said a man in my room, “but they’ve never been game so far to murder British or American people openly in mass, and I can’t see their point in starting that sort of thing on relatively harmless prisoners.”

It about summed up the feeling. I suppose if the truth be known we wouldn’t believe it because we didn’t want to believe it. The mind builds its own defenses. Most of us thought that the whole thing was a bluff, that the forty-one had been moved to another camp, and that we, believing they were dead, would be intimidated into stopping all escape activity. But there was no getting away from the fact that it had been officially announced. We held a memorial service, and every man in the compound sewed a little black diamond on his sleeve.

The Kommandant was afraid there might be some sort of demonstration or revolt and ordered all the guards to be more watchful than usual — more ruthless if they had to be. When some of us were a little slow getting into our hut at lock-up time, a sentry in a goon-box sent a spray of bullets over our heads and a couple more zipping around our feet, kicking up little spurts of dust.

The air raid siren went one afternoon, a lovely sound. We got more kick out of watching American Fortresses draw their vapor trails across the sky than we ever got out of a barrel of raisin wine. The Germans knew it and ordered that whenever the sirens went we must run into our huts and pull the blackout shutters across so we couldn’t see anything. Some of us were a little slow getting inside when the siren went that afternoon, and one of the guards running in emptied his pistol magazine at us. He was a rotten shot, but several people sitting in their rooms in 109 jumped smartly out of the way when a couple of bullets plowed through their wooden wall. They drew rings around the bullet holes with a pencil and labeled them, “Easter Eggs, Sagan, 1944.”

A couple of minutes after that, a guard got an American sergeant standing innocently in the doorway of his hut in the next compound. The bullet went in his mouth and he died instantly. It was not exactly unprecedented for a guard to kill one of the boys, but it was an unfortunate time for another killing. Some of that nice insulation we had wrapped around our minds began to wear thin; the people who believed the forty-one were still alive grew fewer and fewer.

At dusk one day Eichacher pinned a piece of paper on the notice board. Someone passing looked at it casually and gave a shout. “Here are the names!” And in seconds there was a crowd around the board. For the benefit of those at the back a man yelled for silence and slowly read them out. There were little gasps and curses behind as people heard their friends named.

Someone said, “That isn’t forty-one! It’s forty-seven.”

A dozen people checked his count. He was right. Forty-seven!

It was a terrible list. Roger Bushell was on it. That wasn’t unexpected. The ever-courteous Tim Walenn was on it. So were Gordon Brettell, Henri Picard, Birkland, Casey, Willy Williams, Al Hake, Chaz Hall, Tom Kirby-Green, Johnny Stower, Valenta, and Humphries, who had been caught with Royle. Denys Street was on it, too. He was the son of the British Permanent Under-Secretary For Air. The Germans certainly hadn’t been discriminating.

Faced with the names we got back that stunned horror. Some of them were only kids, a year or two out of school. People stood about talking it over almost in whispers. Some still wouldn’t believe it wasn’t a bluff. Germany had been the first nation, in 1929, to sign the Geneva Convention, which lays it down that escape attempts from prison camps are quite legitimate and are not to be punished harshly.

A couple of days later another list was pinned to the board. It was a short one, just including the names of three more who had been shot — Tobolski, Cookie Long, and Danny Krol. It brought the names up to the round figure of fifty. It was noted that, with the exception of two Czechs, every non-Briton who had escaped had been reported shot.

A few days later a group of prisoners who had been badly wounded when they were shot down were taken out of the compound for repatriation to England. Massey was among them. About two hours before they left the compound the Germans called for all the kit of the fifty and took it all away.

It must have been rather senseless bluff. They knew the repatriates would tell everything they knew of the shootings when they got home, and presumably the Germans thought that the demand for the kit of the fifty would indicate that they had not, after all, been shot but removed to another camp.

None of it seemed to make sense. We’d been worrying ourselves sick over it for weeks when the few escapees who had returned came out of the cooler and back into the compound. We pumped them for news, and they, dazed by our news, wouldn’t believe the others were dead. Some of them had seen them taken from the cells at Goerlitz, presumably for another interrogation. They were perfectly all right then. It must be a bluff.