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We had a very much more relaxed day today. Catie and Phoebe decided they were having a day in bed, like they were the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Ernie and me pretty much hung out watching TV and playing games all day, though I managed to get out and walk the dog three times and clear some stones (unpodcast). I finished off Ben Macintyre’s Colditz - a gripping and rather moving read. Fingers crossed that I can get him on the podcast. POW escape was a huge thing from my childhood with the TV series Colditz and the boardgames Escape From Colditz and The Great Escape, so I think many people from my generation have remained obsessed with these tales of derring do, but now that all the escapers are dead and enough time has passed, books like this one and The Real Great Escape by Guy Walters are giving a more balanced view of what was really happening in these camps. It doesn’t detract from the genius and bravery of the escapes, but it’s not quite the stiff upper lip, public school boy larks that the 70s industry makes it seem.
Some of the escapers became big celebrities and Pat Reid (who wrote books and cashed in with the board game and other merch) appeared on This is Your Life. I went looking for this show on YouTube, but only found the one with Douglas Bader, a man who became a legend, but in reality wasn’t quite the polite hero that he was heralded as. One of the funniest bits of Macintyre’s book is his parting words to the man who had carried him up and down stairs at Colditz for all those years. It’s sort of crazy and jarring to see Colditz prisoners mixing with light entertainment stars of the 70s. One of the guests on Reid’s This is Your Life was Eggers, the German who had prevented so many of the escapes (and who himself ended up in a Russian prison for many years) and again it’s so bizarre to think of these men from opposite sides of the conflict becoming friendly enough that one of them could be the surprise guest.
But Macintyre also tells some of the lesser known prisoners as well as highlighting the munitions factory in the town in which Jewish people were worked to death and then murdered as the allies closed in. The owner, remarkably, threw a bit party for his family and associates, had a gay old time and then blew up the dining room presumably killing everyone before they could be punished.
The blurb says the book asks what would you have done, though it barely does. I don’t know what kind of POW I would have been, though I don’t think I’d have had the agility or bravery to make an escape, though I might have enjoyed trying to think of vulnerabilities. But how would I have coped with the incarceration with no definite ending and nothing much to do and often little to eat and no female company. I’d have been wanking off an airman in a cupboard within 30 minutes I reckon.
