The Art of Escape
Filled with dogged guile, cunning heroism and stupendous imagination, prisoners of war are a breed of unmatched survivalist determination. Those that manage to escape may be the quintessential kind of that breed.
In The Escape Artists, Neal Bascomb has managed, a hundred years after the fact, to recreate the challenge of surviving in World War I German POW camps. In an era when officers were still afforded a modicum of respect, they were presumed to receive certain courtesies not available to the common soldier. But that didn’t mean much when the Geneva Convention’s rules of war were routinely ignored.
Any POW camp is far from a picnic. Think of your worst possible nightmare camping trip, double down on it and add no end in sight. Now you might be getting close.
Believe it or not, your experience limits your horror; there were no guardrails to the terrible imaginations of your captors. The atrocities – the mental anguish, not to mention the physical abuse – were never ending. It’s under these conditions POWs labored to find purpose, meaning, and a reason to survive.
In The Escape Artists I was constantly blown away by the daring, the creativity, and the skills used to manufacture the paraphernalia needed to execute escapes. German uniforms, civilian clothes, compasses, cutting tools, maps, disguises, waterproof knapsacks, hidden rooms, tunnels. On and on. There seemed no limit to finding a way to build or get what they needed to execute an escape plan.
Escapes had consequences. Getting out was just the beginning. Navigating to a friendly border 150 miles away was every bit as challenging as getting outside the prison walls. More often than not, capture was the end result. Beatings, weeks or months of solitary confinement, and limited or no food, heat or clothing were the typical punishments that followed. On occasion escapees were simply shot or bayoneted.
Now imagine digging a tunnel over 200 feet long through unstable dirt, clay, and rocks – with a spoon. There are a couple more catches: for starters, the tunnel is 18 inches wide and 12 inches tall. Twelve inches tall! If you’re slender and everything goes right, it takes 30 minutes to go the distance. Pushing a small handmade knapsack of survival gear in front of you, you pull with your fingers and push with your toes at the stunningly slow rate of six feet every minute. The air is thick, stale, and with multiple bodies in the tunnel, oxygen is depleted. Profuse sweating and labored breathing, and the frequent stops of those ahead of you (to clear rocks or dirt that has broken free of the walls), compound the inevitable bouts of panic. Being buried alive is real. As much as nine feet underground, some soldiers take an hour to get through.
From the infamous Holzminden prison camp in western Germany, twenty-nine British officers escaped through such a tunnel on a rainy, stormy night in 1918. More would have made it had the heavy rain not collapsed the tunnel opening. Some ten men in the tunnel at the time it collapsed had to be dragged back, one at a time, to the start by a couple fellow prisoners – a brave and heroic act in itself.
The cruel and psychopathic commandant of the camp had sworn no one could break out. He promised if anyone managed it they would be immediately recaptured and severely punished. That didn’t stop numerous attempts. When the twenty-nine made good on their escape, of course the commandant was incensed, initiated a nation-wide manhunt and punished the remaining five hundred-plus still in the camp.
In the end, ten of the twenty-nine escapees made it to Holland and freedom. It took the Germans weeks to find and capture the others, relying primarily on citizens reporting, chasing and detaining the beleaguered Allied officers. To those who remained in the camps, and to British citizens in general, escapees, whether successful or not, were all heroes. But those who made it to freedom were especially exalted for besting the enemy. It was a much-needed boost in morale because it signaled they had not given up; they were not beaten.
These are powerful stories in which to immerse yourself. Imagining the hardship, with no end in sight, is hard to do if you have never experienced physical hardship. It’s difficult enough to do even if you have.
It highlights the importance of having others around you to share in a like goal, to encourage and buoy each other, to clarify and reinforce a purpose to being, even if it is only survival to reach the chance offered by another day.
In a tangential way it reminds me of Joe Rantz, who survived being deserted by his parents at age twelve during the Great Depression. He somehow bootstrapped himself to become a rower at the University of Washington, and went on to become an Olympic gold medalist in crew at the 1936 games in Berlin.
The hardships were different, but they were still singular and solitary, with comrades who helped and a resolve to keep moving, to keep battling. His story is central to the book, Boys In The Boat, another classic story of character and resolve overcoming huge odds.
People do that every day. With their success, they give the rest of us hope. Big or small, that should be celebrated and, most importantly, used as motivation to take another step. This life is, after all, an unending journey.
