The Great Escape: A Canadian Story by Ted Barris Read Free Book Online

understand him. Among the passages Vicki Sorensen turns to for explanation and comfort is her grandfather’s assessment of Frank at an early reunion as the war was ending.
    “There he was tall and smiling,” her grandfather noted in his diary. “He was in his battledress with a kitbag under his arm, thin and tanned. We had lunch and got out for the table some of the things we have been saving up just for this occasion. His appetite is not great, but it is growing. He needs building up. His spirits are rising and he has improved much . . .”
    A final observation from Vicki’s Uncle Ben about his brother concluded that “after the war Frank was . . . without his former zest for life. He suffered [from] post-traumatic stress syndrome, which in my opinion affected the change in Frank from his youthful exuberance to essentially an unhappy life and old age.”
    As she grew up in London, Ontario, in the 1960s, Barbara Edy recognized her father Don Edy had two careers. She knew he was involved in business, earning a living, paying the bills, and raising a family. But her dad had also devoted plenty of time to an equally important avocation—getting his wartime memories off his chest and down on paper. The resulting book, called Goon in the Block , was published in 1961 and it recounted Don’s experiences inside Stalag Luft III from his arrival there in November 1943 until the kriegies were marched out of the compound and across Germany in the winter of 1945 . When The Great Escape movie hit the theatres in 1963 , for the first time in her life, Barbara could see (even if distorted by Hollywood fabrication) “a visual perspective” [26] of her father’s war inside German prison wire.
    Unlike the children of other kriegies, who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk about their POW experiences, Barbara and her four older siblings grew up hearing about Stalag Luft III as told and written by their father. Not only did he record the events with precision, Barbara noted that he told the stories with the flair of a raconteur. What’s more, word of Goon in the Block had spread and more than just Don Edy’s family members wanted to read it; but there weren’t any more copies of the book around and Don had no interest in a reprint. That’s when Barbara sensed he was passing the torch. She felt compelled to help her father stay in touch with his wartime comrades at the same time she wanted and keep his stories in circulation among historians and journalists. She became Don’s “information gal.” More than that, her work became a personal crusade.
    “The families and offspring of the kriegies all express the same sentiment,” Barbara said, “to carry on the memory of not only the fifty [escapers] whom Hitler ordered murdered, but, as well, the two hundred, huddled in Hut 104 waiting their turn to escape, the hundreds [of others] who assisted, and all the men of Stalag Luft III and its famous, proud, spectacular distraction to create havoc in the midst of Germany’s war effort.” [27]
    Via correspondence and personal contact, Barbara has built a rap port with ex-kriegies and their children in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, and Canada. In 2012 she and her sister Jane Hughes helped to recover and restore a collection of published photographs originally compiled in a book of remembrances and reflections, called Wire Bound World , to redistribute to other survivors of Stalag Luft III. Then, through a series of emails, she initiated an internet exchange of information called The Beginning of List 200 , designed to pool stories, images, biographies, and communications about the two hundred men on the original escape list.
    Along the way, like other kriegie offspring, Barbara believes she has learned how that “proud, spectacular distraction” succeeded in binding her dad and the rest of the Commonwealth flyers together, and why that common bond made the events leading up to March 24 – 25 , 1944 , so significant. Just