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

told him. It was the favourite memento from his big brother’s service overseas as a bomber pilot during the war.
    “Can I have it for a while? I’d like my kids to see it,” Tony said.
    David agreed to loan it, but then never saw it again. Some of the other keepsakes that Tony did manage to salvage from his time at Stalag Luft III ended up in a small briefcase passed down to his son, Chris Pengelly. A few RAF certificates, diagrams, letters, newspa per clippings, and photographs of Tony posing in a group in front of barracks huts or on stage at the North Compound theatre survived in the leather case. Of his father’s role in the Great Escape, Chris Pengelly knew just a little. His father had shared more with his Uncle David than with him. Chris was a teenager in 1963 when The Great Escape was released; his mother Pauline reported the movie disrupted Tony’s sleep with recurring nightmares. In contrast, when the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes —depicting life in a mythical German POW camp— appeared on television between 1965 and 1971 , Chris recalled that his parents loved the series.
    “They watched it all the time,” [32] Chris Pengelly emphasized. “He laughed so hard each time [the farcical German Sergeant Schultz] said, ‘I see nothing. I hear nothing.’ He considered it very funny, but quite realistic. You don’t get shot down and say, ‘Oh, I’ll just take my digital camera with me.’ He knew they had to make things from scratch and bribe the guards for things like the camera . . .
    “ The Great Escape movie gave him nightmares,” Chris said finally. “The TV show let him laugh about it.”
    Very little of the North Compound that the six hundred Canadians knew from 1943 to 1945 exists intact today. On the actual site, just outside the town of Zagan (the Polish spelling of Sagan), the double fencing is gone. So are the watchtowers, the Vorlager , and any above- ground evidence of the cook house, the theatre, or the fifteen barracks huts. All gone. Only concrete pads and some masonry walls remain the way they were when the Commonwealth kriegies were transferred there from the East Compound in the middle of the war. The rest of the former prison camp, the forest and weeds have pretty much reclaimed. Periodically, Polish groundskeepers chop back the brush that pokes through the bricks of the fire pool or the theatre foundation so that visitors passing through each summer can get an idea of what they once looked like.
    At the northern edge of the property, a walkway of crushed stone with wooden borders, twenty inches wide, runs 336 feet north-south the full length that tunnel “Harry” did—from the concrete pad where Hut 104 stood to the approximate exit hole just shy of the woods. At the edge of that same pine forest (that stands very much as it did dur ing the war) are sun-faded commemorative plaques. Near the end of the walkway nearest Hut 104 rests a series of flat stone markers with the names of the fifty executed air force officers engraved on them. The markers include the names of Hank Birkland, Gordon Kidder, Pat Langford, George McGill, James Wernham, and George Wiley— the Canadians murdered after the breakout.
    To their credit, the volunteers at the Museum of Allied Forces Prisoners of War Martyrdom periodically welcome groups of tourists, school children, and some of the kriegie offspring who occasion ally stop to explore and imagine on their own. West of the former prison compound, at the museum site, a replica of Hut 104 gives visitors an approximation of the Commonwealth air officers’ barracks experience. There’s a stove (like the original that covered the trap to tunnel “Harry”) sitting in the appropriate corner of Room 23 , as well as bunk beds, a dining area, and the “To All Prisoners of War! The escape from prison camps is no longer a sport!” propaganda poster tacked on the hut wall after the Great Escape. A nearby pavilion contains a small library and an exhibit room. Out