This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  2 There is, hidden away on a high shelf, out of Michi’s reach, a story regarding the family’s escape from Vienna, immediately after the Anschluss. Like the background to his Jewish background, there is a time to tell this tale, but that time is not here yet.

  3 … and family dog--that is correct. Blockade or no blockade, Michael’s mother Eva was never short of powers of persuasion. Eva went out of her way to convince an RAF officer that she and her family ‘could not leave’ Berlin without Romeo. When she journeyed alone to the air base Gatow with Romeo to seek a spot for her dog for the airlift, the SBO allegedly told her, ‘If I had a dog like yours, I couldn’t leave him behind either,’ and dutifully supplied a pass for Romeo’s transport.

  Unnecessary Travel Lengthens The War

  BAVARIA FILM STUDIOS, Munich. October 2010

  I STAND AT THE BOX OFFICE, outside the museum opposite the active studios, under a grey but clearing sky.

  “Morgen. I have a question.”

  “Welcome.” A young man is working the window.

  “Inside the museum … ”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there an installation from The Great Escape?”

  “Nein. But Das Boot you can see.” His two female co-workers are momentarily intrigued by their first visitor of the morning, a foreigner and not a Facebook friend.

  “Aber keinmal Great Escape?” I leverage the little German I know.

  “Das Boot is more modern.” His co-workers join, reinforcements, to have a closer look.

  “Yes, I know. Aber … But … ” And then I divulge the keynotes of my visit to all three–and why I have come so early on a weekday morning to disturb their social media quiet time. The movie was a Hollywood blockbuster. A member of my family had a small role in it. Unfortunately, he died young, in Hamburg, a long time ago.

  “We’re sorry,” the woman in the black hoodie seems genuinely touched. She has an open, friendly face, oval-shaped, and plump freckled cheeks. She looks at her female counterpart who has cropped and dyed spiky hair, then inquires, “What was his name?”

  “Michael Paryla.”

  The young women exchange bewildered glances, then black hoodie says, “We don’t know him.”

  “He is buried in Waldfriedhof.” I offer a local reference, this might make him real.

  “That is near to this place.” The black hoodie is onside, but her female colleague has moved away, gone into a small office. Looking for clues in her laptop or cell.

  “The prison camp scenes were filmed here in 1962.” I decide to push the film angle.

  “Yes, we know.” The young man takes over. His tone is poised between passive and aggressive.

  “The tunnel scenes were filmed inside.” I point to the studio buildings and sound stages behind the metal fence surrounding the film city. For a moment, I consider telling them about Wally Floody, a Canadian like me and former mining engineer and prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Floody was a wartime Spitfire pilot. He was hired as a technical advisor on the film set. Charles Bronson’s character Tunnel King is partly based on Wally Floody. But never mind.

  “It’s too bad,” the young man reflects. “But no one knows the history of ‘this’ place.” He shakes his head.

  I have travelled a long way to be told exactly what I expected to be told. I’d done my homework in Canada. I had learned about Das Boot from Das Google. But that didn’t stop me from coming here, accepting an unwilling audience, holding out for a surprise. I have three at the window again, crowded inside the box office, which reminds me that the Mirisch Brothers released The Great Escape in an era when the POW film genre had finally become trapped by its own success. Prisoner escape stories conveniently supplied a reliable narrative and dramatic vector, but during the post-war decade there had been a glut of POW films, many based on bestselling memoirs like Paul Brickhill’s.1 Instead of lecturing them on a topic about which I’m far from an expert, I tell my gatekeepers a little more about Michael and his part in the movie. I point in the vague direction of Waldfriedhof and acknowledge his grave is that way. Are they at all interested? Over there, he is buried under the tall trees in a mossy cemetery, I might say, since I know this from a letter Michael’s father penned on April 21, 1967. I could spout verbatim from the private correspondence—the poignant documents written in the days and months after Michael’s death—but turn off the tap. I’m a very curious customer as it is.

  “Why don’t you visit his grave?” the man, sounding bold and on the edge of rudeness, suggests. “It’s too bad, but there is nothing inside about the movie and there is no archivist here, no film historian.”

  As for the past, they are it. Not one born before 1990.

  “I found a web page,” I say, ignoring his forward suggestion, “made by an American. It pinpoints a football field near the studio lot, bordering the forest, where the model prison camp might have been built.”

  “Yes, we know about this, a man was here from America last year. He asked many questions like you and made this web page, probably. But he really didn’t know what he was talking about. He was just like you,” the young man informs me, which means the American was guessing.

  “Are you sure there is not a film historian on site?”

  “Too bad, but no. We are sorry.”

  I sigh good-naturedly but at the same time show my disappointment. How can they not be better organized? They’re Germans. Nonetheless, they have apologized for a situation out of their control.

  “Over there by the train tracks,” spiky hair points, “is a film institute, but it is only educational and for teachers and students.” She slides her hands into her pant pockets. “They won’t know your film there, either.”

  “We are it for knowledge,” says the young man. (They are ganging up on me now. Needlessly beating a dead horse.) “Your film was years ago. There is no consciousness of the film here, which is too bad, and not good.”

  He holds up his palms, and backs away from the window. More denial than asked for. Still, I won’t shoot.

  “Thank you for your help.”

  I walk along the road bordering the studio lots and the forest. He said ‘your film’. It’s not my film—it’s Michael’s. Michael was given a minute on the train, to play Gestapo opposite Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson and David McCallum and James Garner et al. My film? Das Boot is what the people are served today. WWII U-boats. The Battle of the Atlantic. Visitors demand entry to the claustrophobic world of a submarine crew, never mind the shenanigans of a group of Allied prisoners of war. There is a guided tour in English at 1 pm. The cost is 11 Euros. I have no interest in the professionalism of these submariners, thirty-thousand of which perished undersea. I won’t go in.

  I’m here to find out more about the other movie, and to follow as closely as I can in Michael’s footsteps. But I’m finding that it’s not an easy task. Like the type of prisoner who was brought to Stalag Luft III in spring of 1943, Michael was a serial escapist most of his life, beginning in 1935, when he exited the womb in Vienna disguised as happiness itself, in the eyes of his mother Eva, and his father, Karl.

  *

  About a kilometre from the box office I find the football pitch. No sign of Stalag Luft III here though. The field is unremarkable: white goal posts and bald spots in the grass where play is heaviest. Office workers in short sleeves and dress pants, from a neighbouring low-rise, are out kicking a ball during an early lunch hour. I stand by the touchline and take photographs in the direction of the forest, then a couple more from the opposite side, facing the studio lot and high fence along its boundary.

  If not exactly here, then somewhere close, the director John Sturges began filming in the summer of 1962. In order to build a complete replica of Stalag Luft III, the film crew sought and received permission from the German Minister of the Interior to fell a considerable number of trees in the Grüne
wald, a forest bordering the studio’s back lot, on the agreement that they replant two-to-one when the shooting was done. It took Sturges and crew six weeks to build a replica of the original camp, and then another four months to shoot the movie, which wouldn’t have been filmed in Germany if Sturges had not run into a labour dispute with the Screen Extras Guild back in California. The film would use a large number of extras, almost 600. Even with a four million dollar budget and his mind already set on a location in the San Gabriel Mountains, a two hour drive from Hollywood, Sturges took the entire shooting abroad. In nearby Munich, a theatrical centre, the American crew found German actors for important secondary roles: Hannes Messemer, Robert Graf, and Harry Riebauer. Stalmaster-Lister Co. directed the casting of extras. Enter Michael, stage right.

  Standing by the side of the football pitch, I remember reading about the deforestation efforts of the film crew and thinking about how this mimicked the labour of the actual Russian POWs who, in 1942, were sent out on a work detail to cut down trees beyond the Vorlager, the forecamp, in preparation for the construction of Stalag Luft’s North Compound. The trees in question would have been gaunt Silesian pines native to forests in the north-east, altogether different from the ones in the Grünewald. Early in the movie, there is a goofy set-piece involving actor John Leyton as Willie ‘Tunnel King’, in which a number of escape-happy Hollywood POWs hide in wagons laden with cut branches, but are found out at the perimeter fence by pitchfork-yielding goons.

  Correction. It was not out here that filming began in 1962, but inside the sound stages. That spring and early summer in Bavaria the weather was foul. Rainstorms would not let up. Sturges had wanted to shoot his movie chronologically, starting with the opening scene: the POWs’ arrival at camp by a convoy of covered trucks. He even brought in flamethrower trucks in an attempt to bake the mud and dry out the studio lot. The heavy artillery did little good. Meanwhile, the stars had assembled and were waiting to shine, having taken up residence in Munich. (Except for McQueen, who waited for no one. McQueen was having a riot, out riding his motorbike, destroying farmers’ fields, or else he was tearing around in his Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing; the local authorities rigged a speed trap in his honour, and, inevitably, confiscated his licence.) One day, early in June, Sturges called for a meeting of cast and crew. No more time to waste. He had given up filming exteriors. The crew would begin filming in the middle of the picture. Indoors to the sound stages they went, and began with the tunnels. Next, the scenes inside the barracks. Actors James Garner and Donald Pleasance were given their calls.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, I’m headed back to my friends in the box office, shouldering my laptop, smoking a cigarette for effect. Michael was a smoker. Prisoners of all stripes often are. Like Sturges, I’d planned to spit out the book chronologically, but as it is my hard drive is crammed with research notes, transcriptions of family letters, photographs and multiple drafts of the endless permutations of my book so far. There have been days aplenty in the past decade that I have wanted to hire a flamethrower truck and melt the beast in its smooth white silicon crèche, then turn the nozzle on myself. Turns out some of us are fire retardant. The Last Escape was the original working title of The Great Escape. Maybe that’s the title I’ll use for this.

  “What about the train station?” I throw this out, offhandedly. They must know the routine from the American who came before me.

  “Yes,” black hoodie admits. “The other guy, he too talked about a train station.”

  “Is it near here?” I’m thinking of the scene two-thirds through the movie where a handful of escaped prisoners are piled up, none too inconspicuously, on the station platform. In this scene Michael makes his entrance. He arrives by motorcade to Neustadt Station and then proceeds to board the Hollywood gravy train. From what I have read, it was filmed in the vicinity.

  “It might be Pullach,” the young man ventures.

  “Not Geiselgasteig?” Geiselgasteig is referenced all the time—in books and documentaries about the film—but the Germans wouldn’t know the place if they were standing on it. Maybe it’s my pronunciation.

  The two women turn and enter the small back office. Cue the water bottles. Cut to black hoodie mouthing my mangling of ‘Geiselgasteig’. The spiky blonde is sucking a pencil. Smoke and mirrors.

  “Pullach. You must take the S-Bahn two stops in the direction of Munich and then cross by foot over the Isar on Großhesseloher Brücke and then you will walk several kilometres, yes, through the forest. Once in Pullach ask for directions to the train station. They have a very old one, it could be what you are looking for.”

  I go. But before leaving I ask my friends at the box office if I may take a photograph of all three, together?

  “Why of us?” Humbled and suspicious, modestly and falsely incredulous.

  “To help my memory,” I say. “Your faces will help me remember details from this day and this place.”

  Michael (bottom left, looking on with undisciplined hair) in an August Everding production of L’Affaire Dreyfus by Hans Rehfisch. The play focuses on the 1894 trial for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French military. Falsely accused and eventually pardoned, the Dreyfus Affair roused virulent anti-Semitic feelings in France. (Date unknown)

  Leaving, I walk to the S-Bahn stop and wait by the tracks, breathing a mixture tar and creosote fumes. It’s not yet noon. The day is warming up.

  The train arrives and I step on. It is only a seven minute ride to Großhesselohe. I ring the bell and get off and begin walking, crossing over the tracks, following signs to the Brücke. The streets are quiet and the houses of Großhesselohe—half-timbered palaces, fenced and gated—are monstrosities. All of FC Bayern must be shacked up here in the south of Munich, and who knows perhaps a number of War Criminals as well. But where the hell is the bridge?

  The signposts and hand-painted directions have led me deep into a residential neighbourhood. I do realize that I must cross the Isar to reach Pullach, but I can’t find the bridge, nor any sliver of the river. I’m hot and lost on a fruitless search for a station that’s probably not the one I want anyway.

  After twenty minutes of wandering and wondering, I spot a gardener over the fence, raking leaves.

  “Bitte, Helf. Eine Frage?” My throat is dry and my voice sounds hoarse and very weak. I’ve not had the chance to talk much the last couple of days, discounting internal monologues and my brief chat with the box office crowd, and the timbre of my voice sounds pathetic. My speech has the ring of ‘Bite elf, I’m a fag?’ nowhere close to ‘Please, help me, I have a question?’

  Michael lived in Munich from 1956 until his death ten years later. In the first months after arriving from Canada he stayed with his aunt, Irene, and worked odd jobs while he pursued a career in the theatre. Finding work in the theatre often meant travelling and taking a temporary residence in Bremen or Berlin or Hamburg. But he loved Munich above all. Bavaria’s cultural centre, the Bohemian atmosphere, the open air Biergartens covered in gravel and shaded by chestnut trees. These things are pervasive even today. Eventually, he bought property, but no one in my family can tell me where it was. In a letter from 1967 his father calls it a luxurious home; he complains to Eva that Michael now lives like a bourgeois, and that this bothers Karl greatly. His father also describes Michael’s grave in some detail, but nowhere does he mention the irony that his son, a refugee from Nazism who plays a Gestapo on a train in The Great Escape, is buried in a cemetery, four stops beyond the Bavariafilmstadt, the film studio where a substantial part of the movie was made in 1962.

  It makes perfect sense to me now that I am walking the streets that Michael’s house would have been nearby, conceivably an address in this very suburb. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Which means I haven’t been walking aimlessly—methodically drawn into the thick of it, is more like it. Why else would Michael have been buried far to the south of Munich, u
nless he and his Frau Margaret had been living in the vicinity? This proximity to the studios would have eased him into an audition for the film. I keep walking and as I am connecting the dots and inventing my own dots, I have begun taking photographs of houses, of Michael’s untold houses. I’m certain of that. It’s uncanny. I am getting close to him. Roll camera. It makes good sense that Michael resided within shouting distance of his grave and the film studio, or maybe, maybe I am looking at things backwards.

  The groundskeeper comes to the gate, opens it, and steps onto the street.

  “Bite elf, I’m a fag.”

  I try English, then my best French. In the days of the escape, during the Second World War, RAF officers were often multilingual. The first escapees sent out of the tunnel had been selected, from among hundreds of candidates inside Stalag Luft III, because they spoke German fluently. But forget that—no use, the gardener is Romanian and a foreigner like me. For passport, he shows me his hands, calloused palms and fingers, the international sign of the worker.

  I unlatch my shoulder bag and pry out my notebook and a pen. I make a drawing and then begin block-lettering B-R-U-C-K-E. But the gardener is distracted by the white slab of my laptop, which is peaking from my bag. MACBook, international sign of the knowledge-worker aristocracy. Isn’t the answer in there? he seems to be saying, staring hard. Why not use that?

  Momentarily, he points down the street, sends me off on my way. His trailing voice, Links, rechts, links, rechts, left, right, left, right.