by Leo Kessler
‘I don’t know it,’ Otto said. ‘But how will you get away from there, even if you do manage to break out of this place?’
‘There is still a thriving trade between Hull and Sweden, Herr Stahl. Timber, steel, ball-bearings and the like. The Swedes are good businessmen – they sell to both us and the Tommies. And I know most of their sea captains. I’ve seen most of them carried into my Mission at one time or another for Sunday service. The Swedes are great churchgoers, and great drunks.’ He chuckled. ‘Well, Otto, I may call you by your first name?’
‘Please do.’
‘We of the escape committee have had you under observation for the last week or so. We always do that with new people. First, for security reasons, and then to check out whether that person is the right type. We’ve already rejected that wooden-faced Luftwaffe chap. He has no talent for clandestine work whatsoever. He’d give the game away in a day.’
‘Perhaps,’ Otto agreed, wondering what was coming. ‘I think he’s got other things on his mind at the moment.’
‘The cook is hopeless. Won’t be able to stand the work, as for the Bible Student, I can’t think he’s in a hurry to get back to the Fatherland. I feel he’ll be content to spend the rest of the war here, reciting his sonnets and reading the – er – Holy Word.’
Otto felt he detected a note of contempt in Pastor Mueller’s voice, but it was too dark now to have his supposition confirmed by the look on the portly priest’s face. ‘You would think he’d get bored reading it,’ he said. ‘After all he does know the story.’
‘Hm, yes, Otto. Well, as I said we’ve been watching you and you seem to fit the bill. You’re strong, tight-lipped, and I have the feeling you want to get out of it.’
‘You’re right enough there, Herr Pfarrer,’ he replied quickly. In reality, Otto's brain had already filled with images of British police shooting him in the back half way through a daring escape, British soldiers executing him in the line to board a boat, British farmwives sticking him through with pitchforks after finding him in their hay loft. He shivered.
Pastor Mueller laid his hand on Otto’s shoulder in a fatherly manner. ‘Good, then, I think you should be let into the secret. Come on, I’ll take you into the Hole. They should be ready for a night’s work by now.’
Otto followed him, as somewhere up in the darkness a guard lazily started whistling We'll Meet Again. From the other side of the compound, a voice shouted in English, ‘Shut your trap, Vera! Or I'll have to come over there and shut it for you!’
‘Incompetent Tommies,’ Mueller whispered to Otto. ‘We could be stealing the Crown Jewels from right under their noses and they wouldn't have any idea what was happening.’
The pastor was fumbling in his pocket for something. A second later Otto found out what it was. A key, which he inserted in the barred door of the punishment hut, saying, ‘Made of the key from a sardine tin… makes a wonderful skeleton key.’ He chuckled softly. ‘It is amazing the things one learns to do behind prison bars. You know, my boy, I really do enjoy this criminal business, I really do.’ Together they passed inside. ‘Goodness knows what is going to become of me, if this goes on.’
‘Goodness indeed!’ Otto agreed, wondering whether he shouldn't just cut his losses right now and go straight back to bed. Thinking back, the hopes of escaping he'd had just a few minutes before seemed incredibly heroic. The wrong kind of heroic. The kind of heroic where every adventure ends in death by pitchfork and they award medals to your lifeless body.
‘It’s like this,’ Hans, the pumper, said thickly, his naked upper body lathered with sweat as he pushed a dirty white kitbag in and out laboriously. ‘If you were ever to see me with a tree trunk sticking out of my arse – forgive my French, Herr Pfarrer – don’t stare. It’s all part of the tunnel.’
Pastor Mueller smiled benevolently down at Hans, as he pumped at rough, home-made bellows and explained to an open-mouthed Otto, ‘Our Hans here supplies them with air, you see. The kitbag acts as a bellows. It sends the oxygen down the air lines. They’re made of empty milk
powder cans. Look,’ he pointed to a rickety line of cans, each joint wrapped around tightly with newspaper, which led into the floor of the candle-lit Hole and disappeared somewhere below. ‘The clean air goes down and the stale air, rising as it always does, comes out.’
‘What, there are people down there?’ Otto asked, horrified.
‘Who else is going to build the shitting tunnel? Oh, excuse me, Pastor,’ Hans gasped as he pushed and pulled the kitbag in and out like an enormous accordion, ‘Sod it, how many times have I cursed the thing!’
‘God will reward you, my son,’ Pastor Mueller said mildly, obviously unaffected by the big, bald-headed seaman’s rough language.
‘I wouldn’t mind a little reward in the here-and-now.’
Pastor Mueller chuckled, obviously highly pleased with himself for some reason or other. ‘I should think that could be arranged.’ He looked directly at Otto. ‘You look a strong young fellow, Otto. Do you think you could manage Hans’s job?’
Otto looked from the priest to the sweating seaman and said cautiously, ‘I suppose so. Why do you ask?’
‘Because Otto,’ Mueller said carefully. ‘We’ve got diggers down there enough, but we want someone with real stamina for the pump.’
Otto's heart was racing. This was dangerous. If he said yes, he'd be absolutely committing himself to this loony scheme. Someone would no-doubt start shooting at him in the not too distant future. ‘And if I refuse?’ he asked.
Mueller’s smile vanished. ‘Then, my dear Otto, I’m afraid we couldn’t let you walk away and blab out our little secret after a few too many mugs of that rotgut potato schnapps some of the Italians make in their kitchen.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ the sweating Hans grunted. ‘In zero-comma-nothing seconds, you’d be planted down there,’ he indicated what Otto now knew was the entrance to an escape tunnel, ‘looking at the tatties from below – for good. He looked hard at the newcomer. Out of the corner of his eye, the young, blond, well-toned Otto could see that Pastor Mueller had the same lethal, menacing look on his face too. He felt a cold finger of fear trace its length along the small of his back. They weren’t fooling, he knew that instinctively. What a tits-up, he thought. Say no, get knifed. Say yes, get pitchforked.
Pastor Mueller laughed, but there was no joy in that laugh as he stood there in the chill corridor, with the gasp-gasp of the pump the only sound and the candles flickering eerily in the draught that came from below. ‘A louse ran over your liver, I suppose, eh?’
‘Yes,’ Otto agreed, his mind racing now.
‘Well, my dear Otto, what is it to be? We cannot afford to waste any more time. The nights are too short.’
Otto gulped. ‘I’m... with you,’ he said with difficulty.
Pastor Mueller smiled. ‘I thought somehow you would be,’ he remarked mildly. He stuck out his hand. ‘Welcome to the York Tunnel Company Limited!’
Numbly Otto took the hand and pressed it slightly, wondering just what he had let himself in for now.
‘You start tomorrow evening, Otto,’ the priest said softly. ‘Now you’d better get back to your hut before any of the perverts see you. Good night.’
‘Good night.’ His gaze flicked from Mueller to the sweating Hans, still pumping at the bellows.
Otto walked out into the night in a daze, telling himself it just seemed impossible for him to escape the war. Try as he might, the bloody thing always caught up with him.
On the towers the bored, cynical English sentries were making kissing sounds, by sucking the backs of their hands, and in the silver shadows cast by the ascending moon, there were soft whispers like Otto remembered lovers making in better days. He shivered. ‘Home or Homo by December,’ the pastor had said. How right he had been.
That night the air-gunner sneaked back into the hut long after the clock on the tower of the Terry's chocolate factory, which lay
a kilometre or so away from the Camp, had struck two.
A wide-awake Otto could hear him sobbing softly to himself for a long time on the bunk above. That's what you get for jumping into bed with the wrong crowd, he thought, ironically.
CHAPTER 8
The tunnellers met each Sunday morning ‘for the service’ in the little recreation hut. To anyone else in the camp, it would look like a traditional service for the particularly devout, as camp-wide prayers would be over by then. Once, the Bible student wandered in, but was swiftly shooed away by the Pastor with, ‘We don’t want your kind in here, with those radical doctrines of yours. We practise good, old-fashioned honest religion here, clear!’
It was during his first ‘service’ the next morning that Otto met his fellow tunnellers for the first time.
They were all old hands like Mueller, ten in all. There was Kraemer, for instance, a giant, whose muscles bulged brutally through his tunic, who had been captured in Narvik in April 1940. Todt, a skinny Wehrmacht corporal, who had been captured blind-drunk in a French estaminet during a local English counter-attack back in June.
But whatever their arm of the service – and they came from all three branches – they all believed fervently in the National Socialist cause and in a swift victory for German arms when they would return to a hated England, that had imprisoned them, as important personages.
As Hans, the pumper, whose destroyer had been sunk by a British submarine in the Channel, said thickly, ‘One day I’m gonna be Gauleiter and then I’ll make those god-damn buck-teethed Tommies jump through the shitting hoop – excuse my French, Herr Pfarrer – that I will!’
But it was Pastor Mueller who was the tunnellers’ undoubted leader, in spite of his mild, benevolent manner and the fact that he never did any of the work in the tunnel – ‘too weak for the pumps and too smart to be caught with you lot of crooks below ground,’ he was wont to say with that crooked smile of his. Somehow Otto knew that Pastor Mueller was dangerous, very dangerous indeed.
Soon, he would find out just how right he was.
On any given Sunday the men would receive their tasks and orders for the week, for Pastor Mueller thought it dangerous for them to meet together on any other day of the week, and thus it was that as soon as the tea-time roll-call was finished, each man, armed with one of the sardine-can skeleton keys, would sneak into the Hole, and begin the evening’s labour, urged on by a beaming, fat-bellied Pastor Mueller softly singing the popular song of the day, ‘Hi, ho, hi, ho, it’s off to work we go!’ from the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: a song which usually occasioned one of the tunnellers to snap, ‘Well, he bloody well don’t look like Snow White to me!’
By the time Otto joined the York Tunnelgesellschaft GmbH, the tunnel had progressed some twenty metres towards the fence. It had been dug solely by improvised scoops and picks and the odd garden tool that they had found around the camp before the commandant had ordered all such implements to be removed.
The tunneller worked sitting, hacking away at the clay-and-soil mix of that depth, digging out a third of a metre of the stuff at a time before pausing to shore up the whole structure with bed boards stolen from bunks in empty huts, making a little box-like structure some one metre high and one metre broad. This done, he would add another couple of cans to the air-pipe trailing behind him, pack the links with paper, and commence the process all over again by the flickering yellow light of a candle resting on a saucer at his side. It was hard, back-breaking work and none of the tunnellers could stand it longer than half an hour, not even the giant Kraemer; and all of them clambered up out of the entrance which lay in the passage between the cells of the Hole, complaining of dizziness and headaches, due to the foul air.
But it wasn’t easy for Otto either, taking turns with the balding Hans, pushing and pulling the makeshift bellows rhythmically so that cool fresh air from beneath the Hole surged into the tunnel and forced the black fumes from the candles in wisps out of the entrance in a steady stream. By the end of an hour, his shoulder muscles afire, sweat streaming down into his eyebrows and blinding him, he would be counting off the seconds until it was time for an invariably grumpy Hans to take over the task and he could rest his burning muscles.
Promptly at midnight, the pastor would call a halt. Up would come the weary, dirt-covered tunnellers and thereupon all of them, pumpers and tunnellers, would load up with the freshly excavated earth to be disposed of by the same means as the priest had used on the Saturday that Otto had first become aware of the escape plan. Hastily the great grey-coloured heavy slab of concrete was placed over the entrance to the tunnel, damp bread pushed into the cracks around it to resemble mortar, and dust sprinkled over it from the can that Mueller always had with him – ‘sometimes I feel like a priest giving out holy water,’ he often joked – so that it looked as if it had not been disturbed since the last time somebody had thought to make a prisoner sweep it.
Furtively they would steal across the blacked-out compound to the pastor’s room – as senior man, he had a hut to himself – where they would remove all traces of their night’s work, even picking fingernails clean, while the rest of the POWs snored in their bunks, unaware of what was going on.
But although most of them were desperately tired after the unaccustomed hard labour on the poor food, the pastor would not let them leave for their own bunks until he was personally satisfied that they were ‘clean’, as he called it. ‘You must remember,’ he lectured them severely more than once, ‘that security is vital. One slip up – er I believe that is the phrase you crooks use, isn’t it – and we’re sunk. I trust the Macaroni as far as I can throw them and their perverted boyfriends even less. Any one of them would betray us to the Tommies for the sake of a lipstick or a pair of stockings.’
‘Let me catch one of the lace-knickered warm-brothers trying anything,’ Kraemer, the giant, would growl, twisting his hairy paws as if he were wringing some poor Italian’s neck, ‘and he won’t be talking much longer.’
Pastor Mueller would nod his agreement and on such occasions the mild, benevolent look would be absent from his eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. Otto knew that the bunch of them were not just making idle talk. They would deal harshly with any traitor; there was no doubt about that. Otto started to worry. He was back in the company of Nazis, whose philosophy of life he hated. They were men who were part of the system he had tried so hard to avoid so that he did not have to serve it.
As October gave way to November and the tunnel progressed steadily forward and ever closer to the wire, Otto Stahl began to ponder how he might use York Tunnelgesellschaft GmbH to his own advantage.
In the first week of December 1940, with the weather in the north now really becoming cold, heralding the hard winter to come, the pastor ordered the shoring system to be changed to save wood. Somehow the Italians had found a way to enter the empty locked huts too and were stealing the wood from the bunks: the tunnellers would have to use less. Now, instead of solid frame all the way, they spaced the boards at thirty-centimetre intervals and laid single boards on top to hold the roof soil up.
Immediately they started having roof falls and hardly an evening passed without work having to stop to allow some unfortunate, choking tunneller to be dragged out and laid on the floor above in the corridor fighting for breath like a drowning man.
All this was just after Otto had volunteered for tunnel-digging duty. He had had enough of the pump and the tunnellers only did half-hour shifts. The pastor did not object and for a while at least Todt the shifty-looking corporal, was glad enough to take over his place at the pump-bellows.
With the new system of shoring, the tunnel had to be dug forward for nearly a metre before a box frame could be erected and the roof be lined and Otto quickly realised that no matter how carefully he attempted to scrape the arch of earth above him out, it virtually always cracked and fell in. Time and time again, he heard the cracking noise of the soil giving way and managed to duck backwards out of the way
of the miniature landslide. But even then the airline was virtually always blocked and it would be left gasping there, shocked and choking for breath, in the stinking darkness, for the candle invariably went out. Still, he told himself, it was better than the bellows, with Hans and the pastor watching him all the time, as if they still did not quite trust him.
It gave him time to think too, for down there in the flickering semi-darkness, half-naked and lathered in sweat, he was alone, and he felt he needed that solitude if he were going to think out some solution to his ever-present problem: how was he going to escape and at the same time get rid of the others?
For now they were getting ever closer to the wire and already at their ‘Sunday services’ there was excited talk of preparing escape equipment, the bits and pieces of hoarded civilian clothes they would wear, the amount of food they should hoard from their meagre rations, with the pastor making one of his usual theological jokes when they asked for further details of the neutral Swedish ships that would bear them away:
‘Faith is all you need, comrades. As the Good Book says, “Thou shalt have faith and walk upon the waters”.’ To which Hans had answered grumpily, ‘I'd prefer to do it in a nice big fat freighter, thank you very much, Herr Pfarrer.’
It was in the week before Christmas – with Italians, egged on by excited ‘boyfriends’, already beginning to dress up in female finery for the festive concert they had promised to give – that it all started.
Otto was working a particularly loose section of tunnel, his head half turned, ears cocked for the slightest sound of cracking earth, when it happened. Without any warning, the roof gave in and he was buried in well over a hundred pounds of earth, gasping and spluttering and terribly frightened down in the pitch black.
