Like crawling through barbed wire.
Horace Greasley.
Horace Greasley.
Never heard of him?
Today in The Telegraph, the paper my puppy loves to pee on the most, is the story of this remarkable man who passed away in his sleep on the fourth of this month.
What makes this man so very remarkable and such a fitting story on Valentine's Day eve is that he was a skilled escape artist. From prison. Camps. In Germany. The Nazi one. During the early forties when that sort of thing was tricky.
The reason for the frequency with which Greasley put his life in danger, he admitted with engaging good humour and frankness, was simple: he had embarked on a romance with a local German girl. Rosa Rauchbach who was a translator at the camp where he was imprisoned. Discovery of their affair would almost certainly have meant doom for them both.
Mr. Greasley recounted the crazy details of his wartime romance in the book Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell?, published in 2008.
He was a long time prisoner, taken on May 25, 1940 at Dunkirk. "In the second PoW camp to which he was assigned, near Lamsdorf, he encountered the 17-year-old daughter of the director of the marble quarry to which the camp was attached. She was working as an interpreter for the Germans, and, emaciated as he was, there was, Greasley said, an undeniable and instant mutual attraction. Within a few weeks Greasley and Rosa were conducting their affair in broad daylight and virtually under the noses of the German guards – snatching meetings for trysts in the camp workshops and wherever else they could find. But at the end of a year, just as he was realising how much he cared for Rosa, Greasley was transferred to Freiwaldau, an annex of Auschwitz, some 40 miles away."
Shades of Hogan's Heroes. The only way to carry on the love affair was to break out of his camp; he correctly reckoned that short absences could be disguised or go unnoticed. "Messages between him and Rosa were exchanged via members of outside work parties, who then handed hers on to Greasley, the camp barber, when they came to have their hair cut. When, with the help of friends, he did make it under the wire for an assignation nearby, he would break back into the camp again under cover of darkness to await his next opportunity."
Sometimes he took care of business three, four times a week.
He was released five year's, less a day, from his PoW status, freed May 24 of '45 and he still received letters from Rosa after the war's end, and was able to vouch for her when she applied to work as an interpreter for the Americans.
This story does not end happily ever after for not long after Mr. Greasley got back to Britain, however, he received news that Rosa had died in childbirth, with the infant perishing too. Horace Greasley said he never knew for certain whether or not the child was his.
WFDS
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