Like a character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, I recently joined a British pilgrimage in “April, when its showers are sweet.”
The destination of the pilgrimage was the sites of two World War II prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Poland, Colditz Castle and Stalag Luft III. For modern Britons, these camps and the deaths of the men who attempted to escape them, seem to hold a mythical power not unlike that of St. Thomas Becket, whose shrine drew Chaucer’s merry band. Films, books, and games based on Colditz Castle and Stalag Luft III reflect the British as they like to see themselves, even eighty years later.
Colditz Castle (Oflag IV-C) perches on a rocky outcrop above the Mulde River. This high security prisoner-of-war camp for Allied officers manages to look like a fairy-tale castle but also has all the attributes of a prison: high walls, a tiny courtyard with little daylight, and a warren of rooms. Escape schemes, from the crazy to the banal — a glider built of bedsheets in an attic or simply jumping a fence and walking out — have become synonymous in British culture with ingenuity and defiance: British pluck pitted against grim odds.
Though the industrious tunneling allowed seventy-six men to reach freedom, it brought death to fifty others.
Stalag Luft III, near the town of Zagan (now in Poland) offers another kind of desolation. Instead of being in cold, man-made surroundings, the prisoners in Stalag Luft III languished in flimsy wooden huts in endless pine forests. This camp is best known for the famous mass escape of March 1944, immortalized in the 1963 film “The Great Escape.” In a strange twist, watching this Hollywood film has become part of British holiday celebrations, while in the U.S. it is remembered only for Steve McQueen’s performance on a motorcycle.
Guy Walters, the British writer, historian, and television presenter, led the pilgrimage by following in the footsteps of the escapees. The events came to life as we passed through abandoned train stations to arrive at the Gestapo headquarters in Görlitz, where many of the escapees ended up. Walters reminded us that the Great Escape ended with squalid murders, not heroic deaths. Though the industrious tunneling allowed seventy-six men to reach freedom, it brought death to fifty others. For the ones who stayed behind, repression only increased.
Walters told us how the combination of PTSD (which, in the 1940s, would have been referred to as “battle fatigue”), survivors’ guilt, and sheer boredom corroded the prisoners’ spirits in both Colditz and Stalag Luft III. He reminded us that human pettiness is ubiquitous. Imprisoned Christian French officers segregated themselves from their Jewish fellow officers; Britons divided themselves by class and even by public-school groups.
Among my group of pilgrims were several descendants of internees whose family stories and silences had inspired their pilgrimage. It was emotional for all of us to see a mural drawn by the uncle of one of the pilgrims. We visited sites depicted in the drawings of another pilgrim’s father who had been interned in Stalag Luft III.
Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, we also made merry. There was plenty of pork knuckle and beer, bawdy humor, and running jokes about Walters’ penchant for ruined train stations in the middle of nowhere.
Our pilgrimage ended in Dresden, whose war legacy offers a stark contrast to Colditz and Stalag Luft III narratives of courage and escape. In February 1945, British and American bombers unleashed a firestorm that destroyed much of the historic city and killed tens of thousands. While the prison camps affirm the resilience of Allied POWs, Dresden confronts us with the destructiveness of Allied victory.
After my British fellow pilgrims returned to Britain, I stayed on for a few more days in Dresden. Back in the U.K. they joined in the national celebration of V-E Day on May 8. Although there they marked the end of six years of violence and the liberation of Europe from Nazism with memorials, flyovers, and picnics, in Germany I found little mention of the war’s end.
Although there they marked the end of six years of violence and the liberation of Europe from Nazism with memorials, flyovers, and picnics, in Germany I found little mention of the war’s end.
One evening I attended a concert by the famed Dresden Philharmonic in the Kulturpalast. The socialist realist murals of workers and musicians on the walls of this multiuse building remind Germans that until 1989 the price of Hitler’s military aggression was that half the German nation had to live under the Soviet Union for nearly half a century.
The concert of works by George Frideric Handel was exceptional. As I reflected on it the following day, it occurred to me that Handel was born in Germany but worked most of his life in Britain. The soloists were British, American, and German. Two of the works celebrated treaties that ended pan-European wars: The Music for the Royal Fireworks was written to celebrate the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The Utrecht Te Deum marked the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the pan-European war of the Spanish Succession and brought decades of peace and stability.
Perhaps Dresden was not silent about the end of another pan-European war. Just very, very subtle.
