Escape

THEY SHALL NOT HAVE ME-Hellon--Duffon ($3).

The successful escape from a German prison camp of Jean Helion, French soldier and abstractionist painter, ranks with the escape of Casanova from the Leads, or Peter Kropotkin from the fortress of Peter & Paul. This book is the detailed description of Helion's two-year imprisonment and flight (TIME, Nov. 23). As a breath-taking narrative of captivity and escape and as a unique firsthand description of the miseries of life among Germany's French prisoners, They Shall Not Have Me is one of the half-dozen most remarkable books of World War II.

The Defeated. After the collapse of the French armies, captive French soldiers were marched 20 to 40 miles a day without food, crammed into temporary French prison camps. Later they were packed into filthy freight cars and shipped to Germany. Half-starved and battered with gun butts, Helion and nine comrades were sent to a big baronial estate in Pomerania. Baroness von Z. looked with disgust at her new gang of ragged, dirty farm hands. Her overseer gave tongue to a "wide gamut of howls." He wanted huskier help. For six months Painter Helion and his mates lived on the lowest level of Nazi serfdom. They ate potato soup, potato-and-rye bread, cold potato dessert; their stomachs swelled with potato gas. By day they frantically dug potatoes side by side with peasants. Sometimes peasant children sneaked under the threshing machines, voraciously foraged for rye seeds. When the empty barrels of potato schnaps came back to the farm, the peasants emptied the dregs into their dung shovels, hungrily sucked up the liquid filth.

Les Miserables. At first the peasants would stare at a prisoner and say: "Look at the Jew." But one day Helion jokingly rolled a lump of coal toward a little girl. She ran off with it. Next day her father, one eye on the guards, gratefully slipped Helion a meat sandwich. From then on the peasants realized "that we stood together on the same side of the castle: the slave quarters.''

When spring came, Helion was transferred to a prison ship, anchored in the harbor of Stettin. Seven hundred and fifty Frenchmen were lodged in the ship's holds and farmed out to local factories. But their real lives began at night when the great doors of the holds had clanged shut on them. Then the prisoners crept out of their bunks to dark corners where, with light provided by stolen electrical equipment (salvaged from the wreckage of R.A.F. bombings in the neighborhood), they set up "clubhouses . . . based on a unique interest":

>"The Lice Throwers" specialized in vermin. Every Saturday night they would hunt for "the biggest specimens." For twelve super-lice, the club paid one mark. On Sunday morning each member lined up for inspection holding a prize louse between finger and thumb. As the Kommandofuehrer marched down the ranks, members saluted smartly, thereby snapping the "live dose of itch" in his direction. After endless practice on an old overcoat, the prisoners could hit the Kommandofuehrer "below the belt" once in three tries.

>"The Scavengers" collected portraits of Hitler. "If [members] failed to produce an adequate picture, they were bound to contribute one mark ... to a common fund reserved for buying color reproductions." Every morning club members set out with these portraits for the latrine, remarking: "I have to think about Hitler."

To win their endless battles with the Kommandofuehrer and his guards required patience and trickery. When packages arrived for the prisoners from home or from the Red Cross, the guards would stare avidly at bars of chocolate, coffee, wool socks. In return for small favors, prisoners would reward the guards, later demand greater favors under threat of reporting the guard for eating a prisoner's food. To Helion. who worked as an interpreter in the Kommandofuehrer's office, there came a daily cup of steaming American coffee. (The coffee, sent to Helion from the U.S., was prepared by the ship's cook in exchange for a daily cup.) Every third day a cup would appear for the Kommandofuehrer too--if he had treated the prisoners kindly. Said the Kommandofuehrer: "My interpreters live like princes."

Sullen Sabotage. Meanwhile the prisoners constantly meditated revolt. A "Central Committee" of three met secretly, formulated plans for outwitting the Nazis. They composed striking slogans. As the prisoners labored in Stettin's factories, they muttered loud enough to be heard by the German workers: "For every prisoner compelled to slave for Germany, there will be one German corpse in the plains of Russia." They slowed down the work as much as they dared.

Regular notes were kept of the movements of warships in Stettin harbor, the number of troop trains passing through Stettin to the Russian front. Desperate, grandiose plans were conceived for a mass jail break and the ruthless slaughter of German civilians.

Prisoners who were planning escapes were almost sacred to their comrades. At night a group of two or three, concealed behind a blanket, would go to work forging papers, altering clothes, rehearsing in costume. "One let them alone, tacitly, unless they asked for help. One looked at them in awe, but from a distance."

For the prisoner suspected of informing on these heroes the camp had a secret court, judge and jury. "Willful treason" was punishable by death--the stool pigeon surreptitiously dropped through a hole in the ice of the Oder River. Willful disclosure of minor information was punished by six rounds in the ring with the camp's boxing champion. Disclosure through stupidity marked the offender as "utterly dangerous"; he was completely ostracized.

The Getaway. One day the struggle to sustain morale got too much for Helion. From the ship's black market, where a few intrepid souls stole, bought and sold civilian garments for purposes of escape, Helion bought a complete outfit. He obtained the forged leave-card and passport of a Belgian worker which were to take him successfully all the way across Germany into then unoccupied France.

On the day of his escape Helion faked a toothache, gained a few precious hours away from his office job. From under the fixed seats of three latrines he took his carefully hidden garments, changed from prison clothes to civvies. Then, with his prison coat thrown loosely over his disguise, he joined his mates in the yard to watch a minutely rehearsed game of volleyball.

The prison gates opened to admit prisoners returning from work. "Their sentry followed. . . . Four hands were stretched towards me behind my comrades: Marquet held my brief case; Finot held a wallet with my money and papers in it. Moineau and David held nothing but their fingers. . . . They felt rough, warm and kind. At this moment the ball hit the ground, two of the players slipped and fell, and Duclos ran towards Desprez with his fists raised . . . knocked him down brutally." The guards rushed up to intervene. Shedding his prison overcoat, Helion "shot out" of the gate.

"Joy, fantastic joy ran through me. . . ." But at that moment another detachment of prisoners passed on the street. "I lowered my head so that they wouldn't recognize me and I looked at their shoes, their wooden shoes, their torn trousers . . . these belonged to Jacques, these to Martin, these to Louis, dragging snow behind their weary steps; oxen driven back to the stables ... my own companions whom I was abandoning. . . .

"Then I bumped into [their sentry]. He, startled, said: 'Verzeihen SieT [Excuse me].

" 'Pardon,' I murmured--but not to him."

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