Escape (8 page)

“What the devil is that?” said Gimenez.

They found out soon enough. Below, circling around the ground between the prison buildings and the wall, was a guard on a bicycle. He made the trip around the prison perimeter every three minutes.

So close to success, Devigny was seized by a desperate need to get the whole escape over with. Their cell lay empty. The skylight to the roof had been opened. Worst of all, a dead man lay in the shadows. Surely, at any time, a prison guard would find some evidence to point to an escape in progress, and raise the alarm? With every passing minute the chance of discovery grew greater. But Devigny kept these thoughts to himself. The last thing he wanted to do was panic Gimenez.

Then, their chances looked even more desperate.

“Listen,” said Devigny, “I can hear voices below. There must be a couple of guards beneath us too.”

But when the cyclist rode by, the men could see that he was talking to himself. Both breathed a long sign of relief and got ready for the final push.

As the clock struck three, Devigny threw the rope over to the outer wall. The lamp frame grapple gripped the brickwork, and held firm. They tied their end of the rope to a solid chimney stack and prepared to cross. But just at that moment, the guard on the bicycle decided it was time for a rest. He parked his bike right below the men and stood beneath them wheezing.

Devigny and Gimenez could not believe they were so unlucky. Agonizing minutes passed, each man expecting to hear the cry of a guard raising the alarm at any second. In the east a pale light touched the rim of the sky. Soon it would be dawn. But the guard below never did look up to see their rope. He got back on his bike and cycled off.

It was now or never, but the strain was beginning to show all too clearly on the two escapers.

Devigny spoke softly: “You go first, Gimenez, and I'll follow.”

“No…” said the boy fiercely. “What if the rope breaks? What if I get spotted and shot? What if I fall? You go and I'll follow.”

Devigny's patience was at an end, and he snapped: “Go now, or I'll throttle you on the spot.”

A fierce, whispered row continued between them. Eventually Devigny threw himself onto the rope and hauled himself over as fast as he could. Gimenez followed swiftly after, and the two edged along the outer wall until they came to a place where it was low enough to the ground to jump down.

Each man dropped with a dull, muffled thump. They were free. The prison had no uniform, so Devigny and Gimenez were able to mingle with workers on their way to the early morning shift at a nearby factory. By the time their empty cell and the dead body of the guard had been discovered, the two prisoners had both vanished into the nearby countryside.

After the escape

André Devigny escaped to Switzerland, and made his way to North Africa where he joined up with French army forces. After the war, French president General De Gaulle awarded him the prestigious Cross of Liberation medal, and appointed him to a senior post in the French secret service. In 1957, French director Robert Bresson made a film of the escape from Montluc. It was shot at the prison and the actors even used the same rope that Devigny and Gimenez had used. Devigny was hired as an advisor on the film. He retired in 1971, and died in 1999.

Gimenez, his companion in the escape, was not so lucky, and was recaptured. Although his fate is unknown, he was almost certainly executed.

The prison chief Klaus Barbie escaped to Bolivia after the war. He was arrested and brought back to Montluc in 1983. He was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, and died in prison in 1991.

(and how to unlock them)

A visitor to Tim Jenkin's cell, at Pretoria Prison in South Africa, would have to pass through no less than ten doors to get to him. Walking through the outer yard they would first go through two doors at the ground floor entrance of the prison, then another inside the hallway. From there, a long corridor would take them through another three doors before they reached a prison guard's office. Then, another corridor led to a door at the base of a stairwell to the first floor. Here they would pass through another door to another long corridor. This was where Jenkin's cell was, along with all the other political prisoners in the jail. Even his cell had an inner and outer door to get through – and every single one of these doors was locked at night.

Any supporter of South Africa's racist apartheid regime could sleep soundly at night knowing that Jenkin was locked up so securely. His “crime” was being a member of the banned African National Congress Party (or ANC), which was fighting for the right for South Africa to be a democracy.

Jenkin had walked that very same route into the prison in June 1978. Now he was one and a half years into a 12 year sentence. Prison life was indescribably boring but it had its compensations. In the same corridor was Stephen Lee, another ANC member, and a friend of Jenkin's since university. Both of them had been plotting an escape since they arrived. They soon discovered that most of their fellow prisoners were reconciled to their sentences and had abandoned any idea of escape. But not Alex Moumbaris. He had been there since 1973. When Jenkin mentioned they were wondering how to get out of the prison, Moumbaris told him that if any escape plans were being hatched, he “would definitely like to be one of the chickens”.

Plotting a daring escape made prison life less tedious for Jenkin. But Moumbaris was a mixed blessing. While most prisoners were polite and cooperative with the prison guards, he was usually hostile and insolent, and refused to keep his cell tidy. To Moumbaris, the guards were the representatives of a political regime he loathed, and he was not going to let them forget it.

But prisoners who behaved like this were singled out for close supervision, and watched far more suspiciously. Jenkin and Lee persuaded Moumbaris to change his ways and become a model prisoner. Sure enough, the guards began to take far less interest in him and the three could begin to plot an escape in earnest.

They were all now painfully familiar with the day-to-day routine of the prison. But this was actually a tremendous advantage. The three were able to predict almost exactly what their guards would be doing at any particular time of day. They also knew when they were least likely to be disturbed. The guards' meal times, for example, were quiet times when they could almost guarantee they would not be visited. What they also found out was that after 4:30pm in the afternoon, when all the prisoners were locked in the cells for the night, only one guard remained in the prison, in a little office on the ground floor. There was also a guard on a glass-covered catwalk over the courtyard outside the prison, and another who stood outside the main exit, but he did not come on duty until 6:00pm at night.

There seemed to be two options when it came to escape. The first was relatively simple. They could break out of their cell windows, sprint through the prison yard, and climb the 6m (20ft) fence that encircled the prison perimeter. Simple it may have been, but there was also a very high risk of injury or death. For a start, a fierce dog patrolled the yard, trained to sink its teeth into any escaper.

Prisoners were allowed in the yard at certain times of the day, and Jenkin and Moumbaris tried out a few diversionary tactics. Several dogs were used on a weekly rota, and although some of them were prepared to take food from the men, others growled menacingly at even the choicest tidbits.

But there was also another problem with this plan – the armed guard on the catwalk above the yard, which was lit by fiercely bright searchlights during the night. Perhaps they could arrange a distraction to lure him away, but the more they thought about it, the less they felt the simple option was going to work.

So the three turned their thoughts to a more complicated escape. That meant going out the way they had come in. Jenkin's heart sank at the complexity of the task before them. It would take ages to fathom out a way to get past ten locked doors.

Whatever they did had to be fool-proof, as they would only get one chance. If they were caught, providing they weren't killed in the attempt, years would be added to their sentences, and they would be watched much more closely. They might even be transferred to much rougher prisons.

How a lock works

So the three prisoners set about working out how to get through each prison door one at a time, and what better place to start than their own cell doors? Jenkin noted the size of the keyhole and made a painstaking measurement of the shape of the “tumblers” inside, which worked the lock mechanism (see diagram above).

Jenkin worked out the size and shape of the underside of the tumblers by making an impression with a knife, on a blank sheet of paper that he carefully inserted through the keyhole.

There was a workshop in the prison, where inmates spent some of their day making furniture. This gave the three escapers a golden opportunity. They had access to materials to make their keys and the tools to make them too. Even better, the guard who was usually on duty at the workshop was so sleepy and sluggish that Jenkin used to think his brain only flickered to life when he sucked on his pipe.

Gradually, through trial and error, Jenkin managed to construct his first key. First he made the basic shape in the prison workshop, then continued to carve the all important cuts in the “bit” in his cell, with a file he had stolen from the workshop. When the key was finished he made a wonderful discovery – the same key could open every cell door on the corridor.

The keys that would unlock the other doors were all around them. They jangled from the guards' belts and jingled in the guards' hands. Jenkin thought their guards deliberately made as much noise as possible with these keys, to torment the prisoners. Whenever he watched a guard lock or unlock his own door he tried to see as much detail as possible of the key that was being used.

The more they planned how to get out of their seemingly impregnable prison, the more they realized there were some extraordinary lapses in security. During the day, prisoners were allowed open access to several parts of the prison, on routes which passed though several of the 10 doors to the entrance. Amazingly, keys were often left in the locks of these doors, only to be removed when the doors were locked at night. To steal a key would be too obvious, but the three men could certainly look at one, and even make an impression of it in a bar of soap, to be copied later.

Some locks never did have keys left in them, but as their knowledge of lock mechanisms increased, Jenkin, Lee and Moumbaris were able to unscrew the lock from the door, or open it on the spot, measure the tumblers, and then put everything back in place. Amazingly, they were never spotted.

One lock that gave them particular trouble was the one on the steel grill that made up the outer door on each of their cells. It could only be locked from the outside. But even this was not an impossible task. Each cell had an open window overlooking the corridor and between them the escapers made an ingenious cranking device from a stolen broom handle, and other parts found in the furniture workshop. The broom key took four painstaking months to perfect, and Moumbaris kept it hidden in several pieces in his cell.