The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (60 page)

Screwing up his courage, Hayes slipped out after the bed check, and crawled across the rocks, knowing that at best if he was caught, he would be returned to Sağmalcilar; at worst, he could be shot by the guards. As unobtrusively as possible, he entered the water, and began swimming quietly towards the moored boats, hoping that the searchlights manned by the guards wouldn’t be turned in his direction. He reached a dinghy, and was in the process of cutting it loose, using a knife that he had liberated from the canning factory, when he was nearly discovered by the owner of the boat. Narrowly avoiding being seen, Hayes cut through the rope, and rowed himself past the rest of the boats, and the end of the island.

His muscles strengthened from yoga and carrying large sacks of beans around, Hayes was able to row through the night, and hit the beach around the time the next morning that the guards realized that he had escaped. His initial plan had been to ask a favour from a former prisoner friend and hide in his hotel in Istanbul; however when he got there, he learned that his friend had just gone to Afghanistan. Hayes’ hopes of remaining in a basement till the hue and cry died down faded.

If he couldn’t stay out of the way then Hayes knew he had to cross into Greece as quickly as possible; he reasoned that the hatred between Greece and Turkey meant that it was unlikely he would be returned to Turkey unless he committed murder. For three days, he ran through Turkey, dying his hair, and even inadvertently travelling through a minefield on the Greek/Turkish border. He had close encounters with border guards, and tried his best to evade the dogs on his scent by removing his shoes and socks. Eventually reaching the Maritsa river that divided the two countries, he swam across and once on the far side, he was intercepted by a Greek soldier and arrested – he had arrived in a heavily restricted military zone. For nearly two weeks, he was interrogated about everything he had seen, both at the prisons, and on his journey across Turkey to the Greek border.

On State Department advice, Hayes didn’t remain in Europe, in case the West Germans or others decided that they would return him to Turkey. He caught a flight via Frankfurt, remaining in the transit lounge just in case, and Amsterdam to New York. It was more than thirty years before he would visit Turkey again: the film of
Midnight Express
had a noticeable anti-Turkish bias, which Hayes himself did not share, and he eventually went back, as he described it, to heal the breach. In the meantime, he became a film-maker, actor and director. He hasn’t been tempted to smuggle since that day in 1970.

Sources:

Hayes, Billy with William Hoffer:
Midnight Express
(revised edition, CurlyBrains Publishing, 2012)

Crave Online, 28 June 2010: “Billy Hayes Reveals ‘The Real Midnight Express’”

Time
magazine, 13 April 1970: “Americans Abroad: The Jail Scene”

Tete de Turce: “Midnight-Express Phenomenon”
www.tetedeturce.com

National Geographic TV, 2010:
Locked Up Abroad: The Real Midnight Express

US Department of State, 25 May 1974: Telex from American Consul, Istanbul to American Embassy, Ankara

US Department of State, 19 March 1975: Telex from American Embassy, Ankara to Secretary of State, Washington DC

US Department of State, 9 May 1975: Telex from American Embassy, Ankara to Secretary of State, Washington DC

US Department of State, 21 October 1975: Telex from American Consul, Thessaloniki, to Secretary of State, Washington DC

He survived torture at the hands of the infamous Klaus Barbie, and was one of the few people ever to escape from the dreaded Fort Montluc prison in Lyon, but one thing was too much even for French resistance hero André Devigny. After he retired from the Army, he considered a career in politics, but decided that it wasn’t for him when he realized that “the backstabbing was far worse than anything I’d ever encountered in secret warfare”.

Devigny was working as a spy within occupied France during the Second World War when he was captured and sent to Montluc. In May 1940, the former school teacher had been commanding French troops in Belgium, battling against the advancing Germans, working behind enemy lines; unfortunately, he was the victim of “friendly fire” from his own side, and he was hospitalized back to Bordeaux, and then sent to recuperate at his family’s farm in the Savoie region, in the French Alps.

In 1942, Devigny became one of the undercover operatives run by Colonel Georges-André Groussard out of Geneva. Groussard was working with British Intelligence – both MI6 and the Special Operations Executive – as well as Allen Dulles, representing the American Office of Special Services, and was fomenting anti-Nazi resistance within France as part of the “Gilbert” network. Lieutenant Devigny, codename Valentin, was exactly the sort of young officer he needed.

In April 1943, Devigny’s Resistance cell based out of Annemasse, near the Swiss border, was infiltrated by a spy for the Gestapo. Robert Moog had worked at a gunpowder factory near Toulouse that had been sabotaged by Devigny’s cell, and he was determined to take revenge. He betrayed one of Devigny’s key colleagues, Edmee Deletraz, to the Gestapo, and she was forced to identify her leader. On April 14, Devigny and another member of the Resistance killed an Italian counter-espionage agent who was in the pay of the Germans. Three days after this execution in Nice, Devigny was arrested after Deletraz met him at the railway station at Annemasse.

Devigny was taken to Fort Montluc, a nineteenth-century prison which had been taken over by the Gestapo in November 1942 to act as a prison, interrogation centre, and internment camp for those awaiting transport to concentration camps. During the twenty-one months it was in operation, it is estimated that over 15,000 people were imprisoned within its walls; over 900 of them were executed there. In charge was Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon for his extreme methods of interrogation and torture, many of which he carried out himself rather than leave it to his assistants.

From 17 April to 25 May, Barbie and his men interrogated Devigny but he didn’t break, and gave them no useful information. He did his level best to escape from the prison, but each attempt was unsuccessful, and only resulted in ever more severe punishment. During one try, while he was being transferred, he was shot. In the end, on 20 August 1943, he was sentenced to death by a German military court; he would face the firing squad on 28 August.

Three days before he was due to be executed, Devigny escaped. Although the Germans thought that they had kept him firmly under lock and key during his incarceration, Devigny had been able to move around the prison. He knew how to remove his handcuffs using a safety pin, and had then ground down a soup spoon on the concrete floor of his cell to create a tool. He used this to push out the wooden slats at the bottom of his cell door, and found that he could squeeze through the opening. At night, when the guards were confident that their prisoners were secure for the night, Devigny moved around the cell block, talking to the other inmates. He would then return to his cell, and wedge the slats back into place.

The frame of an old lantern that he discovered in the hallway gave him the idea for his means of escape – he knew he would need some sort of grappling hook in order to get over the walls. He took the lantern apart and created hooks from it, which he fixed to a home-made rope, formed from a mattress cover and a blanket, with pieces of wire.

After his appearance before the German military, Devigny knew he had to put his plan into effect quickly, but the day before he was going to flee, the Germans put another prisoner in with him. Devigny realized he had two options: take the rather dim-witted Gimenez with him, or kill him. He decided on the former course.

As soon as the clock chimed ten on the night of 24 August 1943, Devigny sprang into action. He knocked out the wedges which held the slats up, and removed the wooden boards from the door, passing them to Gimenez, who stacked them in the corner of the cell out of the way. He then checked the corridor was empty, and helped Gimenez to squeeze through the gap.

A skylight gave some meagre light into the corridor, and it was through this Devigny and Gimenez planned to exit. Devigny tried to climb up to it but his strength had been sapped by his days of solitary confinement following his previous escapes. Knowing that if he stopped now, he would be a dead man, Devigny summoned up all his energy and managed to boost himself up to the ceiling, and push the skylight open. After a few minutes’ rest, he let a small rope down to Gimenez, who passed up a bundle containing the large rope that they needed to get over the walls, as well as their clothing. Devigny then helped Gimenez to ascend.

The pair had to wait for trains to pass nearby the prison to mask the noise of their movement across the roof of the fort, but since the stretch of line near the fort carried trains between the two main stations of Lyon, there wasn’t too long a gap between them. Covered by the sound of a slow goods train making its way through the night, they managed to reach their goal, the side of the roof opposite the infirmary, slightly quicker than Devigny had anticipated.

Leaving Gimenez while he checked out the lie of the land, Devigny spotted a pair of guards smoking near the wash house, but from his initial position he couldn’t see the stretch of wall they would need to climb down. With infinite patience, he slowly made his way around the roof and checked whether it was safe to proceed.

Although it seemed that the coast was clear, Devigny doublechecked, and was very pleased that he had: his second inspection revealed a sentry sleeping on the steps, who would be in exactly the right position to see the two escapees as they came down into the courtyard. At midnight, the guard was changed, and Devigny watched his movements carefully. He then went back to Gimenez, and told him that they would be descending when the next train approached.

Just before 1 a.m., the two men heard a whistle in the distance which increased in volume. Telling Gimenez not to worry about the man patrolling below, Devigny slid down the rope into the courtyard, raced across to a low wall, threw the rope with the makeshift grappling hook over, hauled himself up and then dropped down the other side. Leaving the ropes for Gimenez, Devigny killed the sentry, then signalled for Gimenez to follow.

The two men raced across the next courtyard to the inner wall of the perimeter as quickly as they could, since they could easily be visible if anyone happened to look out of the infirmary windows, or from the central block. Devigny’s strength was sapping, and in his memoirs, he admitted that he probably would have had to give up at this point if he had been on his own. Gimenez however, was able to ascend the wall without any trouble, and helped Devigny to reach the top. They then had to get across another roof before they reached a point which looked out at the outer wall.

They got up there, dislodging a couple of slates along the way that were luckily not heard, but when he saw what they faced, Devigny wondered if the attempt was doomed to fail. He had been unable to see the exact layout of the perimeter area between the walls from the roof before, and hadn’t realized how brightly lit it was. They could hear voices coming from the perimeter – if there was a sentry box nearby, they wouldn’t have a chance.

Devigny refused to give up, and craned his neck out to look at the area. To his relief, he saw that there was in fact only one sentry, who was patrolling the fifteen-feet-wide perimeter strip on a bicycle. The “voices” they had heard was the man talking to himself to relieve the boredom. At three o’clock, Devigny decided it was time to try. Waiting for the sentry to pass them by, he threw the rope with a grappling iron onto the top of the wall. It held fast the first time, and he then attached the rope firmly behind him.

The Resistance leader was exhausted by this stage, and encouraged Gimenez to go first, since he was lighter. If the rope snapped under Devigny’s weight, at least Gimenez would have escaped. However the younger man lost his nerve, and refused to go.

Dawn was fast approaching, and Devigny realized that it was now or never. As soon as the sentry cycled past once more, passing beneath the rope, Devigny gripped the rope in both hands, swung himself out into space, and then pulled his legs up into position. Then, hand over hand, he made his way across to the far wall, and pulled himself up. As soon as the sentry passed by again, Gimenez followed suit. They then made their way along the outer wall to an area where it was much lower, and dropped to the ground. At 5 a.m., they were free men: the only two to escape from Fort Montluc while it was under Gestapo control.

The escape was nearly short-lived. Gimenez and Devigny were stopped by German patrols a couple of days later, but Devigny was able to escape from them by diving into a nearby river, and staying submerged in the mud for five hours. With help from his Resistance colleagues, Devigny made his way to Switzerland, and became active in the war effort again – he was captured in Spain later in the conflict, but after two months in prison, he managed to escape again. His escape came at a cost. As a direct result, Barbie ordered the arrest and deportation to the death camps of two of Devigny’s cousins.

Devigny served with distinction for many years after the Second World War, becoming a leading figure in French counter-intelligence. He retired in 1971 and died in 1999.

Sources:

The Independent,
25 February 1999: “Obituary: General Andre Devigny”

Ordre de la Liberation: “André Devigny, alias: Valentin”

The New York Times,
27 February 1999: “Andre Devigny, 82; Escaped from Gestapo Prison”

Devigny, André:
Un condamné s’est échappé
(A Man Escaped, translated Peter Green) (Hachette, 1956; Lyons Press, 2002)

Some of the most famous escapes from prisons took place from the prisoner-of-war camps operated by the Germans during World War II. These have inspired films, novels and TV series, and names and phrases like ‘Colditz’ and ‘The Great Escape’ have entered the general language. But as with so many of the escapes recounted in this volume, the true stories are often very different from the screen versions – the 1970s BBC version of
Colditz
needed an American star, so a character was created for Robert Wagner who would not have been imprisoned at Oflag IV-C for as long as he was in the series. The Cooler King played by Steve McQueen in the movie of
The Great Escape
wasn’t part of the real escape, and the fate of the fifty men was markedly different in real life to the dramatic conclusion of the movie. In this section we look at a couple of famous cases, and a pair that aren’t so well known.