The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks by Paul Simpson Page B

one of them was sent to the asylum in Pamplona. Pico was also illegally executed, although there are various different reports as to when. The prosecutor at the trial said he had been shot before those proceedings began; some said he was killed in the woods; others that he was captured, returned to San Cristobal and shot there. De Valasco, who had raised the alarm, had his prison sentence reduced; everyone else who was recaptured received a further seventeen years.
    Three of the men did make it across the border into France; one of them emigrated to Mexico, where he never discussed his time in prison or his escape with his family.
    When the French press denounced the way that Franco’s regime had handled the breakout and its aftermath, the dictator issued an “official note” commenting on the French defamation of his actions, pointing out that a guard had been killed during the escape; most of the escapees had been returned to the prison; those who had been killed had fought back against their pursuers; and wondering about the activities of certain French citizens who had been visiting villages close to San Cristobal prior to the escape. It was the only comment that the regime ever made about the escape.
    Conditions did improve within the prison; the director was dismissed following the mass break out, and the financial administrator was prosecuted for embezzlement. A memorial was erected on the fiftieth anniversary of the escape, but it was regularly vandalized, and was destroyed completely by members of the extreme right in 2009. The prison was closed in 1945, and the Spanish Army abandoned the fortress in 1987, with a surveillance unit remaining for a further four years. In 2001, it was declared cultural property of the state, and over the past few years excavations of the area have allowed many of the bodies of prisoners to be removed and given proper burials.
    The inscription on the memorial is perhaps the best tribute to those who died in the unknown great escape: “I die without pain, since I lay down my life for freedom.”
    Sources:
    El Pais,
21 October 2007: “La fuga de los 221 muertos”
    Memoria Libertaria, May 2005: “Fuerte de San Cristobal 1938” (includes quotes from the documentary
La gran fuga de las cárceles franquistas
)

Cheating the Death Camp
    Although there have been various accounts over the years of heroic escapes from the confines of the Nazi concentration and death camps, some of which do not stand up to close scrutiny, few are as well documented and accepted as the escape from Treblinka in August 1943.
    The death camp had been established as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi’s codename for their Final Solution: the total extermination of the Jewish people across occupied Europe. There was already a forced labour camp near the formerly Polish village of Treblinka; this became known as Treblinka I. Treblinka II was solely concerned with the mass murder of as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.
    The death camp was begun in May 1942, and was in operation by that July: a railway branch line was built connecting to the nearby station, along which the truckloads of Jews were brought. On arrival, they would be informed that this was a transit camp, and that for hygiene purposes, they needed to take a shower before being dispatched to their new workplaces. Separated by gender, with children remaining with the women, the Jews would strip naked, reassured that their belongings would be returned to them after the showers, and the women’s hair was shorn. They were then herded along a narrow passageway into a shower room. Once there, carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust pipe of a Russian tank was pumped into the room, asphyxiating them within a few minutes. The bodies were then removed from the showers, and taken to the mass burial pits before the next group were brought in to meet the same fate.
    Although they were supervised by German and Ukrainian guards, Jewish prisoners