Read an Excerpt

From This Great Escape

Screenplay

INT. TRAIN COMPARTMENT – DAY. The door opens and a Gestapo agent enters. He glances at the identity cards offered by a pair of SS officers. Not of interest, not on his list. In total there are 76 escaped prisoners from Stalag Luft III and Hitler has ordered a nation-wide manhunt, ein Grossfahndung. The Gestapo agent moves forward and then stops when he comes face to face with the actors Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson, escaped POWs disguised as businessmen on the train. There is something about them. He studies their papers closely and questions them in German and in French. He hands the props back, and moves past them into the coach ahead.
The train slows down as it swings into the turn of a steep gradient. At 2:14:34 run time, the Gestapo agent finds the actor David McCallum -- Ashley-Pitt: code-name Dispersal -- and flips through his passbook.


GESTAPO (standing)
Die Reise fur deine firma?

ASHLEY-PITT (seated)
Ja. Fur mein Gescheft.

GESTAPO
Danke.

ASHLEY-PITT:
Danke.


Are you traveling for your company? Yes, for my business. Thank you. The Gestapo man exits the coach and the door slides shut behind him and that’s the last an English audience sees of this actor alive. He’s had perhaps a minute of screen time in one of the most watched war movies of all time. He’s noticeable for his painfully ill-fitting costume. But is not credited for the role, a bit part. Shortly after the film was made he died, aged 32, from a drug overdose in Hamburg. Watched by millions yet (almost) completely unknown, forever eclipsed by the high wattage Hollywood stars. And there's a further irony. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, the son of one of Austria’s most famous left wing actors, and partly Jewish, playing a Gestapo agent, a role reprised on thousands of television repeats.
In fact, watching television is how I came to know of my ‘cousin’ Michael. He was alive but not living, stranded in the no man’s land of a motion picture. His character in The Great Escape is staged and scripted, but I was spellbound nonetheless. Cousin Michael was convincing. Fedora and trench coat. Elegant. Blond. His smooth transitions. His lively walk, his coat unbuttoned, his fashion bespoke the casual flair of some fresh-as-the-breeze fascist. This image, I now understand, many years later, is counterfeit, a convenient archetype, manufactured by the American film director John Sturges and his sidekick Bert Hendrickson in Costume Design and Wardrobe. But it is him, close enough to the real thing. So what to call him? Historicized? Father’s cousin? My first cousin once removed? The family used Michi. As in, Michi broke Mama’s heart.

...

Unnecessary Travel Lengthens The War

BAVARIA FILM STUDIOS
Munich. October 2010

I stand at the box office, outside the museum opposite the active studios, under a grey but clearing sky.
“Morgen. I have a question.”
“Welcome.” A young man is working the window.
“Inside the museum…”
“Yes?”
“Is there an installation from The Great Escape?”
“Nein. But Das Boot you can see.” His two female co-workers are momentarily intrigued by their first visitor of the morning, a foreigner and not a Facebook friend.
“Aber keinmal Great Escape?” I leverage the little German I know.
“Das Boot is more modern.” His co-workers join, reinforcements, to have a closer look.
“Yes, I know. Aber…But…” And then I divulge the keynotes of my visit to all three–andwhy I have come so early on a weekday morning to disturb their social media quiet time. The movie was a Hollywood blockbuster. A member of my family had a small role in it. Unfortunately, he died young, in Hamburg, a long time ago.
“We’re sorry,” the woman in a black pullover seems genuinely touched. She has an open, friendly face. Oval-shaped, and plump freckled cheeks. She looks at her female counterpart who has cropped and dyed spiky hair. Then inquires, “What was his name?”
“Michael Paryla.”
After exchanged and bewildered glances:
“We don’t know him.”
“He is buried in Waldfriedhof Cemetery.” I offer a local reference, this might make him real.
“That is near to this place.” The black pulli is onside, but her female colleague has moved away, gone into a small office. Looking for clues in the laptop or cell.
“The prison camp scenes were filmed here in 1962.” I decide to push the film angle, after all.
“Yes, we know.” The young man takes over. His tone is poised between passive and aggressive.
“The tunnel scenes were filmed inside.” I point to the studio buildings and sound stages behind the metal fence surrounding the film city. For a moment, I consider telling them about Wally Floody, a Canadian like me and former mining engineer and prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Floody was a wartime spitfire pilot. He was hired as a technical advisor on the film set. Charles Bronson’s character Tunnel King is partly based on Wally Floody. But never mind.
“It’s too bad,” the young man reflects. “But no one knows the history of ‘this’ place.” He shakes his head.
I have travelled a long way to be told exactly what I expected to be told. I’d done my homework in Canada. I had learned about Das Boot from Das Google. But that didn’t stop me from coming here, accepting an unwilling audience, holding out for a surprise. I have three at the window again, crowded inside the box office, which reminds me that the Mirisch Brothers released The Great Escape in an era when the POW film genre had finally become trapped by its own success. Prisoner escape stories conveniently supplied a reliable narrative and dramatic vector, but during the post war decade there had been a glut of POW films, most of them based on best selling memoirs like Paul Brickhill’s. Instead of lecturing them on a topic about which I’m far from an expert, I tell my gatekeepers a little more about Michael and his part in the movie. I point in the vague direction of Waldfriedhof Cemetery and acknowledge his grave is that way. Are they at all interested? Over there, he is buried under the tall trees in a mossy cemetery, I might say, since I know this from a letter Michael’s father Karl Paryla penned on April 21, 1967. I could spout verbatim from the private correspondences – the poignant documents written in the days and months after Michael’s death – but turn off the tap. I’m a very curious customer as it is.
“Why don’t you visit his grave?” The man, somewhat bodly, suggests. “It’s too bad, but there is nothing inside about the movie and there is no archivist here, no film historian.”
As for the past, they are it. Not one born before 1990.
“I found a web page,” I say, ignoring his suggestion, “made by an American. It pinpoints a football field near the studio lot, bordering the forest, where the model prison camp might have been built.”
“Yes, we know about this, a man was here from America last year. He asked many questions like you and made this web page, probably. But he really didn’t know what he was talking about. He was ‘just like you’,” the young man informs me, which means the American was guessing.
“Are you sure there is not a film historian on site?”
“Too bad, but no. We are sorry.”
I sigh good-naturedly but at the same time show my disappointment. How can they not be better organized, they’re Germans. Nonetheless, they have apologized for a situation out of their control.
“Over there by the train tracks,” spiky hair points, “is a film institute but it is only educational and for teachers and students.” She slides her hands into her pant pockets. “They won’t know your film there, either.”
“We are it for knowledge,” says the young man. (They are ganging up on me now. Needlessly beating a dead horse.) “Your film was years ago. There is no consciousness of the film here, which is too bad, and not good.”
He holds up his palms, and backs away from the window. More denial than asked for. Still, I won’t shoot.
“Thank you for your help.”
I walk along the road bordering the studio lots and the forest. He said ‘your film’. But he meant mine. Michael was given a minute on the train, to play Gestapo opposite Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson and David McCallum and James Garner et al. My film? Das Boot is what the people are served today. WWII U-boats. The Battle of the Atlantic. Visitors demand entry to the claustrophobic world of a submarine crew, never mind the shenanigans and the soiled underground of a group of allied prisoners of war. There is a guided tour in English at 1 PM. The cost is 11 Euros. I have no interest in the professionalism of these submariners, thirty-thousand of which perished undersea. I won’t go in.
I’m here to find out more about the other movie, and to follow as closely as I can in Michael’s footsteps. But I’m finding that it’s not an easy task. Like the type of prisoner who was brought to Stalag Luft III in spring of 1943, Michael was a serial escapist, most of his life, beginning in 1935, when he exited the womb, in Vienna, disguised as happiness itself, in the eyes of his mother Eva, and his father, Karl.

...

Letters To Eva


21 January 1967 from Vienna

It is very difficult for me to write this letter to you, as it contains news that will affect you just as deeply as it has affected me.

Du must allen Mut und alle Kraft zusammen nehmen, um die schreckliche Tatsache aufnehmen und ertragen zu koennen.

You need to gather all your courage and all your strength in order to absorb and deal with the awful facts.

Her lips part then bump like clouds. This is Karl Paryla’s handwriting. Sounding words, knowing meaning will strike not much later.

I can’t believe it yet myself and I don’t know where to turn or to seek comfort. Aber—But—I have taken it upon myself to deliver terrible news; the worst thing that could have happened to us. Unser Michael ist nicht mehr. Our Michael is no more. He died last night in Hamburg.

The incident is still completely inexplicable, but I see it as my duty to immediately inform you of anything I know. Michael was supposed to go on stage at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg yesterday; when he didn’t show up, they broke into his room and he was lying in his bed, sleeping.

Eva breaks here – numb, mumbling ‘lying in his bed, sleeping’ -- and follows the route upstairs from the kitchen and along the narrow hall, pressing her skirt between her legs she slips into his bedroom to find the sunshine amassed on the rug and the cat warm on the pillow at the head of his bed. Aber. Michael is no more. But. Memory believes. Memory is certain of a hole before the letter from Karl grips her again and she slumps on the side of the bed: Michael home from school with a fever after having his tonsils removed, Michael and his barking cough, when it was past time turn out the light and stop him reading, when it was morning again, she would wake him, a boy of fourteen, fifteen, her fine blond boy. Her son. Her only child.

Beside him, a half empty bottle of whisky and a pill bottle, from which he had evidently taken sleeping pills. He suffered from insomnia and the pills had been prescribed by a doctor. He was brought to St. Georg Hospital by ambulance, where a Dr. Wuehler (with whom I’ve spoken on the phone) attempted resuscitation. Herzmassage, cardiac massage, artificial respiration. But nothing helped anymore.

Because it was broken or they broke it with force, compressing his ribs, shooting blood through four chambers, they tried to squeeze him out from underneath but the weight…it was too much, he was already so weak

He was already so weak and exhausted that he died, without regaining consciousness, shortly after entering the hospital.

She reads from left to right, in one eye out the other: Das Motiv eines Selbstmordes war nicht auszuschliessen, suicide was not discounted, even though there was no indication to that effect. Only further investigation will shed light on the matter.

Eva falls head-sideways on the pillow. The cat hops off the bed. The telephone rings. Antoine. Calling from the lab. What loneliness she feels. She inhales linen, a mouthful of the dry fabric sticks, tingles and cuts her tongue. Selbstmordes. Self-murder. Sloppy. Suicide. Which is better? German or English. She can taste his scalp. He would reek like black pepper when he sweat, when she held him in her arms and kissed the crown of his head. What good is it? Michael is no more. Whosoever has seen a happy thing fall, has stood at the abyss…

I am interrupting my work here in Vienna and will drive to Hamburg and only then will I be able to gain some clarity on all the circumstances surrounding his death. All the people I questioned over the phone today, and who had been in close contact to him, tend to believe it was an accident. A combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. A few weeks ago I was able to see so for myself in Hamburg. I spent a lot of time with him and got the impression that he had matured and was on the right path. He was in great shape and great spirits. He had a respectable contract, a successful career, good prospects.

But Eva knows he was a clown. For certain, Michael was a practical joker. At Collegiate High School, the first year they had arrived in Canada, from Germany, his teachers had told her this: and Eva never forgot it -- an expression she had never heard before; ‘Practical joker’. ‘Your son is a practical joker.’ Was it something good? Maybe it was. Laughter is lucky. In any event to Eva the expression sounded like Canada and America, it was confirmation or a baptism, and the fact is they had arrived. There had been exile and immigration, and now for assimilation. Canada was a land of practical jokers and her son Michael and his new friend Ken Taylor were probably the biggest jokers in all Sault Saint Marie. For teenage boys, they were harmless, which she liked. They went fishing together and for ‘picnics’ (which also sounded very nice). They played on the railway tracks and in the school yard. She liked it that boys this age could be soft and that Michael and Ken were buddies. ‘Buddies’. Buddies and practical jokers. Michael had matured and was on the right path, alright, alright, but Eva hadn’t forgotten that Michael was a practical joker -- which is to say he might have surprised them all, but not her, not his own mother -- Michael had spent the war in Austria and in Switzerland, and then two years in war-destroyed Berlin, before emigrating here to the land of milk and cookies and picnics with ‘bosom buddies’. Michael had been a DP from birth. At fourteen, he was more sophisticated than any of his teachers or buddies could fathom. He was good at hiding who he was. And where he was from. He was a natural. Out there he was acting. But inside Michael was at war. Eva knew.

Also, it is in no way certain whether a sudden physical distress didn’t cause his death. I will find out and let you know. His ‘wife’, with whom he had been living for years, was not there with him. But they were on excellent terms and they loved each other very much.

Eva, it would be easier for me than it actually is if I could tell you something about his death, and I can only ask that Antoine stands by you. It’s terrible that I can only express myself in words now, and from such a great distance, and not take the two of you in my arms, as friends.

Believe me, Eva, I feel your pain, along with mine. The letter was sent Express and mailed to the wrong address. There is no indication as to when it arrived nor whether it is by this means that Eva first learned of Michael’s death. Cross Atlantic telephone calls were not the norm at the time. My sorrowful condolences. I embrace you. Your Karl.