Customer Reviews

Moonless Night -OS

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The review title just about says it all. Not only did Jimmy James spend almost 5 years as a POW, but he escaped countless times. After being one of the "lucky" 23 recaptured from The Great Escape not to be murdered by the Nazis, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and he ESCAPED from there!!!

An amazing true story!

The author, Jimmy James, provides many lucid details dealing with his experiences before, during, and after the Great Escape. James discusses his experiences at Barth, Stalag Luft III, Szubin, and Sachsenhausen. (He later visited the site of Stalag Luft III in 2004, 60 years after the Great Escape. At that time, he also observed the forensic dig that amazingly unearthed remnants of the tunnel Dick). James provides tables at the end of the book which include various statistics on the three tunnels dug at the time of the Great Escape (tons of sand removed per tunnel and per interval of time, numbers of pieces of lumber used for shoring per tunnel, etc.).

James provides a summary of events that occurred on the night of the Great Escape itself. After he left tunnel Harry during the night of the Great Escape, James trekked to Tschiebsdorf (now Trzebow), took a train to Boberrohrsdorf (or Bober-Rohrsdorf; now Siedlecin), and then was caught just north of the German-Czech border. Most of his comrades were murdered by the Germans, in open violation of the Geneva Convention.

James' description of what went on in Sachsenhausen concentration camp is graphic. Unlike modern treatments that tend to emphasize the experiences of Jews, James provides a balanced account of the many different victims of the Germans and the unspeakable cruelties that they were forced to endure. James makes it clear that Poles and other Slavs, religious and political dissidents, etc., were treated every bit as bad as the Jews. Inmates of western European nationalities, by contrast, were treated considerably better. James mentions numerous details seldom encountered in English-language publications. These include the dressing up of some of the corpses of Sachsenhausen inmates in Polish army uniforms for a faked Polish provocatory "attack" on German territory (along the German-Polish border) used to justify the ensuing German conquest of Poland in September 1939, the murder of 17,000 Polish POWs at Sachsenhausen in March 1940, and the suicide of inmate Jakob Djugashvili (son of Joseph Stalin) following news of the Katyn massacre of Polish POWs (correctly blamed on the Soviets).