(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on June 18th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
On WWII Escapees
I promised a seven day run of posts, and the well has run dry a little bit so far as the online business things have gone. Blame the fact I spent the past two days working on testing payments on a new site, which inevitably work in test mode but as soon as you go live… nothing. Until your card gets charged multiple times.
But that’s not a problem; in fact, I’m very lucky.
And that’s the subject of today’s post.
Imagine Being In A Concentration Camp
I’m in unfamiliar territory here because I’m really not old enough to be doing the old grandpa thing of, “You young’uns don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
That said… here’s some perspective.
Last night, I watched an amazing show where a presenter was retracing the steps of some WWII escapees.
These escapees were captured by the Germans in the Second World War and transported to Stalag-17a in Austria.
There they stayed for three years, and we saw the pictures of them looking worn, withered and skeleton-like, as we’re used to with prison camp photos.
At this point, led by an Australian soldier named Ralph Churches, a handful of men decided to shirk their agricultural duties in the most extreme way; they escaped.
But that’s not even the start of the story.
See, with help from some locals, they got to a nearby town, and then Churches decided that escaping wasn’t enough. So, he talked to his local Slovene Partisan guerrilla friends, and they then set about breaking out the whole camp.
Which they succeeded at, and that’s where the story actually begins.
Your Life Struggles…
Imagine this: You’ve been starving and doing manual labour at the hands of enemy captors for three years. Then, in the middle of the night, some crazy Slovenians break you out of prison, and you, in your dilapidated condition wearing nothing but basic rags, have to scale a forested mountain side worrying about the inevitable onslaught of your captors coming to execute you.
In that state, you climb the hilltop, and then proceed to walk fourteen miles in four hours.
You will then have to march one-hundred-and-fifty more miles, evading capture, dealing with treachery, murder, suicide, being ambushed and set upon with machine guns, crossing rivers, dealing with the fact the variable temperatures include heavy snowfall and the fact you have to do this all at night so you don’t get caught.
That’s the story of these escapees.
And then when they got to the British airbase in Slovenia, the pilot said, “It’s only 100 miles as the crow flies. I’m surprised more people aren’t doing it.”
Hard Potential Runs In Your Veins
This is a story about some WWII escapees, and it’s an interesting anecdote. The obvious round-up is that we’ve all got it good… and it’s worth bearing this anecdote in mind when the next Twitter alpha tells you, “Hard times make hard men,” as though any of us have experienced hard times from our houses with super-fast broadband and all of that.
But more importantly; you don’t have to go back that far in anyone’s family tree before this sort of story is commonplace.
Wrapped up in your genetic code is the potential to survive plagues, starvation, warfare, drought, and the like; and not only that, humans have, from these conditions, built the world around us.
We’ve literally evolved to overcome the world around us and all its potential terrors.
If you can access a fraction of that, then the world is your oyster.