Morning in Český Brod

Vladimir brought us breakfast from Jane and joined us in the available dining room on second floor of the pension (our room, room #2, was on the third floor). We ate homemade coffee cake with tea and coffee available from the pension kitchen.

Vladimir then walked with us around the town square where upon we ran into a former US military man, and his son, who served at Fort Bragg, NC (near where we now live) and lived for a time in Palatine, IL (and was familiar with where we used to live).

He now lives with his Czech wife in Chesky Brod. What a small world! 

On to Český Brod, Czechia

We'd always planned to visit the Martinek's but we were unsure when because we left our final planning until very late despite Claire working hard to organize our trip for us. Then we discovered we were arriving a day later than expected and had to shift the trip by a day. To make matters worse we relied upon the car navigation system to get us to Český Brod and we were led to the wrong place also to find the road closed from that town directly to where we wanted to go so we had to find a new way that was not clear on the map. 

Five hours later than expected we finally arrived to find Vladimir, Thomas, and David patiently waiting for us. Vladimir had arranged a very nice room for the night for us and let us to a restaurant for dinner. 

Leisnig Schluss - Burg Mildenstein

Leisnig Castle, also known as city Mildenstein, is a 10th century walled city that underwent a series of ownership changes and renovations and serves today as a standing museum of ancient weapons, books and incarceration tools (stocks, locks and cages) as well as facilities to host concerts and other events such as weddings. Well worth the entrance fee.

Colditz Castle - The Glider

Perhaps the most ambitious escape plan was the construction of a glider that would carry a couple of men, back-to-back over to freedom. The glider was constructed behind a false wall in the attic of readily available wood (prisoners had access to wood through the prison run live theater) and bedsheets made more suitable for aircraft use by coating with porrige using an aircraft construction book unwittingly provided by the guards.

The plan was to cut open the attic wall, place tables on the peak of an adjacent roof, reassemble the plane, and launch the glider using a bathtub filled with concrete, dropped over a pulley at the roof's end ... in one night!

American troops reached the prison after guards abandoned it near the war's end resulting in the plan never being tested but in 2012 an engineer was invited to attempt a reconstruction of the glider and to launch it with a puppet pilot under remote control and it was successfully flown and (deliberately) crash landed across the river using only bathtub launch power.

Colditz Castle - The French Tunnel

While the British attempted to escape more often, the French were more often successful. Eventually a committee was formed to share escape plans to avoid tunnels collapsing into one another and foiled escapes such as when one escapee, dressed as a woman, was beyond the guards when another prisoner called out a watch that the "lady" dropped causing the guard to call "her" back whereupon the imposter lost his nerve.

One French failure involved a secret way into the tower,


descending the bell rope shaft

               

into a wine cellar,

digging a tunnel through bedrock (cracking the rock with alternate heating and cooling) behind a false wall, then up

under the floor boards of the chapel

                                        

whose joists unfortunately had to be painstakingly cut, during hymns, as the ran the wrong way.

This escape failed when the rubble, carefully stowed in the attic adjacent to the tower, gave way thanks to a leaky pipe which had weakened the underlying structure.
Before we entered the castle we ran into a gentleman who played the part of a Frenchman in the video series on Colditz Castle.

Colditz Castle - A British Escape

Our tour guide suggested that the prison was more famous outside of Germany than within. Likely due to the heroic stories written by escapees.

Pat Reid escaped by finding his way into a smelly (from rotten potatoes) root cellar

and squeezing through an air shaft.

This left him outside the castle but facing high terrace steps


(he was either unaware of our untrusting of the cover of a nearby stairway) and the the guard dog kennels both of which he managed to pass through.

Christopher agreed to show how Pat had to do a backbend to pass through the air shaft otherwise Pat's knees would have prevented passage.

Colditz Castle

Colditz Castle was famously used by Nazi Germany to hold the the officer prisoners that attempted escape from other prisons.

Ironically concentrating these prisoners here only seemed to have fed their creative escapes leading to some amazing ideas. Some ideas worked leading to freedom, some worked only resulting in recapture (such as the case of one man, so skilled at German that he fooled the guards, only to be not believed by his own embassy that he allowing himself to be recaptured when he fell ill) and many failed. The prisoners and guards seemed to be playing a cat and mouse game with guards closing one route, following an escape attempt, only to have prisoners find/create another.