Escape from a Concentration Camp

Forestqueen808

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I'm living in a shack with my characters.....
So, I've researched and figured out all the background I need, but, I want to tie in an escape from a concentration camp, but I'm wondering how. Usually its from a guard or something, right? Like a bargain. My character who escapes is a teenage girl, about fifteen. (Aside from her virginity) what could she bargain? I hate to make it too sexual. (She wouldn't be showing, she'd be telling the MC how she escaped)
 

Maryn

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There are a bazillion possibilities. Guards could be bought with whatever they craved. Maybe your girl doesn't give him her virginity but performs a different sexual service. Maybe an older, more experienced woman gives him sex in exchange for letting the girl escape (or getting them both out)? Maybe she incorporates herself among a group of local day laborers who dig new latrines and cover the old ones with the dirt (prisoners may be too weak for hard labor) and march out at sunset? Maybe she finds an area where rain runoff and snowmelt has resulted in a depression below the barbed wire small enough for someone skinny and limber to wriggle through? Maybe she discovers a tunnel dug by others who have already gone to their deaths? Maybe she's the perfect Aryan child, blond and blue-eyed, adopted by an infertile couple in the nearby village as a favor done by the commandant, and she pretends to be okay with it but takes off once she's assembled some supplies?

Maryn, who's seen and read lots of movies and books which involve escapes
 

Flicka

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Maybe she reminds a guard of his/her lost daughter/sister/love. Maybe the guard is trying to appease his/her bad conscious and somehow tells him/herself that this one act of grace somehow is enough to buy forgiveness. Maybe she's hired out as servant or picked out as, say, nanny for the commendan's children and that gives her a chance to escape. Maybe she buys her freedom by betraying someone else.

There are plenty of ways to make her feel guilty over the means she had to employ if you want that.
 

L.C. Blackwell

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If you need ideas, this book is probably worth picking up.

Great Escapes of WWII

I can remember reading one that was rather more comprehensive and had escapes from (I think) several wars involved, but the title is gone from my memory.
 

Hip-Hop-a-potamus

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I like Flicka's idea a lot. That way you could make your guard human instead of the stereotypical Nazi that everyone always thinks of.

I liked this about Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed. His main guy is given a basically impossible mission (to kidnap Churchill during WWII), but you get a glimpse of his life beforehand. This is a mission to revive his career, after he's been put on really crappy suicide duty. He's there because he helped a young Jewish girl to escape during the liquidation of the ghetto in Warsaw. He was so disgusted by the brutality, he'd just had enough.

It made him three-dimensional, which was great. Well-handled. You might want to take a look.
 

Maxx

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So, I've researched and figured out all the background I need, but, I want to tie in an escape from a concentration camp, but I'm wondering how. Usually its from a guard or something, right? Like a bargain. My character who escapes is a teenage girl, about fifteen. (Aside from her virginity) what could she bargain? I hate to make it too sexual. (She wouldn't be showing, she'd be telling the MC how she escaped)

fifteen would be a tricky age. Any Younger and they would have just killed you right away. And no work skills.

The Kid's only chance would be to be selected for work -- must be a big healthy girl, which means she would have to enter a camp after 1942.

Once selected for work, she would have to get away fast because soon she would be too weak to move fast so:

1) get selected for work in a small factory
2) pull a pistol off a nice old man and shoot him dead right away
3) make sure he is dead -- don't fool around
4) check pistol
5) hijack food supply
6) eat
7) keep moving
8) find partisans
9) hope they don't kill you themselves

I'd say she has a one in 10,000 chance at best. Food is the key in 1943 and 1944. Forget about sex.
 

W.J. Cherf

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Escape is possible - but messy

I would imagine that your camp depends on dogs along the perimeter, so, have your 15-year-old go to the latrine at night, smear herself with feces, and then hitch a ride on the suspension of a truck that is leaving. The dogs will avoid their security job.
 

Gareth JJ

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I think any kind of sexual bargain is out.
It's a concentration camp. The prisoners who didn't die there were easy prey for the guards. So if the guard wanted anything from her, he'd just take it anyway. If she didn't give him what she wanted, he'd shoot her, without fear of being disciplined.

Also, remember, the Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp were sub-human in the eyes of the Nazis. To sleep with one, or do any other sexual act with one, would be (in the Nazi's sick eyes) tantamount to having sex with an animal. There were even laws against it. The guard might end up being disciplined and sent to the front if he had sex with a Jewish prisoner.

I think you need to look at it from another angle, other than sex as bribery.
 

veinglory

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I would agree with looking at real stories. One case I know of the camp was being relocated and 2 guys hid in the roof and stayed behind.
 

Maxx

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I would agree with looking at real stories. One case I know of the camp was being relocated and 2 guys hid in the roof and stayed behind.

I can't think of any good real 15-year-old girl escapes stories though. The one that comes closest didn't finish off the nice old man with his pistol. Woops! Always, always finish off the nice old man. And always take the food truck if possible. So you have to be hefty and quick with a pistol in a tight spot and it helps if you know how to drive. But in any case, be sure and finish off the nice old man. Two through the skull from a foot or two ought to do it. And remember what they say about killing people with a pistol: be close enough to touch them, but even closer is even better. Which was even more true given the relatively low-powered pistols of the 1940s.

Men had a lot more escape opportunities I think. For example, they could dress as Nazis and just bluff their way out past the assorted Sloveno-Roumano-Lithuaniano-Arrow-Cross-Iron-Guard-Flaming-Cross camp guards.
 

Gareth JJ

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Not only Jews were the prisoners in concentration camps.

True. But the Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, political prisoners, and all of the other poor souls there didn't have a great time either. I take your point, though. One assumes that in a concentration camp the story is to do with a Jewish girl, but maybe it isn't. Certainly, that would make the story intriguing.

One other possibility to escape, I think, would be during the "death marches", when the prisoners were forced to move from one camp to another. Lots died, but some managed to escape during those marches. A march like that is mentioned in The Reader.
 

Maxx

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Not only Jews were the prisoners in concentration camps.

But having a letter from Palestine on you when you were captured was enough to get you sent to a concentration camp no matter who you were, so even getting mail from a place where there might be some Jews was enough to put you on the "must die horribly right away" list.
 

Miller Robert

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I agree with all of you but we must distinguish the difference between concentration camp and extermination camp.
 
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veinglory

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I can't think of any good real 15-year-old girl escapes stories though.

I don't see why a 15-year-old girl would escape differently from anyone else. You hide, you sneak, you climb, your tunnel, you cut fences etc. The great majority of escapes would probably be during times where security is harder (during transportation, shift changes, at night).

I wouldn't even consider sex for escape. Obviously the average corrupt, incompetent, child molesting guard would have sex and then throw you back inside.
 

Maxx

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I agree with all of you but we must distinguish the difference between concentration camp and extermination camp.

In an extermination camp, our imaginary girl would have no chance at all.

Fortunately, for her, only about 10% of the people killed by the Nazis and their associates (or about 1.5 million) were killed in extermination camps. Moreover, the OP didn't specify the impossible feat of escaping from say Treblinka as a 15-year-old girl.

Of course for many, the difference between an extermination camp like Treblinka and a concentration camp
like Auschwitz, would not matter. A young mother with a child in her arms would be killed within a few hours in either case. BUT our imaginary 15-year-old would have some kind of a chance at Auschwitz and in fact I know of at least one 15-year-old girl who was in Auschwitz before being selected for work in a factory.
 

Gareth JJ

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I agree with all of you but we must distinguish the difference between concentration camp and extermination camp.

Yes, you're right. I suppose it's the distance in time, and the general barbarity of everything nazi, that blends the two.

I think the fundamental truth, though, is that whichever one you were in, you were pretty screwed.
 

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For a girl, Ravensbrück might be the concentration-camp to chose a a setting. Many women, and an environment to disappear in - big woods. Not as big as Auschwitz, which might present better opportunities for escape.
 

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The Great Escape was exactly what I was thinking of...

A few things that I'm sure others have mentioned, but I'll mention again:

1) Jews were not the only ones in concentration camps

2) There was a lot of bribing done by combat POWs. They bribed German guards a lot for many different things, and opens up for possible escape.

3) Unless you were Jewish, if you kept your nose clean, you read that many POWs were left alone. Not saying all. But many.
 

Maxx

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The Great Escape was exactly what I was thinking of...

A few things that I'm sure others have mentioned, but I'll mention again:

1) Jews were not the only ones in concentration camps

2) There was a lot of bribing done by combat POWs. They bribed German guards a lot for many different things, and opens up for possible escape.

3) Unless you were Jewish, if you kept your nose clean, you read that many POWs were left alone. Not saying all. But many.

Yes, WWII was not the same for everybody. Some POWs were exchanged for example. J-P. Sartre was a POW and was sent back to France because he had asthma.
On the other hand, 3 million Russian POWs were starved to death early in the war, while later in the war Russian POWs were allowed to be farm labor in Germany or join German-associated military formations. So the whole starving 3 million Russian POWs to death was completely arbitrary as of course was killing Jews or starving other forced labor populations. If the Germans had used the Russian POWs and/or the Jews as forced labor early on they wouldn't have needed to get other forced labor (from all over, but especially Poland) later and would have had the agricultural labor to avoid starving the later labor. Killing millions of people arbitrarily turned out to be a surprisingly idiotic bit of bad planning as well as horrible for plenty of other reasons.
 

TroyJackson

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Yes, WWII was not the same for everybody. Some POWs were exchanged for example. J-P. Sartre was a POW and was sent back to France because he had asthma.
On the other hand, 3 million Russian POWs were starved to death early in the war, while later in the war Russian POWs were allowed to be farm labor in Germany or join German-associated military formations. So the whole starving 3 million Russian POWs to death was completely arbitrary as of course was killing Jews or starving other forced labor populations. If the Germans had used the Russian POWs and/or the Jews as forced labor early on they wouldn't have needed to get other forced labor (from all over, but especially Poland) later and would have had the agricultural labor to avoid starving the later labor. Killing millions of people arbitrarily turned out to be a surprisingly idiotic bit of bad planning as well as horrible for plenty of other reasons.

True. I suppose I should have inserted "American PoWs", which was what I was thinking of when I made that statement. Russians were treated BADLY early on, which is another reason (other than being invaded and all) that they treated German PoWs so horribly.