The Seventh Escape

Like millions of other Europeans, Walter Logé was caught in the violent vortex of World War II. An ambulance driver in the German army, he was taken prisoner toward the end of the conflict and shipped by boxcar deep into Russia to the gloomy labor camp of Makeyevka.

   But Logé's indomitable spirit rose above it all, because he was a remarkable man who looked at the world through kindly eyes, who empathized with peasants, guards, soldiers-nearly everyone. All kinds of people, whether German, Romanian, or Russian, were his friends. Though a German himself (with a French surname inherited from Huguenot ancestors), he could strike up a tune on the Russian balalaika and watch the light come back into the eyes of a yardful of gaunt, discouraged prisoners as they began to sing and clap their hands. While in a state of near starvation, he could still joke with his captors: "Why do I want to work in the kitchen? That's where they keep the food, isn't it? ìAnd what other German prisoner just escaped from a coal mine ever marched along a country road with a passel of Russian peasant girls singing the Sunday School song, "Always Cheerful"?

   Though a pleasant and gentle man, with an almost childlike faith in the goodness of God and in the innate decency of men, Logé owned nerves of Swedish steel, lightning-fast wits, and an incredible determination to escape and somehow cover the many hundreds of miles across the reaches of the Ukraine and Poland westward to Berlin, where his beloved wife and three children awaited him- if they were still alive.

   This is not just another war story, or merely another chapter in the long, bitter story of man's inhumanity to man. It is not told to work off a grudge. (Happily the Stalinist labor-camp era is long past.) It is not simply a dreary chronicle of misery and brutality, nor is it written to remind us that war brings suffering to the innocent and arouses the worst of human passions.

   Rather, it is a document of human freedom and brotherhood. It is more than a book; it is an experience. To follow Walter Logé on his desperate, but at times humorous, flight from degradation and slavery is a heartwarming adventure of the human spirit.