On the run

On the night of 24 March 1944, Bram Vanderstok was the eighteenth of seventy-six men who crawled through a tunnel under the barbed wire fence of the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp in the Polish town of Sagan. The 1963 film “The Great Escape” was largely based on his autobiography, but with Vanderstok's consent, the filmmakers decided to apply his story to an Australian character named Sedgwick, played by James Coburn.

In his memoirs, Vanderstok chronicles his adventurous wartime experiences before his imprisonment in Stalag Luft III, and then describes in great detail the various escape attempts, culminating in the famous March escape. After the escape, Vanderstok travelled across Europe for weeks, passing through Leipzig, Utrecht, Brussels, Paris, Dijon, and Madrid before making it back to England. He reported to the Air Ministry and, two months after his escape, on 30 May 1944, he returned to No. 91 Squadron RAF. In the following months, he flew almost every day over France, escorting bombers and shooting down German V-1 flying bombs.

In August 1945, he finally returned home. He learned that his two brothers had died in a concentration camp after being arrested for their involvement in the resistance. The Gestapo had tortured his father and blinded him during interrogation, but he never betrayed his son.