Seven Years in Tibet. Heinrich Harrer
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ramshackle car we managed to reach Las Bela, a little principality to the north-west of Karachi. But there fate overtook us and we suddenly found ourselves taken in charge by eight soldiers, on the grounds that we needed personal protection. We were in fact under arrest, although Germany and the British Commonwealth were not yet at war.
Soon we were back with our trusty escort in Karachi, where we found Peter Aufschnaiter. Two days later England did declare war on Germany. After that everything went like clockwork. A few minutes after the declaration of war, twenty-five Indian soldiers armed to the teeth marched into a restaurant garden where we were sitting, to fetch us away. We drove in a police car to an already prepared prison-camp fenced with barbed wire. But that turned out to be merely a transit camp, and a fortnight later we were transferred to the great internment camp at Ahmednagar near Bombay. There we were quartered in crowded tents and huts in the midst of a babel of conflicting opinions and excited talk. “No,” I thought, “this atmosphere is too different from the sunlit, lonely heights of the Himalayas. This is no life for freedom-loving men.” So I began to get busy looking for ways and means of escape.
Of course I was not the only one planning to get away. With the help of like-minded companions I collected compasses, money and maps which had been smuggled past the controls. We even managed to get hold of leather gloves and a barbed-wire-cutter, the loss of which from the stores provoked a strict but fruitless investigation.
As we all believed that the war would soon be over, we kept postponing our plans for escape. But one day we were suddenly moved to another camp. We were loaded on to a convoy of lorries en route for Deolali. Eighteen of us internees sat in each lorry with a single Indian soldier to guard us. The sentry’s rifle was made fast to his belt with a chain, so that no one could snatch it away. At the head and at the tail of the column was a truck full of soldiers.
While we were in the camp at Ahmednagar Lobenhoffer and I had determined to make a getaway before being transferred to a new camp, where fresh difficulties might endanger our chances of escape. So now we took our seats at the back end of a lorry. Luckily for us the road was full of curves and we were often enveloped in thick clouds of dust—we saw that this gave us a chance of jumping off unnoticed and vanishing into the jungle. We did not expect the guard in the lorry to spot us as he was obviously occupied in watching the lorry in front. He only occasionally looked round at us. One way and another it did not seem to us that it would be too difficult to escape and we postponed an attempt until the latest possible moment, intending to get across into a neutral Portuguese enclave situated very near the route of our convoy.
At last the moment came. We jumped off and I ran twenty yards off the road and threw myself down in a little hollow behind a bush. Then to my horror the whole convoy stopped—I heard whistles and shooting and then, seeing the guard running over to the far side of the road, I had no doubt what had happened. Lobenhoffer must have been discovered and as he was carrying our rucksack with all our gear, there was nothing for me to do but to give up my hopes of escape as well. Fortunately I succeeded, in the confusion, in getting back into my seat without being noticed by any of the soldiers. Only my comrades knew that I had got away and naturally they said nothing.
Then I saw Lobenhoffer: he was standing with his hands up facing a line of bayonets. I felt broken with the deadly disappointment of our failure. But my friend was really not to blame for it. He was carrying our heavy rucksack in his hand when he jumped off, and it seems that it made a clatter which was heard by the guard; so he was caught before he could gain the shelter of the jungle. We learned from this adventure a bitter but useful lesson, namely that in any combined plan of escape each of the escapers must carry all that he needed with him.
In the same year we were moved once more to another camp. This time we were conveyed by rail to the greatest P.O.W. camp in India, a few miles outside the town of Dehra-Dun. Above Dehra-Dun was the hill-station of Mussoorie, the summer residence of the British and rich Indians. Our camp consisted of seven great sections each surrounded by a double fence of barbed wire. The whole camp was enclosed by two more lines of wire entanglement, between which patrols were constantly on the move.
The conditions of our new camp altered the whole situation for us. As long as we were down below in the plain, we always aimed to escape into one of the neutral Portuguese territories. Up here, we had the Himalayas right in front of us. How attractive to a mountaineer was the thought of winning through to Tibet over the passes. As a final goal one thought of the Japanese lines in Burma or China.
Plans for escape in these conditions and with these objectives needed the most careful preparation. By now we had given up hope of a speedy ending to the war, and so there was nothing for it—if we wished to get away—but to organise systematically. Flight through the thickly populated regions of India was out of the question; for that one would need plenty of money and a perfect knowledge of English—and I had neither. So it is easy to imagine that my preference was for the empty spaces of Tibet. And I thought of being on the Himalayas—and felt that even if my plan failed, it would be worth having a spell of freedom in the high mountains.
I now set to work to learn a little Hindustani, Tibetan and Japanese; and devoured all sorts of travel books on Asia, which I found in the library, especially those dealing with the districts on my prospective route. I made extracts from these works and took copies of the most important maps. Peter Aufschnaiter, who had also landed in Dehra-Dun, had various books and maps dealing with expeditions in Asia. He worked at these with tireless energy and put all his notes and sketches at my disposal. I copied all of these in duplicate, keeping one copy to take with me when I escaped and the other as a reserve in case the originals were lost.
It was just as important for me, in view of the route by which I proposed to escape, to keep myself physically as fit as possible. So every day I devoted hours to exercising in the open air, indifferent alike to bad and good weather, while at night I used to lie out and study the habits of the guards.
My chief worry was that I had too little money; for although I had sold everything I could do without, my savings were quite insufficient to provide for the necessaries of life in Tibet, let alone for the bribes and presents which are the commonplaces of life in Asia. Nevertheless I went on working systematically at my plan and received help from some friends, who themselves had no intention of escaping.
I had originally intended to escape alone in order not to be hampered by a companion, which might have prejudiced my chances. But one day my friend Rolf Magener told me that an Italian general had the same intentions as myself. I had previously heard of this man, and so one night Magener and I climbed through the wire fence into the neighbouring wing in which forty Italian generals were housed. My future companion was named Marchese and was in outward appearance a typical Italian. He was something over forty years of age, slim of figure with agreeable manners and distinctly well-dressed; I was particularly impressed by his physique. At the outset we had difficulties in understanding one another. He spoke no German and I no Italian. We both knew only a minimum of English, so we conversed, with the help of a friend, in halting French. Marchese told me about the war in Abyssinia, and of an earlier attempt he had made to escape from a P.O.W. camp.
Fortunately for him he received the pay of a British general and money was no problem. He was able to procure for our flight things which I could never have obtained. What he needed was a partner familiar with the Himalayas—so we very soon joined forces on the basis that I should be responsible for all the planning, and he for the money and equipment.
Several times every week I used to crawl out to discuss details with Marchese, and by practice became an expert in penetrating barbed wire. Of course there were various possibilities for the escape but the one that seemed to me the most promising was based on one important fact—that every eighty yards along the “chicken-run” enclosing the whole camp was a steep, straw-thatched roof that had been put up to protect the sentries against the tropical sun. If we could climb over one of these roofs we should have crossed the two lines of barbed wire at a single bound. In May 1943 we had completed all our preparations. Money, provisions, compass, watches, shoes and a small mountaineer’s tent were all ready.
One night we decided to make the attempt. I climbed as usual through the fence into Marchese’s wing. There I found a ladder ready, which we had grabbed and hidden after a small fire in