MH: He thought your uniform was real?

McKiel: Yes. I told the others, and they just rolled on the floor and said: ‘It’s working! It’s working!’

MH: So they were using you to test the authenticity of their phony uniform?

McKiel: Yes. The outcome of it was that he junked the protocol. After the battle dress scam, they told me about the tunnel. It was across the corridor, just 12 feet away from my bunk.

MH: Would you describe it?

McKiel: Yes. What they had done was an ingenious piece of engineering. Each of the huts had a room with a small coal stove sitting on a slab of bricks. They had managed to put hinges on the stove so that it would fold back, and the tunnel went straight down through the bricks into the ground. At 30 feet down, it went out beyond the wire. I was rather impressed with it. It was really quite extraordinary because it not only went down for 30 feet but there was an enlargement at the bottom of the shaft where there were bellows for pumping air into the shaft. There was also a receiving area where they could accept the sand that had been dug from the face of the tunnel, and tracks that ran up to the face of the tunnel. The tracks were wooden rail lines that had been laid down. You lay on a trolley and a rope was used to pull you up to the face without disturbing any of the cribbing that lined the mineshaft.

MH: The X organization was quite large. Were you aware of how extensive it was?

McKiel: Well, I soon became aware because all of the people in my room in hut No. 104 were involved in some capacity with the tunnel. One of them was a carpenter working in the camp theater. He made a number of wooden supports to help shore up the tunnel because the soil was very soft. There was another one very skilled in sewing. He was busy sewing all the time, converting uniforms into either civilian clothes or into German-looking uniforms. There was another fellow who was a calligrapher. He was very good with a pen and cutting out stamps so that they could get really authentic-looking passes. They all had to be done very meticulously or the security people would tell the difference right away.

MH: Did you work in the tunnel?

McKiel: No, I didn’t actually go down in the tunnel. My role was as a penguin. We penguins wore long pockets down our pant legs with a drawstring. When the sand was brought up, it had to be disposed of very discreetly because it had a different smell from the surface sand, and the dogs could pick it up. It was also a different color. So we would fill these pockets with sand and go out into the sports area or another part of the camp. Other men would create a diversion to distract the guards. They were always walking around the wire or watching from the control towers or ‘goon boxes,’ as we called them. Anyway, we’d pull the drawstrings and scuff the sand around and mix it into the ground. Sometimes we put the dirt in parts of the building, like the attic or hollow walls. That was more dangerous because they could find it easier.

MH: What were the guards like?

McKiel: The guards were actually very astute at times. They had been guarding prisoners long enough that they knew and anticipated many of the ways we would try to escape. Some were trained to come in and just wander around the camp. We called them ferrets. In the evening they would often crawl beneath the hut — there was a crawl space there — and they would listen to us in our huts. Many of them spoke enough English that they could understand us when we talked.

MH: What was it like for you, being in the camp?

McKiel: At first there was a period of depression and a lot of insecurities. But one adjusted. The camp itself was administrated by our own people. For example, when the Germans brought the rations in, we did our own rations distributions. We also had all kinds of diversion in our group — sports and activities. We had a very active school with lectures every day. So while a sort of emotional curtain came down when you were first incarcerated, you could say, ‘Well, the doors may be closed, but there are still many windows open, and there are still opportunities.’

MH: What was the food like?

McKiel: The food was a disaster. We were the lowest of the low as far as the Germans were concerned. Gratefully, we got Red Cross parcels every week. They came from Britain, Australia, America, from everywhere. Then, as the war continued, bombing messed up the railroads and the rations were cut in half. We then realized how bad the food was for the German people. We started getting a lot of second-rate stuff, turnips, a lot of ersatz stuff — ersatz coffee, ersatz sugar, it just went on and on. We operated each room in the hut as a separate mess and tried to keep it sufficient. We had our own gardens for vegetables — but overall there was nothing to snack on. It got very desperate toward the end.

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