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from the local
Oflag
of Murnau. One of them was General Tadeusz Piskor, who in the 1920s and early 1930s had been chief of staff of the Polish Army and who, during the September campaign, had been commander of one of the Polish armies, the Lublin Army. The second was Major Władysław Steblik, before the war deputy military attaché at the Polish embassy in Berlin and, during the campaign, the operations officer of the Cracow Army. (After the war he became well known as the writer of a scholarly book on the history of the Cracow Army in the September campaign.) So now they were six in this solitary confinement block attached to the Murnau
Oflag
. They all went later to Colditz.
    But they were there as six only for twenty-four hours. The next day, after the arrival of Piskor and Steblik, all six were moved by train to Srebrna Góra in the Sudeten mountains in Middle Silesia. They travelled there via Vienna, through the Czechoslovak province of Moravia nad Wroclaw. Jędrzej considered the possibility of escaping on the way, then trying to go by train to neutral Italy, but he rejected the idea as the temperatures were well below freezing and the snow very deep. There was no chance of success. In Srebrna Góra they were joined early in January by Admiral Unrug.
    The Germans had organized an “isolation” camp, smaller than Colditz but larger than the six cells in Murnau, at an ancient fort on top of a mountain not far from the small town, called Srebrna Góra in Polish, Silberberg in German. The town belonged to Poland in the Middle Ages, was later in the possession of Bohemia and Austria, and came, in the eighteenth century, under Prussian rule. The population was Germanized. Srebrna Góra was beyond the Polish-German linguistic border and was German-speaking. It was situatedin a separate mountain-chain called Gory Sowie, or Eulengebirge, which means “Mountains of the Owls.” During the Seven Years War (1756–1763), the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, had built three forts on mountain tops, dominating the passage from Silesia to Moravia. One of these forts, Fort Spitzberg, became the mini-Colditz. It was a very unpleasant place, and had served previously as a mountain shelter for the Hitler Youth. Several underground bunkers had recently been adapted as sleeping quarters. They resembled cellars and were very wet. In the vaulted ceilings, there were stalactites already ten centimeters long.
    When Jędrzej’s group arrived, there were already seven Polish prisoners there. They had come the previous day and were all unsuccessful escapers. Their number increased every few days, especially when spring began. More and more escapers were hauled in. Several of them, Jędrzej included, tried to escape from Fort Spitzberg, but no one ever succeeded.
    There was room for ninety prisoners and this number was soon reached. In April 1940 the Germans set up a similar camp at the nearby Fort Hohenstein and twenty prisoners, amongst them Jędrzej, were moved from Fort Spitzberg to Fort Hohenstein.
    Towards the end of May 1940, ten officers were able to escape from there. They climbed through a hole made in the wall of a room that had been barred off from the prison and descended on a rope made from cotton sleeping-bags into the shallow moat. The remaining ten officers covered the escape successfully. It was discovered twenty-four hours later at the morning
Appell
or roll-call. The German commander of their
Oflag
was later tried by court-martial, because fifty percent of the inmates of Fort Hohenstein had escaped!
    The escapers travelled in three separate groups. They had no civilian clothes so they went on foot, sleeping in forests during the day and walking, guided by the stars, at night. They intended to reach neutral Hungary. One group of three succeeded. Another group was caught after three days. Jędrzej’s group (the other members were Michal Niczko and Zdzisław Ficek) marched for