Colditz

---

Got up and had about 500 more K’s for breakfast and arrived at Colditz—the computer got it fairly wrong and we ended up going down some very narrow roads, but no mirror clipping this time. The Saxony government had taken over the running of the castle and is doing it up - in a ten year plan. The bit of the castle of the castle where the German officers were housed is now a flash youth hostel, and some of it will be an arts centre and some a museum. The guided tour was really interesting. There were a couple of German women there - who spoke English with a beautiful upper crust London accent - who had never heard of the castle, but just happened by. The tourists by and large are English speaking. So the guide - a German frau - had to spend the tour talking about the Germans in the third person. It was amazing the ingenuity that the prisoners had. They made uniforms out of dyed blankets and pyjama pants and passes by cleverly printing off the writing using jelly and painting the photos by hand, They even had a wooden sewing machine which they had made, and at the end had built a glider to escape, out of wood and old bed sheets. They have reopened some of the old tunnels that were dug. It sounded like the castle was run in a very civilised way - with only one death during an escape - and that pretty much by accident. All very gentlemanly - in contrast to what was going on in Auschwitz at the same time. Finished the day with another 200k and stayed in a lovely campsite beside a lake after crossing in a small ferry.

---

Photos

Escape tunnel
They tunnelled along, up under the chapel floor, down again under the foundations and were a few days away from escape when the tunnel was discovered.