How This British POW Escaped a Nazi Camp 200 Times Using One Love Story

The Prisoner Who Escaped for Love, Not Freedom

On May 25th, 1940, near Carvin, France, the war ended for Private Horace “Jim” Greasley with a sound more terrifying than gunfire.

Silence.

The last British rifle shots faded. Then came guttural shouts in German, the thud of boots, the crack of rifle butts driven into exhausted backs. Greasley, twenty‑one years old, blood crusted on his temple from a grazing shrapnel wound, joined a column of defeated men stumbling into captivity.

His ammunition pouches were empty. The week‑long retreat from the German Blitzkrieg, the desperate fallback toward the beaches, had not ended in the miracle at Dunkirk. That salvation lay just miles to the north.

He had fired his last shot as a free man on French soil that would not remember him.

German soldiers moved down the line with practised speed, stripping watches, cigarettes, photographs. One guard laughed as he pocketed Greasley’s identity discs. Another slammed him toward a waiting cattle wagon.

The doors crashed shut.

Sixty men disappeared into sudden, absolute blackness.

For three days the train lurched east, the air in the wagon thick with sweat, urine, and the sour stench of fear. There was no room to sit; men leaned on one another because there was nothing else to lean on. A single bucket in a corner served as a latrine. At night the temperature plummeted and bodies pressed closer, not from affection, but from a primal drive to keep warm.

An eighteen‑year‑old from Leicester whispered his mother’s name until his voice failed. After that, his lips moved soundlessly in the dark.

Twice a day, the doors slid open. Guards shoved in chunks of black bread and allowed a handful of prisoners to stumble out to relieve themselves under rifle sights. Through that narrow rectangle of light, Greasley watched France slide past and a harsher landscape appear—sharp‑roofed German towns, staring civilians, children emboldened enough to throw stones at the anonymous cattle cars of enemy soldiers.

On the fourth morning the train braked hard outside a processing camp near Trier. SS guards stormed the wagons, screaming orders. Greasley understood not a word of German, but he learned immediately what hesitation meant: a rifle butt to the kidneys, a boot in the ribs, a lesson in obedience delivered through pain.

They stood for hours in formation while clerks took their names and numbers, reducing their existence to entries in ledgers. A photographer captured each hollow‑eyed face for the Reich’s files. British uniforms—muddy, torn, defeated—marked them as trophies of a victory German propaganda would soon parade.

This was only a way station.

The real destination lay farther east.

The next train ran deeper into occupied territory until a new name appeared: Stalag VIII‑B Lamsdorf, in Upper Silesia, near the Czech border. The name meant nothing when Greasley first heard it.

He would come to know every metre of its wire.

Lamsdorf emerged from the mist like an industrial wound. Guard towers punctured the sky at regular intervals, their machine guns pointed inward, not outward. Parallel rows of barbed wire eight feet high stretched into the distance, enclosing a raked strip of sand—a killing zone designed to show every footprint. Beyond the wire, long wooden barracks stood in endless grids.

Thousands of men were already there.

He passed under the main gate with the first British draft; the guards treated them with particular contempt. To those guards, British prisoners were not just defeated soldiers—they were representatives of a stubborn island the Reich expected to conquer soon. Breaking them would be a kind of rehearsal.

Processing at Lamsdorf stripped away the last pieces of individuality. Guards confiscated everything: letters, photographs, even shoelaces that might be used for escape or for hanging oneself. Each man received a tin mug, a wooden spoon, one blanket as thin as paper.

They were herded naked through delousing stations, sprayed with stinging chemicals by fellow prisoners whose own heads had been shaved. Their uniforms were fumigated separately. The burning on the skin and the humiliation of standing exposed under the gaze of guards marked a final transition.

They were no longer soldiers.

They were numbers.

Barrack 12E became Greasley’s world. Built for eighty, it held over two hundred men. Triple‑tier bunks lined each wall. Straw mattresses, alive with lice, served as bedding. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, rotting straw, and the latrine trenches outside. Men lay on bunks staring up at rough roof boards with the fixed, empty gaze of those already halfway to being institutionalised.

A British sergeant named Williams, captured two months earlier in Norway, explained the rules.

Appell—roll call—at 0500. Stand motionless for hours in all weather while guards counted and recounted. Work details: farms, factories, stone quarries. Twelve hours of labour under guard for a ladle of soup and a slice of bread. Red Cross parcels, when they arrived, were the only barrier between slow starvation and quicker death, and in mid‑1940 they were rare.

Punishment was swift and brutal. The Strafblock, punishment barrack, swallowed those caught breaking rules. Men emerged thin shadows or did not emerge at all.

The first morning, whistles tore through the pre‑dawn dark. Two thousand prisoners stumbled into the assembly ground and formed into ranks of five. German guards walked the lines, barking numbers. When the count did not match the ledger, they began again. The sun rose. Men swayed where they stood. One collapsed. Guards dragged him aside and continued counting.

After three hours they were dismissed to collect their breakfast: ersatz coffee and a slice of black bread like compressed sawdust. Greasley, already lean from days on the run, understood that his body had just begun a slow, disciplined descent into hunger.

Work details were called from the food line. By luck, his name appeared on the list for farm labour.

Outside the wire, five kilometres away, fields and barns replaced barbed wire and towers. A civilian foreman barked tasks. Older Wehrmacht guards, less fanatical than the SS, smoked and watched. Among them was a grey‑haired Bavarian, Müller, who looked away when prisoners slipped extra potatoes into their pockets.

Tiny mercies. Tiny cracks.

On the third day at the farm, as he bent over rows of potatoes, Greasley saw her.

A dark‑haired nineteen‑year‑old carrying food from the farmhouse kitchen. She was Czech—her accent later confirmed it—conscripted for forced labour in German‑held territory. Her name was Rosa. She crossed the yard with a tray, glanced at the prisoners, and for a second her gaze met his.

In that one second, something wordless passed between them: recognition, pity, perhaps a shared hatred of the uniforms around them. For the first time since the doors of the cattle wagon had slammed shut, he saw a future that was not just wire and hunger.

Rosa began to appear more often. Bringing water. Carrying baskets. Moving through the farmyard under German orders but not German in spirit. Their eyes found each other again and again, each time adding weight to a connection they could not yet risk speaking aloud.

Back inside Lamsdorf, the camp tried to grind that spark flat. Dysentery and lice became normal. Men died quietly in their bunks and were removed before Appell. Others cracked, screaming in the night until dragged to the punishment block. The machine of captivity ran with mechanical efficiency.

But captivity runs on routines.

Greasley began to watch those routines the way a soldier watches enemy movement.

Guard rotations changed every six hours. Evening shifts were always thinly manned. The south fence had longer gaps between towers—about sixty metres, far enough that a man lying flat in the killing zone might be invisible for the few seconds it took a searchlight beam to pass.

The farm detail always left at seven and returned at nineteen hundred. Müller, the indifferent guard, always sat in the same spot for his cigarette. Rosa’s working day stretched an hour longer.

Patterns emerged. Distances formed in his mind. The camp, which for most men was simply a closed world of suffering, became for him an object of study.

Sensible men talked of surviving, of waiting for liberation or exchange. Escape, real escape—through hostile territory, across borders, back to Allied lines—was a fantasy. They were hundreds of kilometres from any frontier that was not guarded or neutral but unreachable. To those men, the wire was more than metal. It was a calculation they had already lost.

Greasley’s mind turned a different problem over and over.

Not escape to freedom.

Escape for a night and return before dawn.

From camp to farm: five kilometres. From the edge of the farm fields to the trees: two hundred metres. From the trees to the farmhouse where Rosa slept: a short sprint if no one was watching.

Between Appell and full dark, there was time. Between guard rotations, there were gaps. Between fear and obedience, there was a narrow space where a man might move.

From his bunk one Sunday, while others used their single rest day to lie still and conserve strength, he mapped it:

Evening roll‑call ends: 18:00
Guard change on the south fence: about 19:15
Complete dark: 21:30

The wire could be climbed or cut. He had watched repair crews do it. The killing zone could be crossed if the timing were perfect. A man could reach the farm by eight, meet Rosa, then slip back through the same hole and be in his bunk before morning Appell at five.

It was insane.

The penalty for escape was shooting on sight. A missing man at roll‑call meant searches, beatings, punishment for everyone in his barrack. The war, the camp, and every rational instinct screamed at him to keep his head down and stay alive.

Yet the more he studied the impossibility, the more it took shape as a set of numbers and movements instead of a wall. Rosa’s glances across the yard, the half‑smiles she could not show to the guards, the small extra pieces of bread she managed to get into his hands—all of it weighted the scale.

Other men dreamed of one great escape to freedom.

He began to dream of something more ridiculous and, for him, more urgent.

To break out into enemy territory—not to run away from the camp, but to run toward a girl in a farmhouse—and then to break back in again before anyone realised he had gone.

It was the kind of madness no German officer was watching for.

The camp was built to stop men from leaving. No one had designed it to stop a prisoner from choosing to return.

By the time his muscles adapted to starvation and his feet toughened to the endless marches, his decision hardened. Not yet. He would wait. He would watch until he could predict each guard’s habits as well as his own breathing. He would wait for a night with heavy cloud, no moon, and Müller on duty.

Then he would test his theory.

Lamsdorf had been created to strip him of identity and hope, to reduce him to a number waiting for an unknown end. Instead, it would become the place he chose to return to, night after night, willingly, because beyond that wire there was something worth the risk.

Soon, the Germans at Stalag VIII‑B would face a kind of prisoner they had not allowed for in their manuals: a man who escaped not to be free, but to love—and who came back at dawn by choice.