In our last post we left the intrepid Polish captain Wyssogota making the surprising choice to leave the Free Zone of Vichy France to go to Paris in occupied France. It didn’t take him long to realize how mistaken his assumptions that he could get to England via Belgium had been.

In November 1942, the same month that the Germans gave up the pretense and openly invaded southern France, Wyssogota made contact with a woman who was helping fugitives. She once guided 10 men over a border by using her own personal laissez-passer on which she had written by hand “accompanied by 10 persons.” Despite the odds, it worked on that occasion. This woman took Wyssogota to Brussels to make contact with a certain man she had heard about. They looked his number up in the phone book but it turned out that he had been arrested two years earlier but had escaped from German custody and made his way to England.

This was the final straw for Wyssogota. Disgusted by how badly escape lines were organized, he decided to stay in occupied Europe and dedicate himself to evasion.

In January 1943, Wyssogota went to St Jean Pied au Port on the Spanish border to set up a new escape line. He found a man from the Red Cross with a truck who agreed to take some people over the border and to Madrid. He also had a route through Hendaye using train, taxi and boat. He did not, however, ever go through Bayonne because of spies on the train.

Wyssogota had a bit of good luck one day when the Gestapo officer controlling identity papers turned out to be a German he had met in 1940. Before the war the Gestapo officer had played soccer for the Polish team. In 1943 he asked Wyssogota in Polish and in a very friendly fashion for his identity papers. He did not arrest Wyssogota, although he did arrest several Frenchmen.  The Gestapo officer must have liked Wyssogota or had a fondness for Poles, because he really should have arrested this man who he knew to be a defeated enemy soldier on the run.

Wyssogota’s luck turned bad on 7 March 1943 when he was arrested and imprisoned in a fortress. His escape attempt ended when he went out a back window into a courtyard full of Germans. They transferred him to the internment camp at Compiegne, from where he was deported at the end of April 1943.