In western Poland, the attempt by dozens of prisoners of war to escape from a Nazi concentration camp eighty years ago is commemorated. Military personnel and their relatives laid flowers and carried pictures of pilots who were involved in the outbreak, depicting the classic film The Great Escape (1963) based on.

Dozens of soldiers fired their weapons into the air in honor of the prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III. National media wrote that four F-16 fighter jets of the Polish Air Force flew during the celebration. The camp was located in Zagan, now Poland, but at the time was part of Nazi Germany.

Many Allied pilots were interned at the camp during World War II. For example, they came from Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. One night, 76 prisoners tried to get out of the fence through tunnels that had been worked on in secret for more than a year. However, the tunnel turned out to be not long enough to do so.

Things ended badly for most people. They were found by German soldiers in the following days. Fifty of them were executed in retaliation for the outbreak. Hitler was angry about this.

Scottish prisoner Jack Harrison later said: “It was a moral victory.” “We have outmaneuvered the Germans. We have humiliated Hitler and enraged the Nazis.” Harrison never made it past the barbed wire, nor did about 130 other prisoners who hoped to escape that evening. The action was soon discovered by German guards.

Only three pilots who managed to escape remained out of enemy hands. One of them was the Dutchman Bram van der Stock. Instead of heading west, as the enemy expected, he would flee east. He eventually returned to England by wandering from Spain. Van der Stock died more than thirty years ago in the United States.

In 1963, a successful film was made about the legendary escape, starring Steve McQueen. Fictional Australian pilot Louis Sedgwick, played by James Coburn, was based on Van der Stock’s role in the operation.