The Story of the Escape Dot

The photograph that inspired the writing career of Suzanne Leal.

For my career as a writer, I credit my late friend and landlord, Fred (Bedřich) Perger, who provided me not only with a roof over my head but also with stories from his extraordinary life.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1923, Fred had been sent to Auschwitz during the war and liberated from Dachau Concentration Camp. He agreed to tell me more about this time and we met once a week for over a year. When I transcribed them, our interviews ran into hundreds of pages. These interviews would later provide the foundations for my first novel, Border Street and inspire my more recent novels, Running with Ivan and The Deceptions.

Some years after his death, Fred’s daughter, Helena, visited the memorial site of the Dachau Concentration Camp.  At the entrance, she had been startled by a wall-sized photograph of the camp’s liberation: hundreds of inmates staring at her from behind barbed wire fences.  At eye level, one face had jumped out: a tall, fair-haired man with prominent ears.

She brought a copy of the photograph home with her and took it out to show me.

‘I would say it is my father,’ she said, ‘but I cannot be completely sure.’ 

I couldn’t help.  All I could see was an emaciated inmate who, like those around him, was wearing a striped uniform.  There was nothing to set him apart, nothing to help us identify him.

Or was there?

‘Wait,’ I said, a distant memory finding its way back to me. Searching through my laptop, I found what I needed: my transcription of the interviews I had conducted with Fred more than a decade earlier. 

In answer to a question about Dachau, this is what Fred had told me:

“After having been captured after my escape from [the concentration camp of] Kaufering, I had on my chest and back a large red circle a so-called Fluchtpunkt, escape dot, about four or five centimetres in diameter - to that, he is an individual who already tried to escape.  Typically, when I was in Dachau, how it disintegrated, so in April or March, I tore it away and nobody noticed - it was really the last stages [of the war].”

My heart pounding, I looked back at the photograph. Unlike the men around him who had stars or circles or triangles sewn onto their pockets, the man who would become Helena’s father had no pocket at all.    

Suzanne Leal writes contemporary fiction about the legacy and secrets of the past. She is the bestselling author of The Teacher’s Secret, The Deceptions, Border Street and, most recently, The Watchful Wife.  Her debut novel for middle-grade readers is Running with Ivan.