Save Furniture, Save the Past

I’ve just finished reading Ben Macintyre’s 2022 book Colditz, Prisoners of the Castle. It’s a captivating tale detailing the extraordinary experiences of those WWII prisoners of war who were held there, as well as touching on the stories of the guards and commandants, and some peripheral characters in the village nearby.

The popularised myth of Colditz, as a grim Bavarian castle prison housing stiff-upper-lipped British officers who spent their waking hours plotting and tunnelling, has many large grains of truth in it. But many other narrative strands make up the full thread of the history – the prisoners who went mad, those who gradually withdrew into themselves, those (only one) who were able to seduce the local dental assistant, those who ran spy networks from the prison, those who spent countless hours tunnelling, and those who invented ways to import the components of a radio and assemble it in a wall cavity, never to be discovered until after the war. More anecdotes than you can point an imitation pistol at.

The lasting impression is one of the indomitability of the human spirit. Even under the most restrictive and oppressive circumstances, these soldiers and airmen came up with the most inventive ways to combat their enemy and their predicament. From picking locks and extracting contraband from parcels before they could be examined by the guards, to designing and building a glider in the attic (which was never launched, although a replica did successfully clear the prison walls and land in a meadow over the river in 2012), nothing the guards could do stopped the prisoners from devising and manufacturing gadgets and disguises in pursuit of escape.

The secrecy with which they had to work is also impressive. Fake news played a part back then, too – faked escapes sent the Germans on a wild goose chase while two or three ‘ghosts’ hid in hidey-holes for months at a time. This tactic artificially lowered the prisoner head count and bought time for the next escapees to remain unnoticed, since no one was officially missing.

The prisoners developed ways to communicate with home and by extension with their intelligence services. Coded letters were read by censors but never deciphered. All the efforts of the enemy could not stop messages from being exchanged. The book goes into enough detail about the code they used to tempt me one day to embed a special message in an essay.

It’s a welcome reminder in these times when censorship is the flavour of the month for governments around the world. In Australia, the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill is having a second attempt to get through parliament, the government seemingly having gotten cold feet at the previous attempt in 2023 after much backlash. In a rare burst of optimism, I’m confident that we’ll collectively find a way around this sooner or later, and continue spouting outrageous truths.

A recent unnerving development for future historians is the disappearance of web pages that used to be there, describing, say, a set of endorsed health protocols. Articles that used to link to embarrassing pronouncements (think ‘safe and effective’) now find the links broken and pointing only to ‘Error 404’ messages. Popular archive site the Wayback Machine was also offline recently after a cyberattack. If history can be erased, it can be denied. Which kind of puts us into a ‘save the furniture’ mindset – what and how can we preserve important kernels of truth for our children and grandchildren to know?

Hardcopy books like John Stapleton’s Australia Breaks Apart and personal diaries in a trunk in the attic might help. Oral histories told in earnest during parent-child walks along deserted windswept beaches, with smartphones left at home, might make an impression. Maybe fiction or plays could keep a non-approved thought alive. Or maybe more secret, more hidden, more complicated, more devious methods might be required to protect the knowledge of what really happened during this momentous upheaval we have lived through, so far, since 2020.

Craftsmen of old were skilled at making beautiful furniture, with the sort of precision at which a self-taught hobbyist like myself can only marvel. Perfect mitre joints, dovetails hand-cut, inlaid artwork, cabriole legs, carved figures. And secret compartments, sometimes, spring loaded or with a false front or false floor, released by a clever mechanism. The sort of thing the chaps at Colditz would have knocked up using a toothpick and a button and a bed board.

I’m not so ambitious, but I am inclined to make a token effort to preserve the truth in an unconventional way. A little while back I completed building a chair, with a sprung seat and an adjustable back. 

I’m now in the middle of completing the project by adding a matching footstool.

Whenever I think of a footstool, I think of the first verse of Psalm 110:

“The Lord says to my Lord: 
Sit at My right hand,
Until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet.”

(NASB)

Like the chair, the stool incorporates thin decorative spindles, 8 on each side (the chair has 34, 17 on each side.). It occurs to me that these spindles could preserve the names of 16 of the more notorious characters of the modern era, especially those who have received Australia Day Honours, Damehoods, and such. I think their names stamped on the inner faces of the spindles, looking outwards through the other set of spindles, as through bars on a Colditz window, might be a fitting recognition of their contribution to history.

Perhaps one day on a ‘collectibles’ TV show an expert in early 21st century footstools will peer excitedly inside and underneath my footstool and declare it to be a genuine Dead Sea Stool and to be clearly the work of an at best moderately talented amateur but nevertheless a work of supreme importance to the historical record, corroborating as it does the alternative, radical, suppressed, and largely thought to be the mythical view of the ‘Covid era’ which cast these characters as villains of the highest order.

Nominations are now open for those whose names should grace my footstool. 

Republished from the author’s Substack