Day 6

On May seventh, after breakfast, we started off the day with a tour of the castle we were staying at (Colditz Castle). In the second world war, the castle was used as a jail for important people or people that had escaped from other places; We were still in Germany, so the Allies would be imprisoned there. During the tour, we were told about many escape attempts, some successful and some not so successful. The tour was long and got boring after a bit; the tour went right through lunch. One time, we all went out onto a balcony and my mom and I smelt something weird; The tour guide said it was the smell of people making ice-cream flavouring for their ice-cream business. When my brother and I heard this, we found an easy way down and started to look for the shop. Our mom soon put an end to this by threatening that we wouldn't get ice-cream if we didn't come back up right then. We came up. For the rest of the tour we all were hungry and bored.

At the end we heard a really funny story; here is one explanation "After Mairesse-Lebrun's escape from the park, prisoners in solitary confinement took their exercise on the northwest terrace. During his walk on this day, Flight-Lieut. Don Thom of the Royal Canadian Air Force suddenly leapt over the terrace's balustrade and grabbed a hold of the crossbars in the windows of the guardroom. He dropped to the bars of a lower window, which he held for a moment before dropping to the ground. As the guards opened fire on him, he got over a barbed-wire curtain and ran into the woods before being stopped by coils of wire. Security officer Reinhold Eggers called it 'the maddest attempt of all'."

(source: http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/colditz.html)

The picture on the right shows where Thom climbed down, but the castle was grey back then.

This is me getting a lift from my dad to try to ecape over the wall of the prison yard, as a prisoner did once.

After lunch we went to Leipzig (another German city), where we went to the Friday night service at Saint Thomas's church. There, a boy's choir performed and a person told a sermon, but everything was in German, so we couldn't understand much at all. Bach conducted the boy's choir at that same church only a few hundred years ago. One of the tunes they performed was actually written by Bach.