breaking in

oh the irony

Colditz Castle, 2014

Castles are built to keep people out. In fact, most are built very well in that regard, and attempting to break into one is futile and a waste of time.

Yet, there we were, attempting to break into a German castle on a dark winter evening.

*****

When my husband was a kid, he read a book about Oflag IV-C, which was a German Army prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. The prison — because “camp” is too benign a name, even if the Wehrmacht did follow the Geneva Convention — was originally meant for captured enemy officers but grew to include other prisoners of war who had repeatedly attempted to escape other Oflags.

Oflag IV-C was located in Colditz Castle, which was considered by the Germans to be sufficiently secure. The outer walls were 7 feet thick at their base and the castle itself was built on top of a hill with a sheer drop of 250 feet to the river below. Security measures were more pronounced than at other POW camps.

Nevertheless, the prisoners all worked toward their escape, often spending months preparing for a particular plan. Some were successful and after the war, some of the men wrote books about their time at Colditz Castle.

As you can imagine, these books grabbed the imagination of my husband. After we were married, I read the books and was similarly enthralled by the stories.

Flash forward two decades to 2013. We had decided to take our 13 and 15-year-olds on a family trip to Germany (with side jaunts to Venice and Ljubljana). As we were planning our trip, my husband and I realized that of course — OF COURSE — we would need to swing through eastern Germany to see Colditz Castle, which is located near Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz.

Over the centuries, the castle has had several uses and owners. In the past century alone, it has been a hospital and an assisted living home. In the early 2000s, the inner part of the castle became a museum about the war years and escape attempts, while part of the outer castle was turned into a hostel.

A hostel? We could sleep in a castle? The very castle that had fascinated us for so many years? Take my credit card, please. Accordingly, we reserved a family room.

And this is how we found ourselves in early January 2014 visiting a Renaissance-era castle in a small town.

*****

We arrived at the castle in the late afternoon. We parked outside and entered through an outer gate that led to the bridge that crossed the moat and connected to the gate to the outer courtyard. We walked through the outer courtyard to the hostel office and checked in. The person who greeted us gave us the keys to our room and the door to the hostel. Y’all, we had the keys to the castle. Well, a small part of it.

We went up to our room to drop off our bags. This part of the castle had been modernized and did not in any way look old or historic. Oh well, no worries, because the next day we would be seeing the really interesting stuff during our scheduled tour.

We left the castle and explored the town, then found a restaurant for dinner. Afterward, we walked back to the main gate through which we had entered and exited the castle earlier. Since it was January, the sun had long since set.

We pulled out our handy dandy key to the castle and tried to insert it into the lock of the outer gate I mentioned earlier. It kinda sorta fit, but not well and it definitely did not open the gate. Hmmm… Maybe the lock was stiff and we needed to jiggle the key a bit more. Nope.

We tried a few more times, then stopped, puzzled. Then one of us realized that there was a gap under the outer gate. Maybe someone could open the gate from the inside and let us in.

And as it turned out, our younger offspring was small enough to crawl under. Said child put the castle key in their coat pocket for safekeeping and wiggled under. Once on the other side, the 13-year-old was not able to open the gate for us. Nor did the key work in the lock of the aforementioned inner gate. Our kiddo wiggled back under the gate and rejoined us.

Here’s a photo we took the next day recreating our break-in:

Now what?

As we stood there in the cold winter darkness figuring out what to do, a disembodied voice yelled at us in German. We looked around until we saw a face in an upper-story window. It was an older woman and we quickly realized that she spoke no English.

Of the four of us, our older daughter and I both spoke a smidge of German. Between the two of us, we figured out that the woman was basically asking us what in the hell we were doing. Using our limited German vocabulary and some charades, we explained that we were locked out of the castle.

The older woman spoke to us very slowly but we weren’t quite sure what she was telling us. Then, another disembodied voice from another building spoke out in heavily accented English, “She says there is another door to the castle. You should go there.”

Another entrance? No one had mentioned this to us earlier when we checked in. Where might this door be?

A little more back and forth between the two Germans, and then the second person explained where we might find it.

We all said Danke! and walked off in the direction of the elusive accessible entrance. And sure enough, there it was, just a normal door in the outer wall of the castle. Our key worked in the lock, glory be, and we let ourselves in.

The next day, we went on a guided tour of the inner part of Colditz Castle and saw all the places that had been described in the books we’d read. Over the decades, various props from wartime escape attempts have been found and preserved, as well as various escape routes and tunnels discovered and preserved. We learned just how difficult it was to escape the castle and how amazing it was that a small number succeeded.

The irony of us trying to break in was not lost on us or our guide when we told her the story.

So that’s the story of how we tried — and failed — to breach a castle gate.

The end.