Description

pp. x, (2), 340, ‘Escape from the Nazis, a well-worked theme in film and fiction, has a new tale to surrender from real history. Washington Post editor Eisner found an intrepid and heroic one about a Belgian escape-and-evasion organization called the Comet Line. Many of its operatives were caught, but a few escaped; now in their eighties, they shared their reminiscences with Eisner, who dramatizes them in a present-tense account. The Comet Line rescued Allied pilots shot down over Belgium and smuggled them across France to Spain. An American B-17 pilot whom Eisner interviewed, Robert Grimes, supplies the example of how the Comet Line clandestinely spirited its charges past the Gestapo to the Pyrenees. After recounting the work’s ensuing dramatic climax, Grimes’ crossing of the mountains guided by local Basques, in which a fellow airman and a Comet Line operative died, Eisner ends his history with the exposure of, and justice meted to, a nefarious initiate of the Comet Line who was a Gestapo double agent. An inspiring World War II story filled with courage and steely nerves.”