THE GREAT ESCAPE

An intelligent, accessible, wry and playful work of non-fiction

He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, and David McCallum. The film is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen) and went on to become one of the most watched war movies of all time; the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died of a drug overdose – but was it suicide or an accident? His relative Andrew Steinmetz wanted to find out... In This Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz tenderly reconstructs the life of a man seen by millions yet recognized by no one, whose history – from childhood flight from Nazism to suspicious death twenty years later – intersects bitterly and ironically with the plot of Sturges's great war film. Splicing together documentary materials with correspondence, diary entries, and Steinmetz's own journal, This Great Escape reconstructs the making of a cinema classic (now celebrating its 50th anniversary), but is also a moving testament to the complexity of human experience, a portrait of a family for whom acting was a matter of survival, and proof that our most anonymous, uncredited, and undocumented moments can brush against the zeitgeist of world history. ANDREW STEINMETZ's Eva's Threepenny Theatre, a "fiction about memoir," won the 2009 City of Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Steinmetz is also the author of two collections of poetry, numerous magazine pieces, and the memoir Wardlife, which was short-listed for the Edna Staebler Award, the Quebec Writers' Federation First Book Award, and the Mavis Gallant Prize. He is the founding editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press.