As a war ripped much of the world apart, a young Austrian prisoner of war found friendship and finally, an escape route among his Australian military guards.
Rudi Pruckner wearied of his long years as a prisoner of war at Murchison, Victoria.
Pruckner was a young Viennese, drafted into the German Werhmacht’s 2nd Panzer Division in the early days of World War II. He was captured during the short-lived Battle for Greece of April, 1941, when an overwhelming force of Germans invaded and took just 27 days to drive out of Greece the Commonwealth forces of Australia, New Zealand and Britain.
Rudi Pruckner took to working in the kitchen alongside Australian cooks. He decided to teach himself English, allotting himself 10 new words a day. One of the guards, a young Australian named Donald McDonald, helped out on the understanding that in return, Rudi would teach him German.Among other friends he made was a cook from far south-west Victoria named Norman Vaughan. Vaughan was from a large farming family, and one of his brothers, Roy, was a military guard at Camp 13.
Others, it would later become obvious, were in on the plot. A former guard named Haig linked up with McDonald and Pruckner in Melbourne, and another named Andrew Thompson fitted into the scheme. Norman Vaughan, Pruckner’s fellow cook, and his brother Roy, the former guard, became crucial to ensuring Pruckner got away.
Rudi Pruckner did not know it, but a soldier who would become Australia’s first Aboriginal military officer, Reg Saunders, was raised at the mission on Lake Condah, a few hundred metres from Murphy’s Hut. Saunders, who fought with the 2/7th infantry battalion, was one of those soldiers fighting rearguard actions against German units during the withdrawal from Greece in April 1941.
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