I sometimes wonder why wonderful factual stories are dramatized and the historical information changed to create a better story. I understand it is dramatic licence and perhaps it makes for a more exciting story particularly for a movie or TV series like The Crown or Napoleon. But everybody I know think the early episodes of The Crown, which were I believe more factually accurate, are much more enjoyable than the latest series. Maybe as we all search for meaning and understanding more true stories of real heroism and survival against the odds are what is needed.
My father Sam Derry was asked in the 1950s by the then government to tell one of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War of how he and a Vatican-based Irish Monsignor, hid an army of over 4000 escaped POW’s in and around German occupied Rome. His book The Rome Escape Line was published in 1960 and serialised in the Sunday newspapers of the day. In 1963 10 million people watched his “This is your life” programme with Eamon Andrews on the BBC.
I have tried for over 30 years to have his book republished as it has long been out of print. It has however, been used as the basis for a movie starring Gregory Peck called “The Scarlet and the Black” which made no mention of him or the millions of pounds the British Government spent funding the escape line.
Most recently Joseph O’Connor’s book My Father’s House has used his work as source material. In the very first chapter Sam Derry is in a car with an acute appendicitis even though that story from The Rome Escape Line was not about him but another POW. As Mr O’Connor has said real people and real events inspired his work of fiction that is My Father’s House it is first and last a novel.
As we all watch the horrors unfolding in the Middle East and the Ukraine maybe true stories of real heroism and unselfish devotion to saving lives in the face of evil will resonate. The two men who made the Rome Escape Line possible were an Irish Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who had little love for the British, and a British Officer Sam Derry. These two men, one a real Monsignor the other often wearing the clerical robes of the other, lived together in a tiny flat and ran an escape organisation that saved thousands of lives. They were helped by priests and ordinary Italians who risked their lives to save thousands of others of all nationalities.
Claire Derry’s father Sam Derry organised the escape routes to POWs in Rome during the Second World War.
Aspects of History Issue 20 is out now.