To the Showers

Just across Kanellopoulos Street from a small British-owned bleach factory in Piraeus (the port of Athens) stands a building that was once a profitable bordello. Today, fitted with an imposing guard tower at each corner, it is the Greek government's Vourlon Prison, involuntary home of many a condemned member of Greece's outlawed Communist Party, serving time for their parts in Greece's bloody civil war, or for stirring up trouble since then.

One day last week at the bleach factory opposite Vourlon, a watchman's 15-year-old daughter spotted four strangers on the premises, where she lives with her parents. "What are you doing?" she asked. "We're policemen," they answered, "and we just went inside to take a shower." At least part of the answer was true: calm as could be, the four had indeed been washing in the factory shower room. What they didn't tell the girl was that, along with 23 companions, they had entered the shower room through a 55-ft.-long tunnel, dug under the street from Vourlon Prison. With the girl's curiosity thus satisfied and the rest of Piraeus drowsing in the Sunday sun, the 27 escapees, all Communists, sauntered out into the street and casually boarded passing buses to freedom.

The bold escape touched off Greece's biggest manhunt in years. Police set up roadblocks, sent men into all public conveyances to check identity cards, and searched all outgoing ships. Strengthened army patrols combed the frontiers to the north. The Vourlon Prison director was fired, and a dozen of his guards placed under investigation (one drenched himself with alcohol and set himself afire as a result), but all for nothing: the birds had flown. "Nobody," cracked one Athens newsman, "ever got out of a brothel so cheap." Meanwhile, across the border in Rumania, the Communist radio urged "all Greek patriots" to assist those who had escaped "from the jails of Americanocracy."

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