Life and Death

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in The Times about prisoners on life sentences, tells of how some of them cope with the knowledge that they are never going to leave prison and will die there. Some cannot bare the thought but others "accommodate themselves to it and even find happiness in it."
He mentions Arthur Koestler "who wrote that he had never felt more serene than while waiting execution in one of Franco's jails in the Spanish Civil War."
I doubt if it would be serenity that I would experience in similar circumstances - more like fear I think.
Yet there are people, maybe like Koestler, who can face up to the imminence of death with more courage than I could muster.
One man I knew, "Jimmy" James, a pilot, who died this year in his nineties, was a famous escaper from German concentration camps in the Second World War. He told me once, in the almost off-hand, casual way, that was not too far away from, say, his telling me about a Sunday afternoon's tea party with the vicar and his wife, about how he and twenty or so other prisoners were one day taken outside and ordered to stand up against a wall.
"I had the impression," he said, "that they were going to shoot us."
They didn't, but after some time "told us we could return to our huts." Then he gave a little chuckle, a sort of "Hah well!" chuckle.
This was just about the time when Hitler ordered the death of about twenty (or more?) escapers who had been recaptured.
I shall always remember Jimmy's chuckle.