About two hours into one of the best-known war movies of the 20th century, The Great Escape, there is a 57-second window of screen time in which a Gestapo agent searches a train for two of the film’s main characters.
For most, this unnamed, uncredited blond man in a trench coat and fedora is an anonymous Hollywood archetype. For Ottawa writer Andrew Steinmetz, author of This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla, he’s a distant cousin and the subject of research spanning eight years.
The book, which launched last week at the Raw Sugar Café, reconstructs the short life of bit actor Michael Paryla through a collection of personal accounts, letters, diary entries, and the author’s travel journal.
It’s a follow up to Steinmetz’s 2008 memoir, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, a re-telling of the life of Paryla’s mother (Steinmetz’s own great-aunt Eva). Both books, he says, are the product of a lifelong interest in his family.
“I grew up knowing two things about him,” says Steinmetz. “He was an actor and had a role in a famous movie, and that he himself – a refugee from Nazism, from a part-Jewish family – played a Gestapo agent in that movie. And I knew that he died relatively young from an overdose.
“Possibly it was accidental, possibly it was a suicide,” Steinmetz continues. “That subject was taboo, so naturally I was drawn to it, and to him. The more I discovered about him, the more interesting he became to me.”
Paryla spent his childhood moving around Europe after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935. When he was 14, his family moved to Canada, settling briefly in Ottawa.
Ironically, the young actor’s closest brush with success came in his role as a nameless agent of the Nazi’s secret police in John Sturges’s famous 1963 film. Paryla died only four years after it was released, at the age of 32, as a result of a deadly mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol.
The author will be discussing the book at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Oct. 27, at the Manx Café on Elgin Street.