Sartre escaped his POW camp through a simple medical pass

Evidence

It wasn’t a very swashbuckling escape, but it was simple and it worked. He had been suffering a great deal from his eye problems, thanks to all the reading and writing — which were mostly done one-eyed. Sometimes both eyes were so sore that he tried to write with them closed, his handwriting wandering over the page. But his eyes gave him his escape route. Pleading the need for treatment, he procured a medical pass to visit an ophthalmologist outside the camp gates. Amazingly, he was then allowed to walk out, showing the pass, and he never went back. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 462

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat little story: the most influential existentialist escaped the Nazis with an eye doctor’s note, not a dramatic tunnel.