Escape maps for prisoners of war

During WWII hundreds of thousands of maps were produced by the British on thin cloth and tissue paper. The idea was that a serviceman captured or shot down behind enemy lines should have a map to help him find his way to safety if he escaped or, better still, evade capture in the first place. A map like this could be concealed in a small place (a cigarette packet or the hollow heel of a flying boot), did not rustle suspiciously if the captive was searched and, in the case of maps on cloth or mulberry leaf paper, could survive wear and tear and even immersion in water. The scheme was soon extended to cover those who had already been captured, although a certain amount of ingenuity was required to get the maps into the POW camps.

Maps were also produced inside the camps:

The technical problems of improvising printing plates, pens, ink and a press, in secret and out of very limited materials, were considerable. All the information on the maps had to be drawn on by hand, in "mirror writing" of course, using home made wooden pens and melted margarine. The plates were treated with jelly from Red Cross parcels, and the printing press itself was made of oak floorboards covered with leather. A roller was fashioned from a window bar, and ink was made from pitch scraped from between the flagstones of the pavement, boiled to separate out the dirt and mixed with margarine and pigment. After much trial and error, a satisfactory method was developed and efficient teams of four worked together on map production.

Much more at the very interesting link. Via Neatorama's Upcoming Queue.

And speaking of POWs and concentration camps, see the link below this one...