A Berlin trip a few years ago rekindled the author's twenty-year fascination with a daring, true, tunnel escape from East to West Berlin during the height of the Cold War. A wonderful group of feisty senior citizens led by an eighty-one-year-old man pulled off one of the most daring escapes to freedom in recent history. The fictionalized account of these real events is the backbone of this wonderful novel by prodigious author Lou Macaluso. The Greatest Escape must rank as one of the best historical fictions of this period anyone has written to date.