Local couple visits tropical island, but it’s no paradise
By Avi Rutschman avi@theacorn.com

Hal Geer and his wife, Carol

While most people avoid desolate places of exile during their vacations, Hal Geer recently returned from touring Devil’s Island. The small island off the coast of French Guiana in northeast South America was the home of one of history’s most notorious prison colonies, Île du Diable.

Geer, a retired Warner Bros. cartoon producer and Simi Valley resident, has spent his golden years sailing the globe and delivering a range of lectures aboard cruise ships.

“I learned from producing educational films that you need to entertain your audience first, and then you can teach them,” Geer said.

Geer had no problem finding interesting material to discuss in his lecture “Dry Guillotine: Life, Death and Escape from Devil’s Island.”

During its century of operation, Devil’s Island was the most brutal prison on earth. Between 1852 and 1946, the prison was home to 80,000 inmates, ranging from political dissidents to thieves and murderers. Less than one-quarter of the people sent there ever made it out again; escape was nearly impossible because of the swift tidal currents and dense jungle that surrounded the compound.

DEFINITELY NO PARADISE–– If you were to pass Devil’s Island, right, on a sea cruise, you might mistakenly assume that it’s just another tropical Shangri-la. On closer examination, however, you would find the deplorable conditions, below left, that faced prisoners. The prison camp, built in 1852, operated for nearly 100 years, incarcerating 80,000 prisoners.

The prison camp was built in 1852 on a group of islands ironically known as the Islands of Salvation. While the islands earned their original name because they provided settlers with a safe haven from jungle diseases such as malaria, the prison later became known as the “dry guillotine” since being sent to the island was the equivalent of a protracted death sentence.

Even though pictures of the island present it as an idyllic paradise surrounded by beautiful waters, the area was a hell on earth while the prison was in operation.

“It was a brutal place,” Geer said. “People on the island often went stark raving mad. There was one story of a man who scratched his fingers down to the bone after trying to claw through a wall.”

Two of the island’s most famous inhabitants were Alfred Dreyfus and Papillon. Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French military, spent four years on the island after falling victim to antiSemitism and being wrongly convicted of treason.

Papillon, whose real name was Henri Charrière, won fame after publishing a novel about his escape from the prison. The story, which was later made into a Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, is highly controversial and its authenticity is still debated.

Geer, who focused on anthropology during his university studies, feels that Devil’s Island, like other prisons, provides important commentary on mankind’s efforts to deal with misfits.

“Devil’s Island is an example of a society trying to figure out what to do with evil people,” Geer said. “They would isolate (anti-social people) on this island to make the population feel safe, but they never figured out what to do with them. As soon as they served their sentences, the prisoners were forced to work for low wages in cane fields, where they often died.”

Geer feels that while modern prisons aren’t nearly as brutal as Devil’s Island, mankind still hasn’t figured out how to address this complex issue.

“Unfortunately, history is often a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite,” said Geer.