The film raised some debate among ex-prisoners of war. There are no known survivors of any of Coward's escapes, and the National Ex-Prisoner of War Association (in its Autumn 2006 newsletter) suggested that some of the stories in his biography might have happened to other men in the camps, with some events "borrowed" for the book and for the film. In 2013, Shimon Peres, then president of Israel, disclosed that his father, Yitzchak Perski, who immigrated from Poland to Mandatory Palestine in 1932, had joined the British Army in 1939 and was captured by the Germans in Greece in 1941. Perski and Coward had been fellow prisoners, and Peres claimed that some episodes in the film were based on his father's exploits at that time.