Jack Laurence

That instead of going home, they would in fact be sold to the feared Al-Shabaab.

And going with them could mean almost certain death.

Little did Nigel or Amanda know at the time, but their over 15-month ordeal was about to come to an end.

But in keeping with the chaos of their lives for the past over 400 days, it wasn't going to be a simple handover.

next time on What I Survived.

There are certain stories that have burned themselves into the cultural imagination.

Stories of escape, of the impossible made possible through patience, ingenuity and sheer refusal to accept the walls around you.

Most of us know them through films.

The Great Escape, based of course on a true story as it happens, where allied prisoners of war in a Nazi camp spent years digging tunnels beneath their captors' feet, moving the earth one spoonful at a time.

Shawshank Redemption, fictional but feels so real that generations of people have watched Andy Dufresne crawl through 500 yards of filth and felt something close to joy as he breaks out into the night sky and feels the rain on his face for the first time in years.

And of course, Alcatraz, the island prison in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the one they said was inescapable.

On the night of June 11th, 1962, three inmates, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, spent six months preparing a breakout.

They tucked papier-mâché heads into their beds and broke out through ventilation ducts and an unguarded corridor and departed the island on an improvised raft.

Of course, no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced about their fate to this day.

No one knows whether they made it.

However, we root for these people every single time, whether we know their story is real or fictional.

Something deep in us responds to the image of a person refusing captivity, of a mind that will not stop working, of a body that runs when every rational calculation says stay.

We watch these films from our sofas, hearts hammering, leaning forward, willing the person on, screaming at them to make it through the next door, over the next fence, across the next yard, before the lights come on.

But here is the thing about Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhouse.

With their story, there was no director, no script, no stunt coordinator standing just off camera, no second take if something went wrong.