The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp

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It starts in 1933 when Adolph Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. Within a few years, if you were Jewish, a Gypsy or even a Catholic Priest, your days were numbered. In 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee in Paris buys a gun and goes to the German Embassy in that city. There he assassinates a high-level Nazi diplomat. This leads to the infamous Kristallnacht in Germany. On that night, Jewish places by the thousands were destroyed and hundreds of Jews were beaten and killed in retaliation, more or less with the blessing of law enforcement authorities.

Imagine, being a child and being a part of the Kinder Transport and getting to England, the land that is to save you, and you find yourself, not in someone's home, getting love and comfort, but in a camp - the very thing that you were fleeing [ often at the expense of the parent's that sent you to keep you safe] wondering just why you were there. This is what happens to Peter [ one of the main characters of the book] along with others who were just fleeing for their lives and had the misfortune to be German [ though there is a TWIST at the end, though it doesn't have to do with Peter and I will admit breathing a sigh of relief at that] and this book is about their time on the Isle of Man and what happened to them there and afterwards. Parkin’s main focus is the Hutchinson Camp which became the home of an eclectic and talented group of people. The camp was populated with over 1200 prisoners predominantly refugees from Nazi Germany who had been living in England peacefully at the time of their arrest. Parkin’s begins by exploring English paranoia concerning a “fifth column” as it appeared the Nazis were about to invade. Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorized the arrest of thousands among them were “so-called aliens” resulting in the imprisonment of teenagers who fled Germany on Kindertransport trains among them was Peter Fleischmann one of the main characters of the monograph. In an interesting description, Parkin places Fleischmann at a concert performed at Camp Hutchinson symbolizing how one could be imprisoned by one’s liberator. For Peter it was a reminder of Gestapo roundups in a world he had fled. Other prisoners included Oxbridge dons, surgeons, dentists, lawyers and scores of celebrated artists – a truly talented array of people, one of “history’s unlikeliest and most extraordinary prison populations.” It begins with a closer look at an attempted murder of a German diplomat in Paris, which led to Kristallnacht, and upended the life of a Jewish orphan. Peter Fleischmann escaped to Britain, only to be arrested as a suspected Nazi spy. He was one of hundreds of Jews who had sought asylum in that country who later found themselves interned. Many of these men and women had settled into rich cultural lives as professors and teachers and scientists, never believing they would be yanked out of them. In later years, everything of which Fleischmann had dreamed since he was a young aspiring artist at the orphanage would come true. Under his adopted name, Peter Midgley, he would be accepted into the Royal College of Art. He would graduate with first-class honours, the top fine art student in his year, rewarded with the RCA’s prestigious Rome scholarship. He would become a professional artist, securing commissions to create works for a number of British government departments, universities and the Royal Navy. Nothing bettered the training he received at Hutchinson, however. “Everything thereafter,” he later said, “was just a recap.”The police came for Peter Fleischmann in the early hours. It reminded the teenager of the Gestapo’s moonlit roundups he had narrowly avoided at home in Berlin. Now, having endured a perilous journey to reach England – hiding from the rampaging Nazi thugs at his orphanage, boarding a Kindertransport to safety – here the aspiring artist was, on a ship bound for the Isle of Man, suspected of being a Nazi spy. What had gone wrong?

The latter was especially well presented. Parkin is clear as he shows how Britain went from a policy of 'deportation, not internment' to approving mass internment of anyone deemed a threat. Often that determination came about in the most random and haphazard of ways, such as the sloppy application of poorly articulated guidelines for the determination of who presented the highest risk and overall ineptness of the judiciary tasked with making the decision based on those guidelines. For Peter his final arrest came on July 5, 1940, and along with thousands of others were subjected to the inhumanity and indignities of how the British processed the men stealing their limited possessions, deprived them of their civil rights, and saw themselves as having survived dangerous escapes from Germany to be imprisoned by their saviors. Hitler laughed at British policy correctly pointing out how the British were copying the Nazis by rounding up so many Jews. Parkin describes a number of British facilities and for many it took months to reach Camp Hutchinson.Just when I thought the US had the market on atrocities committed [ and don't get me wrong, we are 100% in the lead for stupid, horrible things done to other human beings, in the name of protection, when it was really done in the name of hate and superiority and SUPREME IGNORANCE], along comes a book about one of the biggest stains on Britain's history that few know about [ and to be a fly on the wall of some people's houses when this book comes out and they are presented with it] and when people read it, it will be done in horror that people, some of them CHILDREN, were treated in such a way when all they wanted was safety and comfort from the horrors of Nazi Germany.

I had no idea that England had internment camps during WWII. Unlike the United States that forced US citizens into internment camps, England placed German refugees into camps. There were multiple camps, but this book focuses on Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. Understandably, the English were afraid of Nazi spies, however through fear, antisemitism and/or incompetence they did a poor job of vetting the refugees and determining which (if any) were actually threats.Fleischmann, was not the only individual caught up in these machinations of the state. He, along with thousands of others, were twice interned or other-ed. They had escaped the Nazi system only to have their haven turn against them. In a Britain ruled by fear, these escapees were robbed, ostracized, and in a portion of cases killed by neglect or mismanagement. Simon Parkin details many different experiences and the governments implementations, management of the camps, and how the government reported or presented details about the camps. As Parkin states in the postscript "There was no unified experience of internment." Rawicz had made his point. Captain Daniel relented. The camp’s maintenance department wheeled a hired Steinway onto a sturdy rostrum built for the occasion. A date was set, and the commandant, eager to demonstrate the superiority of his camp, issued invitations to his rival officers on the island. For the finale, Rawicz had selected two pieces designed to draw a veil of ironic dissonance across the scene. Ignoring classics from the European composers, he opted instead for the sixteenth-century folk tune “Greensleeves”—a quintessentially English melody—before he segued into a rendition of the British national anthem. Peter and the other internees stood to their feet and sang.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor the US Government did exactly the same thing to their Japanese Americans. I. The others were: Mooragh, Peveril, Onchan, Central, Palace, Metropole, Granville, and Sefton for male internees, and Rushen for women internees and, later, married couples. It was just by chance but I finished reading this important historical work on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I knew quite a bit about the United States's deplorable detention of Japanese Americans (and other groups) during World War II, but I had no idea that the British had done the same, and worse, interning refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, including young people who had left their home countries on the Kindertransport, which brought Jewish children to England to save them. The police came for Peter in the early hours of the morning, without prior warning, a manner of detention that had reminded him of the Gestapo’s moonlit roundups and the muggy world of fear and distrust from which he had just fled. Simon Parkin has been announced as the winner of this year’s Wingate Literary Prize for his book The Island of Extraordinary Captives (Sceptre).A palisade of barbed wire separated and barred the men from the harbor, a perimeter that marked the boundary of what was officially known as “P” camp, or, to the men, simply, “Hutchinson.” Outside the wire fence, a group of locals had gathered. They peered in, hoping to glimpse and understand what was happening, the only obvious clue that tonight’s was a captive audience. Parkin chronicles the plight of many of these “inmates” but never loses sight of the impact of the experience on young Peter. Parkin also shows who tried to assist these refugees and who tried to keep them incarcerated. Drama is built upon what will happen to Peter, the parallel stories which ask if there were collaborators among these men and the impact upon these creative geniuses. The majority of the interned in Britain were innocents ripped from their families, often leaving them destitute and terrified.