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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Julie Cohen is an award-winning, best-selling author of over 25 novels. She is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Reading and a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and a founder of their Rainbow Chapter for LGBTQ+ writers. Her latest novel is Summer People (August 2022, Orion). She lives in Berkshire, UK with her son and a terrier of dubious origin. Peter’s story was no isolated incident. During Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews escaped and found refuge in Britain. Once war broke out in 1939, the nation turned against them, fearing that Nazis had planted spies posing as refugees. Innocent asylum seekers thus were labeled “enemy aliens” and ultimately sentenced to an indefinite period of internment.

Peter’s story was no isolated incident. During Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews escaped and found refuge in Britain. Once war broke out in 1939, the nation turned against them, fearing that Nazis had planted spies posing as refugees. Innocent asylum seeker Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Mann was an internment camp during WW2. From it opening in July 1940 to its close, more than two thousand men were held prisoner. In this highly detailed and thoroughly researched book, Parkin reveals the injustices at work and the unique climate created. Teenagers accepted under the Kindertransport were re-classified as dangerous aliens and interred: the hand of salvation became the hand of damnation. Germans from all classes of life were grouped together -- a potpourri of eminent artists, scientists, musicians, archeologists and philosophers. The greatest injustice occurred when those interred were offered release if they joined the British army; as a way of proving their innocence.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." Simon Parkin has been announced as the winner of this year’s Wingate Literary Prize for The Island of Extraordinary Captives (Sceptre).

The winner was announced at an event at JW3, featuring the BBC’s Emily Kasriel in conversation with the judges and shortlisted authors. Simon Parkin’s well-researched and beautifully written book is a testament to how the Jewish refugees interned by the British as ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, ‘turned a prison into a university, a camp into a cultural centre’.

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All seven of the shortlisted books were exceptionally strong. The range of subjects and genres made choosing the winner very difficult, but we judges felt that The Island of Extraordinary Captives particularly fitted the criteria of the Wingate Prize to communicate lived Jewish experience to the general reader.

In the autumn of 1940, the British government released a white paper outlining several categories under which internees could apply for release. Those who were too young or too old, too infirm, or who already had permits to work in positions of national importance could apply to be freed. Artists, writers and musicians were not included until later revisions, and had to prove they had achieved distinction in their chosen field. (As Helen Roeder, secretary of the Artists’ Refugee Committee, put it to the director of the National Gallery: “Do you think [the criteria could] be stretched to include the poor souls who have been too busy being hunted to achieve distinction in the arts?”)From an early age Peter had aspired to be numbered among the great artists. Events both international and domestic had at first conspired against his ambition, his dream to become an artist exploded by exile. Then the currents of history had carried him into the orbit of his heroes; he shared the camp with a raft of eminent artists, including Kurt Schwitters, the fifty-three-year-old pioneering Dadaist in front of whose “degenerate” work the failed painter Adolf Hitler had sarcastically posed. The artists, in turn, took this skinny, bespectacled outsider into their care. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Using exclusive new archive material, letters and diaries, The Island of Extraordinary Captives is the untold story of history’s most extraordinary prison camp. There are fascinating parts to the book, such as what provoked Kristallnacht, and the prodigious outpouring of art of all kinds that the camp inmates produced. There are also parts of the book that made me rethink how I perceived the British government and its citizens during WWII. I had no idea how antisemitic they were, as well as how incompetent they were. The whole way that the internment of these mostly innocent people was handled was appalling. BTW, I am aware that the US did the same appalling thing to the Japanese during WWII, but the British held these refugees in camps with their enemies. Frankly, the only difference between the British and the Nazi camps was that the Nazis worked people to death or killed them outright. The British may have treated their captives better, but they were interred based on fear and loathing. There are a lot of references to a “Fifth Column” in Britain, which was a fear that there were spies and Nazi sympathizers among the refugees that had arrived in Britain over the past 10 years and they would “support an enemy invasion from within.” This was never proven, but became a rallying cry amongst government officials and journalists, just like “pizza parlor sex slaves” and “Hunter Biden’s laptop” is for the far right fringe today in the US.

Parkin notes in passing that chaos was the root of Dadaist philosophy. Rather than explore Dadaism and offer a more detailed portrait of Schwitters, Parkin simply moves on as if the Dadaists' opposition to war and "mutual destruction" was not a key issue for the book. Viewed kindly, Hutchinson had been a world of unparalleled opportunity, a time when historic forces had momentarily aligned to gather a unique cross-section of men. In no other circumstances before or since have the university don, the local butcher, the celebrated Dadaist, the lawmaker, the baker, and the couture dressmaker been forced to cohabitate and, in doing so, enrich one another’s lives.” The remarkable untold story of a Jewish orphan who fled Nazi Germany for London, only to be arrested there by the British government and sent to an internment camp for suspected foreign agents on the Isle of Man, alongside a renowned group of refugee musicians, intellectuals, artists, and—possibly—genuine spies.

Within two weeks of its opening on 13th July 1940, Hutchinson camp’s population numbered more than 1,200, all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty.