The Island of Extraordinary Captives

August 29, 2022
Journalist Parkin (A Game of Birds and Wolves) documents in this vivid history the British internment of German refugees on the Isle of Man during WWII. He spotlights Hutchinson Camp, one of 10 internment camps on the island, where the 2,000 male detainees held between 1940 and 1944 included actors, artists, composers, lawyers, professors, and writers, “as if a tsunami had deposited a crowd of Europe’s prominent men into this obscure patch of grass in the middle of the Irish Sea.” Parkin details how government officials determined which foreigners constituted a “threat,” and explains that the camps’ system of self-governance was “designed to invest a community in the orderly and peaceful organization of its own captivity.” At Hutchinson Camp, the “high concentration of luminaries,” including artists Paul Hamann, Kurt Schwitters, and Hellmuth Weissenborn, necessitated a cultural department to coordinate the schedule of lectures and performances. Throughout, Parkin interweaves the story of Peter Fleischmann, an 18-year-old orphan and aspiring artist who was connected—via a German Jewish heiress with whom he used to spend summer holidays—to a Gestapo spy in the camp, with harrowing details about the “banal and enduring structures of cruelty and indifference” faced by refugees and asylum seekers. Character-driven and carefully researched, this is an engrossing look at a less-remembered aspect of WWII.

Starred review from September 1, 2022

Parkin (A Game of Birds and Wolves) illuminates the long ignored injustices of Britain's World War II concentration camp policies by focusing on some of the prominent individuals confined at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. Fearing spies amid the immigrant population might aid an invasion, the government sanctioned the imprisonment of German and Austrian immigrants in a disorganized program that saw more than 20,000 Jews who had fled Nazi oppression detained with fascist sympathizers, POWs, and Gestapo agents. Parkin shows how artist Kurt Schwitters, actor Otto Tausig, and other creatives and intellectuals tried to stave off the level of despair of their predicament through an outpouring of creative communal endeavors including lectures, art exhibitions, and a camp newspaper. Juxtaposed with their stories are the experiences of Peter Fleischmann, a German Jewish orphan, who found in his incarceration at Hutchinson the supportive community and mentorship that life had thus far denied him. The author's choice to center the narrative on Fleischmann allows him to highlight both the cruel absurdities of the concentration camp and the resiliency of those imprisoned. VERDICT A deeply effective look at an important but rarely discussed aspect of World War II history.--Sara Shreve

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2022
A World War II tale about how panic, fear, and xenophobia led to a drastic governmental policy in the U.K. Drawing on copious unpublished and archival material, British journalist Parkin has produced a richly detailed history of the internment of thousands of men and women because of their German or Austrian ancestry. Many had fled to England as refugees from Nazi Germany, and the vast majority were Jewish. Though they had become productive, upstanding members of their communities, "jingoism and hatred," stoked by the media, became justification for the new policy. "Instead of taking an enlightened lead," writes the author, "the government now used public opinion as justification for strict measures." Parkin focuses on Hutchinson, on the Isle of Man, which housed some 2,000 men from the time it opened in July 1940 and whose inmates included artists, musicians, fashion designers, architects, academics, and writers. "It was as if a tsunami had deposited a crowd of Europe's prominent men onto this obscure patch of grass in the middle of the Irish Sea," writes the author. Officials ran the camp as humanely as possible, and the inmates worked to make it a community. They gave theater and music performances, set up cafes, started a newspaper, and conducted classes, especially for the younger men whose schooling had been disrupted. Among those younger men was Peter Fleischmann, whose story exemplifies the inconsistencies--indeed, the absurdity--of the policy of internment. An orphan who had come to the U.K. on the Kindertransport, he was at first seen as no threat to national security. Nevertheless, he was later arrested, and six weeks after the camp opened, he arrived at Hutchinson. His experiences there changed the course of his future. Parkin also chronicles the policy shift that eventually freed about half of the internees by the spring of 1941. "Historical ignorance and bedrock xenophobia" led to a "panic measure" that, Parkin warns, reverberates in contemporary treatment of asylum seekers. A vivid recounting of a shameful event that still resonates.

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