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

Product Information

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. Many of those who fled the Nazis were artists, musicians, composers, university professors, and other professionals any rational country would want to keep. Hutchinson became a particular standout for its organization of cultural activities.

The book is definitely informative, but it does suffer from being a bit wandering in the narrative. I was never quite sure if this was intended to be a history book of the event, or more of a look at some of the individuals. It could be a combination of these, of course, but frankly, because it doesn't really seem to know the narrative tends to fall a bit flat. 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.” A sort of love-letter travelogue [and a] thought-provoking introduction to the fastest-growing religion on the planet." ( The Times) Peter Fleischmann was a 17-year-old orphan living at the Auerbach Orphanage in Berlin. His parents had been killed in an automobile accident when he was about five. His wealthy banker-grandfather raised him for several years before the Nazis seized his property. The grandfather died shortly thereafter and Peter ended up in Auerbach an orphanage and boarding school. 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.Parkin includes a final chapter in which he describes what occurred to people after release. Finally, Peter will be accepted to an art school because of recommendations by camp artists and the work of refugee organizations. This had been his life’s wish and finally he acquired people he could rely on and trust. Parkin builds his narrative around the artist Peter Midgley, born Peter Fleischmann, a Jewish-German orphan who was just young enough to qualify for the Kindertransport and just old enough to be caught in the internment dragnet. In December 1938, SS officers stole from Midgley and the other children as their refugee train left Germany. Eighteen months later, in 1940, Midgley watched refugees being robbed again, this time by British soldiers at the corrupt and dysfunctional Warth Mills internment camp in Lancashire. The intentions of the British and German governments towards the Jews were very different, but the irony of their treatment in the country where they had sought asylum was not lost on the refugees. Hitler would gloat that year: “The British have detained in concentration camps the very people we found it necessary to detain.” Simon Parkin does a riveting job of showing how panic pushed up and through governmental channels comes out as inconsistent, mismanaged and political bumbling - basically resulting in waste product of ill-used resources.

An etching of Warth Mills by German artist Hermann Fechenbach, who was among the refugees interned there Illustration: Courtesy of hermannfechenbach.com II. The terms “internment camp” and “concentration camp” are, strictly, interchangeable. Modern readers associate the latter with atrocity, but neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the Holocaust Museum draw any distinction in their respective definitions.As much reading as I did about WWII, I somehow missed hearing about English internment camps. While the internment of Japanese Americans in the US gets more attention, England’s role in this xenophobic measure is left mainly untold. This, the author tells us, is because it negates the historical narrative the British want, or wanted, to be told. 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?”) In 2021 Canadian PM Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology to the thirty-two thousand Italian Canadians declared ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War. While I’m not terribly impressed by apologies after such shameful occurrences, it’s better than nothing. I am not aware of any apology made by the UK or the USA. Reluctantly, Rawicz agreed. A small crowd trailed the musician as he toured the houses, testing each instrument for its suitability. Rawicz, not one to disregard an audience, had amused his trail of followers with sarcastic quips and condemnations.

We admired The Island of Extraordinary Captives for its serious intent, but most of all we responded to its humanity and ability to find joy in exploring how the internees used their culture and creativity to stay sane and even thrive in arduous circumstances’. In this case, the book discusses the remarkable assemblage of creative persons housed in an internment camp. Parkin blends the many aspects of their story into a single narrative that moves smoothly between biographical sketches, the various refugee support groups fighting for the release of detainees, important art movements of that time, the oppression and subjugation of Germany's Jews by the Nazis, the political debates and outcomes within Britain as related to the acceptance of refugees and then later their internment as potential 'fifth columnists'. To begin: Part one tells of how the internment camp(s) in the UK during WW2 came to be. Ignorance and panic of supposedly smart people acting out of alarm without rational thought proceeded with some very wonky decision making.

Need Help?

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. Very engaging and illuminating. I enjoy what I think of as niche topics about the second World War. That is to say, stories focused on a more narrow, and oftentimes obscure aspect of those years. I find it's these sorts of stories that really flesh out those years and add depth (as well as context) to the other far more well known events and personalities of the war. Parkin has a deft sense of the ways that video games appeal to and satiate the longings of the spirit ... Death by Video Game offers an excellent sociocultural study of the 21st century's quintessential art form." ( Washington Post) The book is a heavy read and at times goes off on a tangent and becomes confusing which is why I have taken off one half star. It was tough going to finish this book. 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.