Despite prostrate Germany’s need for the return of its men, in Britain we didn’t release our prisoners of war until 1948. In Russia — for those who survived — freedom came even later, in the 1950s; an apparent lack of moral equivalence saw the subject conveniently ignored until recently. Likewise, in a country that thrives on retelling wartime tales of derring-do, Britain has been slow to examine the complex story behind its internment of ‘enemy aliens’, the vast majority of whom were Jewish refugees. The horror of the Nazi concentration camps helped contribute to the silence on the subject post-1945, but, as Simon Parkin argues in The Island of Extraordinary Captives, that is no reason to avoid it.
The author made his name with A Game of Birds and Wolves, recasting the Battle of the Atlantic through the heroics of a retired captain and a team of Wrens in an onshore tactical unit based in Liverpool. His new book is equally rewarding.
For many Jews, internment on the Isle of Man was darkly reminiscent of their expulsion from Germany
Just 75,500 German and Austrian refugees were allowed into Britain before war was declared — and how we lauded our national effort to save them. Who hasn’t read a touching Kindertransport story? I’ve met several veterans who trained on the Isle of Man and recall no-go zones full of morbid-looking foreign men, but I’d never challenged myself to join up the dots until Parkin came along with his inimitable capacity to find the human pulse in the underbelly of Britain’s war.
There are heroes aplenty in The Island of Extraordinary Captives, which focuses on Hutchinson, one of Britain’s many internment camps on the Isle of Man, chock full of artists, musicians and intellectuals.
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