Excerpt from a longer article:

Timely Take-aways for Life-long Learners

Lesser-known Stories from the World War II Era
Several new books explore the lesser-known stories of prisoners, survivors, resistance fighters, scientists, and other amazing individuals of the World War II era.

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The Island of Extraordinary Captives
Simon Parkin, 2022, Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Themes: History, Modern, Holocaust, 20th Century
At the beginning of WWII, a British internment camp was established to detain asylum seekers the government feared might be spies. Prisoners included intellectuals, artists, musicians, and others considered possible enemy aliens.
Take-aways: Teachers will find this lesser-known true story to be an interesting example to be taught alongside a discussion of the Japanese Internment in the United States.

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Whether helping educators keep up-to-date in their subject-areas, promoting student reading in the content-areas, or simply encouraging nonfiction leisure reading, teacher librarians need to be aware of the best new titles across the curriculum and how to activate life-long learning. - Annette Lamb ( )

I’ve read so many stories about World War II and each one seems to teach something new about that time in history. In this case, I knew that in the United States there were internment camps for Japanese citizens. The camps seem so unfair and are like a punishment. One wonders how much good they do for the country that places people in them.

In this case, Peter Fleischmann, an orphan from Berlin, managed to get to England on a Kindertransport train. Once in England the British police sent him to an internment camp on the assumption he was a spy. The camp was located on the Isle of Man and many other German and Austrian Jews were sent there as well.

What was unusual about the camp was the unique traits of the people who who sent there. Peter was joined by professors, artists, composers and authors. This was certainly not the makeup of your ordinary prison camp. Peter, being one of the youngest in the camp, was taken under their wing and given an education unlike any he would have gotten anywhere else.

I found the story to be a bit dry at times and I also found it difficult to keep up with the many names mentioned throughout the book. The ending was impactful because the author told what happened to Peter and whether or not he ever found any of his family.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me to read an advance copy. I am happy to offer my honest review and recommend this to other readers who enjoy history and nonfiction. ( )

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: https://www.ManOfLaBook.com

The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp by Simon Parkin tells of the English internment of perceived fifth columnists during World War II. Mr. Parkin is an award winning writer and journalist.

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.
To be fair, there were spies among the 73,000 prisoners, but the blanket policy was controversial even then.

Many of the 73,000 Germans and Austrians living in England, found themselves tagged as “enemy aliens” overnight. The government’s answer: a mass internment policy. One would think, that putting persecuted Jews, along with known fascists behind a fence would not be such a good idea, but at the time Churchill authorized the policy.

The Island of Extraordinary Captives Simon Parkin tells of the camps by following Peter Fleischmann, a Jewish aspiring artist, and orphan who got to England through the kindertransport. Through his eyes, we see the Hutchinson camp’s life on the Isle of Man for more than a year. The camp held more than a thousand captives, many of whom were luminaries in their respective fields, and many others were rising stars. Lawyers, writers, musicians, academics, and artists. Luckily for them, Captain Hubert Daniel, the camp’s commandant, was a humane person trying to make the best of a policy which he didn’t agree with.

Putting all those accomplished people in one place, it seemed, sparked their artistic brains and turned their prison into a cultural place of learning. Peter, later known as renowned artist Peter Midgley, learned much of his craft during those months from the famed Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, and made lifelong contacts in the art and academic fields.

The camp worked out for Peter, but many others were terrified of falling into Nazi hands when the invasion, which seemed imminent at the time, happened. Being trolled by Nazi sympathizers and fascists daily. There were even “suicide classes” held in secret – just in case.

This is an inspirational read, and does a fine job exposing Churchill’s government’s knee-jerk actions. Somewhere though, the book loses its narrative, when Peter’s journey is sidelined, and the account takes us in different directions. ( )

Drawing on unpublished and archival material, Parkin has written a detailed history of the internment of thousands of men and women refugees, on Britain’s Isle of Man, because of their German or Austrian ancestry. This is a powerful and vivid story of these “enemy aliens” who were wrongfully imprisoned and their remarkable resilience and creativity to use art and intellect to better their circumstances. They created a thriving cultural community, complete with art exhibitions, lectures, musical performances, and poetry readings, showcasing how hope and creativity can flourish even in the darkest of circumstances. An aspiring read!

A remarkable piece of research to collate the stories of over 1000 interned Germans, mainly Jews who had escaped the Nazis, only to held on the Isle of Man. What was special was the eclectic talent caught up in the internment and the ways they used it. A reminder to us of the ways a conflict can impact refugees, rescued from persecution only to be treated with suspicion by their rescuers. ( )