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Pandora
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(Harvill Secker £14.99)
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(Bantam Press £20) Jack Reacher comes to the aid of
an army veteran searching for her twin brother (1,370)11 13FICTION PAPERBACKS
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Simple and slimming
recipe collection (3,520)Jew reassuringly not to worry:
“We will soon win the war,
and set you free again.”
In the Isle of Man camp its
resident geniuses started
classes in everything. Parkin
writes: “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.”
Fleischmann found himself
enjoying opportunities to fulfil
a passion to become an artist
— he provides Parkin’s book
with part of its subtitle — and
studied under some of
Germany’s greatest masters,
now reduced to making
substitute brushes from each
other’s eyebrows, and paint
from sardine oil.
The detainees were
progressively released in late
1940 and 1941, as emotions
calmed and they were
individually screened. Most
went on to play useful and
even distinguished roles in the
British war effort. One man
was not freed — Ludwig
Warschauer, the spy of the
book’s subtitle. Exhaustive
interrogations by MI5
eventually exposed him as a
Nazi “plant”. He was spared
the gallows only because hehad not attempted to carry
out espionage activities.
Churchill said on August 15,
1940: “I always thought [the
Fifth Column menace] was
exaggerated.” He added in
self-justification: “I should not
have felt I was doing my duty
by the national defence if I
had not taken these special
steps to cope with Fifth
Column activities.”
He was probably right that,
amid the national emergency,
special precautions were
justified. It was the insensitivity,
trending to brutality, with
which the measures were
implemented that incur the
censure of posterity. While
British antisemitism was
never as poisonous as the
European kind, it received an
ugly licence in 1940-41, in the
uniform of the crown.Amid the shame, those
who behaved well receive
just credit from the author.
Notable among them was
Bertha Bracey, who led a
dedicated Quaker group that
succoured German refugees
from 1933 through the war.
When victory came in 1945,
Parkin writes, “the general
reluctance of internees to
pronounce or denounce their
experiences led to a benign
whitewashing that has kept
the internment episode
obscured from mainstream
historiography”.
Parkin’s account of the
experiences of the internees
is vivid and moving. The
narrative sometimes becomes
confusing, as he leapfrogs
from one episode to another,
but his book spotlights a sorry
aspect of Britain’s war that
deserves to be better known.
One of those who
experienced an internment
camp, the great Claus Moser,
who later became the
government’s chief statistician
and a towering patron of the
arts, said in old age: “I often
ask myself if it could happen
again.” In our own new age of
xenophobia, it is easy to fear
that it might. cThis aspect of
Britain’s war
should be
better known
GETTY IMAGESwith his friends the great
Prisoners’ Chorus lament.
Peter Fleischmann came
to Britain aged 17 with a 1938
Kindertransport, but was
interned, despite having been
orphaned and made homeless
by the Nazis. In his first
detention centre he found
himself among a group of
captured U-boat crewmen,
one of whom told the young
Isle of Man
camp Jewish
refugees
were seized
and interned
as ‘enemy
aliens’PAPERBACK
OF THE WEEKJews Don’t Count
by David Baddiel
TLS Books £7.99This is an
angry book,
directed at
the author’s
own political
home. It’s a
convincing
and even
devastating charge sheet,
in which various left-wing
politicians, actors and
writers are shown to have
said things about Jews that
would have ended their
careers on the spot if they
had been made about any
other minority group.
Dominic LawsonST DIGITAL
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CO.UK/CULTURE6 February 2022 25