The Island of Extraordinary Captives by Simon Parkin reviewed by Julian Landy When you are young everything seems at once possible and scary. The future is all there to play for even if it seems uncertain. When you get older, life seems fixed and predictable. You know who and what you are and where you are going. Yet, whatever your age, war is totally discombobulating, driving falsehoods, promoting insanity, exploiting ignorance, and dividing siblings and friends. “The Island of Extraordinary Captives” by Simon Parkin is entirely fact based and tells the story of the use of the Isle of Man as the location of internment camps in World War II. Parkin draws on survivors’ stories and his own scrupulous research. The result reads like a thriller. AS we know, the stated intention of our wartime leaders was to put socalled “fifth columnists” out of circulation. The vast majority of those interned were Jews. Some were new arrivals, many merely youths. Some had lived in UK for years, but were not naturalised. All were angry, frustrated, and kept in ignorance of how their futures would develop. Moreover, they were a genuinely mixed bunch, including Nazis or fascist sympathisers, as well as distinguished people who had worked in government and academia, some in Cambridge. Page 24
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