The Island of Extraordinary Captives

b y S i m o n Pa r k i n

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.

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The writer starts by telling the background story of one particular young man who, for a variety of causes, is orphaned and homeless. He comes to the UK on the Kindertransport and, after various weird and unpleasant experiences, is interned. Later, we are told of the reality of everyday life in one particular camp, called Hutchinson: a place for men only. Initially, the experience of adaptation proves hard for both the inmates and those running the camp. Eventually, the residents organise themselves and a vast variety of activities begin. Effectively, the camp becomes an open university. The one essential qualification is that you must be an internee. Of course, no degrees were awarded. Yet people were enabled both to teach what they knew and to learn what they did not know: a cathartic experience in the most peculiar of situations. This is a book to treasure. It is well written, with no digressions or excessive detail often found in academic volumes. It has voluminous notes at the end of the book. Frankly, this is such a great read, both gripping and enlightening, that the notes, while interesting, are almost superfluous. As I write, another dictator is laying waste to eastern Europe. This book provides a welcome story of hope amid the ruins: I hold fast to it.

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