The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp

Journalist Parkin (A Game of Birds and Wolves) documents in this vivid history the British internment of German refugees on the Isle of Man during WWII. He spotlights Hutchinson Camp, one of 10 internment camps on the island, where the 2,000 male detainees held between 1940 and 1944 included actors, artists, composers, lawyers, professors, and writers, “as if a tsunami had deposited a crowd of Europe’s prominent men into this obscure patch of grass in the middle of the Irish Sea.” Parkin details how government officials determined which foreigners constituted a “threat,” and explains that the camps’ system of self-governance was “designed to invest a community in the orderly and peaceful organization of its own captivity.” At Hutchinson Camp, the “high concentration of luminaries,” including artists Paul Hamann, Kurt Schwitters, and Hellmuth Weissenborn, necessitated a cultural department to coordinate the schedule of lectures and performances. Throughout, Parkin interweaves the story of Peter Fleischmann, an 18-year-old orphan and aspiring artist who was connected—via a German Jewish heiress with whom he used to spend summer holidays—to a Gestapo spy in the camp, with harrowing details about the “banal and enduring structures of cruelty and indifference” faced by refugees and asylum seekers. Character-driven and carefully researched, this is an engrossing look at a less-remembered aspect of WWII. (Nov.)