Image by Alfred Lomnitz.
By kind permission of the Lansdale family.
We’ve been here before. The basic principle of asylum is again under attack in the UK, as well as across the world. As I’ve puzzled over the upside-down, Alice in Wonderland logic of the Nationality and Borders Bill, and watched Priti Patel’s bizarre pantomime of compassion, I’ve had an uneasy sense of déjà vu. Listening to reports of the grim barracks in which refugees are being held, and to the talk of ‘reception centres’ and offshore detention – I’m reminded of another time which I’ve been studying, when Britain suddenly targeted its refugees. The story is a warning of what can happen when tabloid-driven racism is allowed to dictate policy.
Just over eighty years ago, in the early days of the Second World War, Britain took the abrupt decision to round up tens of thousands of recent refugees. There are still traces of our UK camps, if you know how to read them - although there’s little left to attract attention, no visitor centres and precious few plaques. On the Isle of Man an elderly lady pointed out of her window at an eroded wooden stump, which is all that remains of a once-impressive barbed wire fence. Over the summers of the late 20th century, there were occasional quieter and older holiday-makers, who came to stand thoughtfully outside particular buildings or on the beach: ‘motivated largely by instinct… to reconcile the feeling of indignity,’ as one visitor from Israel explained. Now it is more often their children or grandchildren who come, says an archivist at the Manx National Heritage Library, to find out more about that time their relatives didn’t want to talk about.
There are sites on mainland Britain too. Even those who lived close to them were often confused, and usually assumed the people held there were Prisoners of War. Most people know very little about the hastily-improvised network of civilian internment camps, or about the five ships on which refugees were forcibly deported to Canada and Australia.
At the time, however, it was a huge operation. At the height of the internment crisis in 1940, over 30,000 people – so-called ‘Enemy Aliens’ – were rounded up by the police. The majority were German-speaking Jewish refugees; there were also Italians (usually what we might now call economic migrants), many of whom had lived and worked in Britain for decades. Unlike so much else about that remarkable year - the Battle of Britain, for example, and the Blitz - this is an aspect of the war that has almost vanished from public memory. It’s another one of the stories from British history that we’ve chosen not to commemorate.
Today, many people are under the impression that Jewish refugees escaping the Reich were welcomed by Britain with open arms. In fact, although there were inspiring acts of generosity by many individuals and organisations, the official position was one of indifference verging on hostility. After war broke out, a series of articles in the Daily Mail and the Express argued that the refugees were a threat, despite the fact that they were Hitler’s first and most fervent opponents. In the summer of 1940, as anxiety about a German invasion grew, Churchill gave the order to ‘collar the lot!’
Even with all the distractions of the war, the internment of civilians was controversial, criticised by MPs like Eleanor Rathbone, newspapers including the Manchester Guardian, and by Francois Lafitte, who argued in a swiftly-published book that ‘thousands of innocent refugees have been treated like cattle.’
All these years later, some of the relatives of those involved are still trying to understand what happened. ‘Maybe because it was something that was so unspoken, I feel like in a way I need to speak it,’ says Mona Benjamin, whose father was interned at the age of 22 and deported by ship, struggling with depression and what we might now call PTSD. Like other relatives of the internees, Mona has been using her own research to try and fill in the gaps.
The internees themselves also wrote about their experiences, both immediately afterwards and in the years since. Alfred Lomnitz was an artist who wrote an account of his internment called ‘Never Mind, Mr Lom,’ published in 1941.
‘Never mind, Mr Lom!’ said his loyal char with fatuous sympathy, on that perfect blue-skied June morning when two detectives asked him to pack a few necessary belongings in a suitcase - as small a suitcase as possible - and follow them.’
With such large numbers involved, the British were forced to be resourceful. As well as prisons, they used the Oratory School in London, holiday camps in Seaton and Clacton-on-Sea, and an old cotton mill near Manchester. The camps where Alfred Lomnitz (quoted above) spent time were on a race track, and on a half-built housing estate at Huyton near Liverpool. On the Isle of Man, whole streets and squares of run-down Victorian hotels and boarding houses, as well as the entire southern tip of the island, were partitioned off with barbed wire.
There are sites on mainland Britain too. Even those who lived close to them were often confused, and usually assumed the people held there were Prisoners of War. Most people know very little about the hastily-improvised network of civilian internment camps, or about the five ships on which refugees were forcibly deported to Canada and Australia.
At the time, however, it was a huge operation. At the height of the internment crisis in 1940, over 30,000 people – so-called ‘Enemy Aliens’ – were rounded up by the police. The majority were German-speaking Jewish refugees; there were also Italians (usually what we might now call economic migrants), many of whom had lived and worked in Britain for decades. Unlike so much else about that remarkable year - the Battle of Britain, for example, and the Blitz - this is an aspect of the war that has almost vanished from public memory. It’s another one of the stories from British history that we’ve chosen not to commemorate.
Today, many people are under the impression that Jewish refugees escaping the Reich were welcomed by Britain with open arms. In fact, although there were inspiring acts of generosity by many individuals and organisations, the official position was one of indifference verging on hostility. After war broke out, a series of articles in the Daily Mail and the Express argued that the refugees were a threat, despite the fact that they were Hitler’s first and most fervent opponents. In the summer of 1940, as anxiety about a German invasion grew, Churchill gave the order to ‘collar the lot!’
Even with all the distractions of the war, the internment of civilians was controversial, criticised by MPs like Eleanor Rathbone, newspapers including the Manchester Guardian, and by Francois Lafitte, who argued in a swiftly-published book that ‘thousands of innocent refugees have been treated like cattle.’
All these years later, some of the relatives of those involved are still trying to understand what happened. ‘Maybe because it was something that was so unspoken, I feel like in a way I need to speak it,’ says Mona Benjamin, whose father was interned at the age of 22 and deported by ship, struggling with depression and what we might now call PTSD. Like other relatives of the internees, Mona has been using her own research to try and fill in the gaps.
The internees themselves also wrote about their experiences, both immediately afterwards and in the years since. Alfred Lomnitz was an artist who wrote an account of his internment called ‘Never Mind, Mr Lom,’ published in 1941.
‘Never mind, Mr Lom!’ said his loyal char with fatuous sympathy, on that perfect blue-skied June morning when two detectives asked him to pack a few necessary belongings in a suitcase - as small a suitcase as possible - and follow them.’
With such large numbers involved, the British were forced to be resourceful. As well as prisons, they used the Oratory School in London, holiday camps in Seaton and Clacton-on-Sea, and an old cotton mill near Manchester. The camps where Alfred Lomnitz (quoted above) spent time were on a race track, and on a half-built housing estate at Huyton near Liverpool. On the Isle of Man, whole streets and squares of run-down Victorian hotels and boarding houses, as well as the entire southern tip of the island, were partitioned off with barbed wire.
Activities and Inactivities by Alfred Lomnitz.
By kind permission of the Lansdale family.
What followed was a surreal experience, by turns farcical, squalid and traumatic. The internees were usually grateful to be in a British camp rather than a German one, but they were also very often horrified and re-traumatised to be in a camp at all, and the parallels were troubling - the writer Robert Neumann described his experience as concentration camp – ‘KZ’ – ‘auf Englisch.’ Hannah Arendt also made this link (in relation to the whole continent) writing that ‘apparently, no one wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.’
It’s a story of resilience: some remarkable visual art, music and lectures were produced in the British camps. This is the angle that is perhaps best remembered – Kurt Schwitters making sculptures out of porridge, the Amadeus Quartet, who met on the Isle of Man, or the bilingual cabaret written by Hans Gal, called ‘What A Life!’ While inspiring, I think this emphasis is sometimes a little too consoling. The full story is darker and more complicated.
In what Churchill later described as ‘a deplorable and regrettable mistake,’ the British hit upon the disastrous plan of deporting some overseas, to Canada and Australia. Four ships left for Canada (and one for Australia) carrying thousands of civilian internees. Conditions were terrible: overcrowded, dirty, and dangerous. Another one of my favourite internment memoirs is ‘Accidental Journey’ by Mark Lynton. He relates how on a ship called the Ettrick there was an outbreak of dysentery, and a group of interned German-speaking Cambridge students took on the job of cleaning the toilets, applauded by the others as they disembarked: ‘let’s hear it for the lavatory gang!’
The second ship to depart, the Arandora Star, was sunk by a German torpedo in the Atlantic, with the loss of 800 lives. Survivors were reloaded onto the notorious HMT Dunera, on which internees were attacked and robbed by British guards. Many went on to settle at their destination, and the ship was later described by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘the greatest injection of talent to enter Australia on a single vessel.’
Alfred Lomnitz was at first frustrated by all the people who told him to ‘Never Mind’ about internment (hence the title of his memoir). After his release, however, he began to feel differently about this dismissive phrase. He confesses to a railway guard that he’s just been released from the camp up the road, afraid of his reaction. ‘Well, never mind,’ says the guard, and offers him a cup of tea. ‘I hope they didn’t treat you too badly there?’
This strange paradox - individual kindness set against collective hostility – might feel familiar to many caught up in cruel absurdities of the current immigration process. We love our immigrants only in retrospect: as with the ‘Windrush generation’, it feels as if at least seventy years need to pass before we suddenly feel sentimental about any given group and start to celebrate them rather than discriminate against them. I was shocked to learn that Jewish refugees were treated this way by the British government, but it seems clear that what Neumann describes as ‘laziness of heart’ still characterises our approach to those seeking asylum.
Do we really want to live in a country that victimises the most vulnerable and traumatised, in a desperate bid for popularity? Hannah Arendt knew what she was talking about – she was interned by the French in 1940 at Gurs: most of the women interned with her were later sent east and murdered after the Germans took over the camp. In her later work ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, she argues that the treatment of refugees is a kind of litmus test for oppressive governments, a first step down a dangerous path. Once a government has tasted the ‘humanity-annihilating power of racism’ and noticed the ‘silent consent’ of the majority, they become less likely to ‘resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status.’ And this applies as much to the way governments receive refugees as to the regimes they are fleeing.
I believe that there are many alarming parallels between then and now. The new legislation – the Nationality and Borders Bill – is a cruel and senseless attack on the basic rights of refugees, which undermines the whole principle of asylum. We in Britain are often conflicted about our relationship with the rest of the world: we want the prosperity which comes with global trade and cheap labour but find it harder to celebrate the cultural and social impact of immigration, scapegoating recent arrivals for home-grown problems we’d rather not address. Arendt’s work is a sobering reminder of where such tendencies can lead.
This episode should warn us of what can happen when press and politicians exploit and enable racism and prejudice. As well as the heroic and uplifting stories of the war, we should also remember that we once had state endorsed persecution and internment camps, here in the familiar seaside towns of Britain.
It’s a story of resilience: some remarkable visual art, music and lectures were produced in the British camps. This is the angle that is perhaps best remembered – Kurt Schwitters making sculptures out of porridge, the Amadeus Quartet, who met on the Isle of Man, or the bilingual cabaret written by Hans Gal, called ‘What A Life!’ While inspiring, I think this emphasis is sometimes a little too consoling. The full story is darker and more complicated.
In what Churchill later described as ‘a deplorable and regrettable mistake,’ the British hit upon the disastrous plan of deporting some overseas, to Canada and Australia. Four ships left for Canada (and one for Australia) carrying thousands of civilian internees. Conditions were terrible: overcrowded, dirty, and dangerous. Another one of my favourite internment memoirs is ‘Accidental Journey’ by Mark Lynton. He relates how on a ship called the Ettrick there was an outbreak of dysentery, and a group of interned German-speaking Cambridge students took on the job of cleaning the toilets, applauded by the others as they disembarked: ‘let’s hear it for the lavatory gang!’
The second ship to depart, the Arandora Star, was sunk by a German torpedo in the Atlantic, with the loss of 800 lives. Survivors were reloaded onto the notorious HMT Dunera, on which internees were attacked and robbed by British guards. Many went on to settle at their destination, and the ship was later described by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘the greatest injection of talent to enter Australia on a single vessel.’
Alfred Lomnitz was at first frustrated by all the people who told him to ‘Never Mind’ about internment (hence the title of his memoir). After his release, however, he began to feel differently about this dismissive phrase. He confesses to a railway guard that he’s just been released from the camp up the road, afraid of his reaction. ‘Well, never mind,’ says the guard, and offers him a cup of tea. ‘I hope they didn’t treat you too badly there?’
This strange paradox - individual kindness set against collective hostility – might feel familiar to many caught up in cruel absurdities of the current immigration process. We love our immigrants only in retrospect: as with the ‘Windrush generation’, it feels as if at least seventy years need to pass before we suddenly feel sentimental about any given group and start to celebrate them rather than discriminate against them. I was shocked to learn that Jewish refugees were treated this way by the British government, but it seems clear that what Neumann describes as ‘laziness of heart’ still characterises our approach to those seeking asylum.
Do we really want to live in a country that victimises the most vulnerable and traumatised, in a desperate bid for popularity? Hannah Arendt knew what she was talking about – she was interned by the French in 1940 at Gurs: most of the women interned with her were later sent east and murdered after the Germans took over the camp. In her later work ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, she argues that the treatment of refugees is a kind of litmus test for oppressive governments, a first step down a dangerous path. Once a government has tasted the ‘humanity-annihilating power of racism’ and noticed the ‘silent consent’ of the majority, they become less likely to ‘resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status.’ And this applies as much to the way governments receive refugees as to the regimes they are fleeing.
I believe that there are many alarming parallels between then and now. The new legislation – the Nationality and Borders Bill – is a cruel and senseless attack on the basic rights of refugees, which undermines the whole principle of asylum. We in Britain are often conflicted about our relationship with the rest of the world: we want the prosperity which comes with global trade and cheap labour but find it harder to celebrate the cultural and social impact of immigration, scapegoating recent arrivals for home-grown problems we’d rather not address. Arendt’s work is a sobering reminder of where such tendencies can lead.
This episode should warn us of what can happen when press and politicians exploit and enable racism and prejudice. As well as the heroic and uplifting stories of the war, we should also remember that we once had state endorsed persecution and internment camps, here in the familiar seaside towns of Britain.
Women Internees boarding a train © Imperial War Museum
Sonia Lambert is a writer, journalist and teacher. Her novel Three Mothers was published by Piatkus (Little, Brown) in 2008, and she has written for BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and has recently completed a PhD on the subject of refugees to Britain during WW2 at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a volunteer at the Refugee Council. Contact: soniamlambert@hotmail.com
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