Otto Daria by Eric Koch

Author:Eric Koch [Koch, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780889774445
Google: nOH6uQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2016-01-15T00:22:27+00:00

Chapter 22

Internment: The English Phase

I spent the two months between May and June 1940 in three camps: Bury St. Edmunds (in Suffolk, near Cambridge), Huyton (an unfinished housing estate near Liverpool), and the Isle of Man (between England and Ireland). During these months English forces had to be withdrawn from Dunkirk, and France fell. Italy entered the war. The danger of invasion became more acute by the day.

No newspapers or radios were allowed in the camps. We only heard about these events by word of mouth, usually by way of rumours spread by the guards.

Under normal circumstances we would have been in a state of acute panic, especially after it was whispered that the Vichy French had, after their surrender on June 22, simply turned over the keys to their internment camps to the Gestapo. Another rumour suggested that Churchill was going to ship us to Germany in exchange for British prisoners of war.

We should have been paralyzed with fear. But we were not. For one thing, we were always hungry. When you are hungry you think of only one thing. I mentioned this to Daria and received this reply:

June 2, 1940

Thank you so much for the peach you sent me. It smells so ripe and sweet, and is so round and soft in my hands, with its downy skin and faint yellow colouring. I think it would be coarse to eat it. I hope you will get my peaches and also the crate of strawberries and three churns of clotted cream which I sent to you.

I wonder what she would have written in response to our other fixation: the absence of cigarettes. Or to descriptions of the sanitary facilities, which were, let us say, inadequate. Or to our hastily improvised sleeping arrangements.

Most of us were young and were having a new experience. It was an adventure. Although the majority of us came, like me, from the Central European urban middle class, we found ourselves locked up with people we would never have met outside—wrestlers, a strong man who could carry a grand piano on his back (so he said), and a Muskelzwerg (muscle dwarf) who was a Jiu-Jitsu champion. His amazing physique had enabled him to survive all kinds of horrors in Dachau. We had a professional juggler in the camp and an escape artist, universally known as Klettermaxe, who tried it once and was caught. And there was Baron von Ketschendorf, who wore stiff collars, silk shirts, spats, and polished shoes. He had bushy eyebrows, carried a walking stick, and never forgot to put on a monocle for the roll calls (twice a day). There were a few farmers, Talmudic scholars, bohemians, poets, architects, doctors, artists of many kinds, actors, academics of all stripes, a violin virtuoso, a psychoanalyst from Vienna, and a Jew-for-Christ. And there were Nazis who, for once, were in a minority, but who thought, not without reason, that they were winning the war. We were lumped in with them, which did not mean that we talked to them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.