The Island of Extraordinary Captives by Simon Parkin

Author:Simon Parkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

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EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT OF THE FOURTEEN thousand internees still imprisoned in Britain resided on the Isle of Man. The news provided a new glimmer of hope. For some, however, it came too late. By mid-August, three men had died while interned in the Isle of Man’s various camps.

On arrival at Hutchinson camp on September 5, Sigmund Stiegel immediately died of a heart attack. A fellow passenger on Professor Jacobsthal’s ferry died of exhaustion before the boat docked on the island. With winter approaching, the chief rabbi’s office, anticipating more deaths, purchased a half-acre plot—with room for an estimated fifty burials—on the north end of Douglas Borough Cemetery, “on account of the large number of Jewish internees at the camps in the Isle of Man… and the advanced age of many.” The Douglas Borough Council even rented out a room in the caretaker’s house to be used as a Jewish chapel for funeral services at a rate of £7 per year.

At least forty-five men died in the Isle of Man camps. To die in internment was a compound injustice. Internment to interment, without interlude. Forty-six-year-old Simon Guttmann was one of the unlucky few sent to Australia on the notorious HMT Dunera. When he returned from Sydney to Britain sixteen months later, Guttmann was sent to Hutchinson, where he was twice refused release. On September 6, 1942, having survived two world crossings by ship as an internee, Guttmann died of a heart attack, possibly brought on by his considerable ordeal. Or there was Kurt Schier, an ice-skating instructor, who, like Guttmann, was refused release on two occasions; he took his life at Hutchinson. Men like these, who never left the camp, were permanent victims of a policy that, while not strictly malicious, was indisputably panicked, disorganized and, via that combination, cruel.

Those internees who, for one reason or another, had no job and no papers, still faced a near-insurmountable challenge in convincing the authorities that they posed no threat to the British state, let alone that they qualified in any way as eminent.

The thirty-year-old Hutchinson internee Oscar Norbert Gugenbichler was a typical case. Despite his muscly Germanic surname, Gugenbichler (he later truncated his name to Gugen) was born in Paris where, as a dual French-Austrian citizen, he lived during the invasion of France. As the German troops advanced, Gugen destroyed his papers. A professional diver, Gugen ably swam the mouth of the River Loire in Nantes and climbed aboard a British destroyer, which was in the process of evacuating troops. Having obscured his German nationality, Gugen was welcomed and taken to Britain, where he was summarily arrested and sent to Pentonville Prison and, finally, to Hutchinson. Unable to prove his identity or his loyalties, Gugen would remain in the camp until its closure in March 1945, occasionally teaching the other internees French, while those around him left, person by person.

Men like Gugen fell under the classification “Unsponsored Cases” and represented some of the most tragic and disregarded individuals in the internment saga. Most of these cases became the responsibility of Bertha Bracey at Bloomsbury House.

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