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3: Aliens For my first creative writing group, formed with three colleagues at the [ 39 ] South Bank Centre in London in December 1987, I wrote about this photograph, taken in 1940 or 1941. I called the piece ‘Image of an alien’. But the really extraordinary thing about this photo is that he is right in the centre. Not only that. He is framed and displayed by the arch, projected, more than any of the other men, against the pale background of the sky. It took me a while to understand what was so unsettling about it. I thought it was the dislocating effect of seeing him in the company of men – a different vision of how he might have been before the matriarchy took him over on his return. There is something strange, too, in the evidence that he existed, in a particular place and at a particular moment, before I was born. But now it’s perfectly clear that the most disorienting feature of this image is his position of casual centrality. Because for the past forty years he has only appeared at the edges of things, exiled to the margins of the life and the conversations of the family. I imagine that this was, for him, a position he took with some gratitude. Excluded by culture and language, as well as by natural inhibition and reticence, he was more than content to leave all the Important Things (which included the children) to my mother and her ample extended family. There’s only one photo of him holding the baby (me), in which he looks embarrassed and nervous (but with the same shy smile as in this photo). Someone must have told him that for once he had to take a turn in front of the camera. The photograph is a scene from one year in his life, when he was interned with other refugees in the Isle of Man. The ‘internment of aliens’ – a peculiar and rather hysterical measure taken by the British government after Dunkirk. He had only been married for four months. But I suspect he really enjoyed the ironic freedom of that year. This is my father as an alien. He is alien to Britain and to English culture. Surrounded by those who are not alien to him, he is captured in an alien environment. And this image of him as the central figure is one which is entirely alien to me. His existence on the edges of my childhood, his refusal to engage with me or to challenge the matriarchy, constitute the real alienation. Aliens Janet Wolff - 9781526121295 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/05/2021 07:19:55AM via free access Now this all feels a bit strained, and the theme overstated. But the photo retains its strangeness, so many years after I wrote the piece. My father is the one in the middle of the top row. On the far left of the picture is Heinz Kroch, another refugee, whose company in Eccles, near Manchester (Lankro Chemicals), had hired my father in 1938 and thus enabled his (belated) departure from Germany. I recognise one other person in the photo – Ernst Levi, second from the left at the front, [ 40 ] wearing a beret – but remember him only vaguely from my childhood. He also worked at Lankro. (I remember that I had to start the piece with ‘But’ in order to pretend to myself that I was already in the middle of something – otherwise it would perhaps have been impossible to embark on a writing project of this kind. On the same basis, I think, writing teachers sometimes give the advice that you shouldn’t buy a special notebook, but simply use an ordinary school exercise book, in order to make the task less daunting.) The internment camp my father was sent to in 1940 was Onchan, on the Isle of Man. On the basis of Winston Churchill’s notorious order, ‘collar the lot!’, all enemy aliens still at liberty in Britain were rounded up in June 1940, when invasion by Germany seemed very likely. My father, who had come to Britain from Germany in February 1938, was a class C ‘enemy alien’ (recognised as a genuine refugee, and officially designated a ‘friendly’ enemy alien). The classifications were made by wartime tribunals set up in Britain in 1939. Those classified ‘A’ were considered to be of highest risk, and likely Nazi sympathisers, and were interned immediately. Category B aliens were not interned at that stage, but their freedom of movement was restricted and they were monitored by the police. Category C aliens were considered no risk, and remained at liberty. By January 1940, 528 enemy aliens had been interned, and about eight thousand placed under restrictions. The majority, of a total of about 75,000 cases, were assessed as category C. In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the Home Office, under pressure from some politicians and some of the media, ordered the arrest and internment of all male German and Austrian aliens between the ages of sixteen and sixty living on the east and south-east coastlines of England and Scotland. The surrender of Holland, and the imminent collapse of Belgium and France in the following days, led to the decision to arrest all category B males later the same month. As the evacuation from Dunkirk began, this was extended, on 27 May, to include German and Austrian women in category B. Finally, the Home Office wrote to all Chief Constables on 31 May, to say that they could intern any German and Austrian men or women of category C ‘where there are grounds for doubting the Austerity baby Janet Wolff - 9781526121295 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/05/2021 07:19:55AM via free access [ 41 ] Notice of arrest, June 1940 Aliens Janet Wolff - 9781526121295 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/05/2021 07:19:55AM via free access reliability of an individual’. When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 Italian enemy aliens were also rounded up for internment, together with any remaining category C German and Austrian aliens under the age of seventy, following prime minister Winston Churchill’s order. My father’s arrest document is dated the following day. My mother, born in England in 1917, lost her British citizenship on marrying my father four months before his internment. She had to apply for naturalisation to [ 42 ] regain her British citizenship in October 1941. The irrationality of the arrest and internment of aliens, many of them doing valuable work in Britain, is captured in a contemporary newspaper account from Manchester, quoted by François Lafitte in 1940: A chemist who has held an important position at a chemical works in the Manchester district for three or four years was dismissed at a moment’s notice (his hat and coat were brought out to him: he was not allowed to go to his office to bring them) when the factory was taken over by the Government. Two days later he was interned as an unemployed enemy alien. A highly qualified chemist, who specializes in a branch of industrial chemistry in which qualified men are rare in this country, employed by a firm engaged on sub-contracts for Government orders has been interned … An ‘Aryan’ German who has been with the same firm for more than three years and before that was in a German concentration camp as a punishment for having tried to help his Jewish employer when the employer was expropriated by the Nazis … All the directors and chemists of a works near Manchester engaged on chemical manufacture for the leather industry … A pathologist in the pathological laboratories of Manchester University. A distinguished German Jewish dentist who had to leave the west coast town where he was practising, and, as he was therefore without a practice, was interned. A young chemistry research student of six years’ standing at Manchester University, son of a famous German Jewish doctor. Lafitte, a young researcher working for Political and Educational Planning at the time, played a crucial role in the opposition to internment. His book on the subject was published as a Penguin Special in November 1940, and sold almost all fifty thousand copies right away. Together with other reports, and persistent questions in Parliament by Eleanor Rathbone, George Strauss, Josiah Wedgwood, Sidney Silverman and others, it produced pressure on the government and by mid-1941 many of the internees had been released. Lafitte went on to a career as a journalist for The Times, and, later, as an academic. When I was a sociology student at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s, he was Professor of Social Policy there. I knew him very slightly, but knew nothing then about his early career, and the great impact he had had, Air Raid Precautions card, as a young man, on my father’s situation. November 1943 Austerity baby Janet Wolff - 9781526121295 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/05/2021 07:19:55AM via free access By July 1940 about 27,000 people had been interned. Many enemy aliens were also deported to Canada and Australia. That month, The Arandora Star, a ship carrying 1,500 German and Italian – many category A – internees to Canada, was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat; more than 650 of them lost their lives. Deportees, from all three categories, arrived in Canada on other boats (the Ettrick, the Sobieski, the Duchess of York); some were sent to Australia (on the Dunera [ 43 ] – whose captain foiled another U-boat attack on 12 July). But the majority of arrested aliens were interned in a number of special camps in Britain, primarily on the Isle of Man off the north-west coast of England.

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