The Island of Extraordinary Captives review – fascinating history of an interned artist

Simon Parkin unearths the story of German Jewish refugee Peter Fleischmann, who became a painter while a prisoner in a second world war camp on the Isle of Man

In the days leading up to the outbreak of the second world war, writes Simon Parkin, the British police and intelligence services were “deluged with tipoffs about suspicious refugees and foreigners”. A beekeeper was detained when investigators found a diary entry reading “Exchange British queen for Italian queen”. An art historian was reported by a neighbour who had heard some suspicious knocking noises (perhaps a secret coded message?) produced by the bed while he was having sex with his fiancee.

By the time Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, the mood was even more fevered. Imminent invasion seemed highly likely and the country, inflamed by sensationalist newspaper articles, was deeply worried about the “fifth column menace”. The government could therefore claim popular support for its decision to intern all “enemy aliens”. Yet these included thousands of Jews and other opponents of Nazism who now found themselves locked up with German prisoners of war and other committed fascists.

This is hardly an unknown story, though it has attracted much less attention than the internment of Japanese Americans in the US, perhaps, as Parkin argues, because it “upsets the prevailing historical narrative of Britain’s role in the second world war: a united, courageous nation, fighting a just war to defend the persecuted”. While he makes clear that there were spies even among those who seemed to have impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, he nonetheless describes internment as “a panic measure born of historical ignorance and bedrock xenophobia”.

The Island of Extraordinary Captives brings the broader issues to life through the story of aspiring artist Peter Fleischmann. He was only 18 when he was arrested in July 1940, “denied the civil rights that even convicts enjoy: no charge, no trial, no bail. None of his story mattered: not the fact he had been orphaned and made homeless by the Nazi regime. Not the fact that he was brought to England as a destitute child, nor that he had been carefully interviewed by one of the most senior judges in the land and deemed to pose no security risk to his adoptive country.”

Instead, after other unpleasant experiences, he was sent to Hutchinson camp on the Isle of Man for almost a year and a quarter. This held up to 1,200 captives, including many lawyers, writers, musicians, academics and artists, most notably the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. The commandant, Captain Hubert Daniel, sometimes baffled inmates by using the camp radio system to broadcast the latest cricket scores. But he was also humane and encouraged all the prisoners’ educational and artistic initiatives.

In response, as Parkin puts it, they “turned a prison into a university, a camp into a cultural centre, a boarding house into an art gallery, a jumble of wires into a broadcasting station, a field into a fitness club, a lawn into a concert amphitheatre”. Lecture series explored everything from Greek philosophy to “the industrial uses of synthetic fibres” by way of Shakespeare’s sonnets. For those who had missed out on an education, “here was an opportunity to learn from some of the best-regarded scholars in Europe”.

The young Fleischmann, we read, found himself imprisoned among “both rising stars and established luminaries of the German and Austrian art worlds”. By becoming a sort of apprentice, he was able to gain the kind of artistic training he had never had: “He learned to use toothpaste to size their painting grounds and how to find and crush minerals, then mix them with the oil from sardine tins to create oil paints. He persuaded several bushy-eyebrowed internees to let him have a few hairs, which he made into brushes.” He was also able to observe how Schwitters produced not only some very fine portraits but collages from cigarette packets, nails, pebbles and shells stuck into leftover porridge that “had acquired rainbow streaks of mould and now emitted a faint sickly smell”. The experience “seeded in him an indefatigable love of art and a belief in its capacity to liberate the human spirit” that he was later able to develop, at the Beckenham School of Art, into a distinguished career under the name of Peter Midgley.

Related: ‘I remember the feeling of insult’: when Britain imprisoned its wartime refugees

Needless to say, not everybody who went through Hutchinson camp found it such a transformational experience. Many prisoners were so terrified by the possibility of falling into German hands, Parkin tells us, that a clinical pathologist and a retired funeral director formed a “Suicide Consultancy” to “offer lessons to any interested parties on the best and most painless way of killing oneself in the event of invasion. The pair offered demonstrations – one of which proved almost fatal to a volunteer – on how to make a reliable hanging noose from either a washing line or a pair of twisted trousers.” In later years, many internees played down their hardships, not least because they seemed trivial compared with what relatives left behind in Nazi Germany had endured. Parkin’s rich and vivid account makes clear just how much the displaced artists did suffer, and the remarkable resilience and creativity with which they responded.

• The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A True Story of an Artist, a Spy, and a Wartime Scandal by Simon Parkin is published by Sceptre (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply