“The tribunal has decided that this young lady is to be interned until further order.” So read the notice delivered to Livia Laurent in July 1940. It was, she writes, “a queer thing” that came on top of years of queer things: finding herself an outcast in her own country (Jewish in Nazi Germany); having to uproot herself and navigate the bureaucratic and financial challenges of leaving Germany; making her way to a new country (England) and absorbing its language and ways. And now, despite the seemingly self-evident fact that a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany was unlikely to pose a security threat to England, finding herself labelled an enemy alien and ordered to report to Holloway Prison for confinement.
A Tale of Internment is a wafer-thin story of Laurent’s year behind bars and barbed wire for the crime of being foreign. Like Paul Cohen-Portheim, whose Time Stood Still was featured here in 2014 and has since been reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, Livia Laurent’s entrance into internment was marked by the goodwill and bad advice of her jailers. Her warder said she would be sent (like Cohen-Portheim, at first) to the Isle of Man — “A beautiful place, I went there on my honeymoon” — and advised to pack a bathing suit (“Essential. Sunglasses, no”).
Unlike men like Cohen-Portheim the war before, the women internees of 1940 were housed in hotels or boarded with residents. They were free to roam the streets and fields of the town, but barbed wire barricades and guard posts marked the perimeter within which their movements were restricted. The Babel of voices Laurent encountered on a typical walk represented the extent of Hitler’s conquests: “French, Italian, German in all dialects, including Austrian, Czech, Polish, Dutch.”
But even though the women were treated civilly, allowed to receive parcels and correspond with people outisde the camp, even given a small weekly allowance for cigarettes, cosmetics, or sewing items, they never forgot that their only crime was holding the wrong king of passport:
That fact alone was sufficient to overshadow any other consideration for their personal value, their own integrity. And they accepted it. The terrible thing was their own acceptance of it, making it possible for a technical matter to influence their character, their courage, touch their very souls. To watch them in the offices, waiting patiently hour after hour, where there should have been no waiting necessary at all. To see a woman of sixty being servile towards a girl of twenty, who in the ordinary course of events might have been her employee, being servile because the girl belonged to the staff and could give or withhold a permission. And watching the girl being conscious of her power, enjoying it, using it.
After a long grey, monotonous winter, the administrative machinery begins to turn, and one by one, the women’s cases are reviewed for possible release. Some hear in a few weeks. Others wait months. It’s pointless to inquire, of course. And to further complicate the situation, a decision is taken to bring in known Nazi sympathizers and confine them in the same town-camps. No one expected the Nazis to be released, but now arose the danger of becoming the victim of a whispering campaign. The mere suggestion of a favorable attitude towards the genuine enemies is enough to have an application for release rejected.
In the end, though, Laurent’s request is approved. Yet, when she reads her release certificate, she realizes her freedom remains conditional: “Exempted from internment until further order.” She was interned “until further order”; now, another “further order” hangs over her head.
A Tale of Internment, like Time Stood Still, shines with humanity, good humor, and a recognition of the inherent absurdity of most blunt-force administrative actions. Even its publication required a request by the Jewish Refugee Committee and approval by the Secretary of State, and even then its author chose to use a pseudonym (her real name was Eva Meyerhof) to protect remaining internees and relatives still in Germany.