His Majesty's Loyal Internee: Fred Uhlman in Captivity

In May and June 1940, when the war seemed to be going badly for Britain, thousands of German and Austrian refugees from Nazi oppression were rounded up and put into internment camps on the Isle of Man and elsewhere. Fred Uhlman, a Jewish refuges from Stuttgart, was one of these. Uhlman was a lawyer and an artist, and is probably best known today for his novella Reunion. Cut off from his wife, who was about to give birth to their first child, Uhlman found internment a harrowing yet also a highly memorable experience which he attempted to capture both in word and image. This volume contains Uhlman's previously unpublished internment diary in its original 1940 version as well as a later reworked version in which he looks back at the same experience, though from the perspective of 1979. It also contains corespondence to and from the internment camp between Uhlman and his wife Diana, and between Uhlman and his disapproving aristocratic father-in-law. Lord Croft. These written testimonles are complemented by some of the stark and haunting drawings that Uhlman completed while interned. Chapters on Uhlman's biography and on his artistic and his literary output set his writings and drawings with in the wilder context of his life and work. In addition, a chapter on life in Hutchinson Camp, described by one former Innate as 'a camp full of once and future Very Important persons', sets out to recreate something of the extraordinary artistic and intellectual life so vigorously pursued there by the internees.