In the coda of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (
Encompass Editions, 2012) I wrote briefly about the film Children of Men.
I expand upon it in the following blog connecting the film to the treatment of prisoners-of-war and suspected spies held in the UK during World War Two. The torture of suspected spies is uncannily similar to that of alleged terrorists after 9/11 in Chapter 19 of the second volume of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (
Encompass Editions, 2013).
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| Blind-folded German POWs arrive at prison camp |
The panic following the fall of France and the invasion scare in May/June 1940 led to a mass round-up of most Germans in Britain, pro and anti-Nazi alike. Unsubstantiated rumours circulated of a Fifth Column, an alliance between pro-Nazi
sympathizers and aliens, that could destabilize the war effort. According to the cabinet minutes record, Churchill issued the order: "Collar
the Lot." As a result, over 27,000 German Nationals in the
British Isles were interned with public support. It turned out that there was no Fifth Column.
Among the German Nationals were Jewish refugees, survivors of the Nazi camps who found
that arrival in Britain could replicate their terrible experience. The squalor
and the starvation diet in the cramped camps were appalling. But the
deportation of thousands, the installation of Jews and overt Nazi sympathizers
in the same camps, and the dehumanizing language of the commandants that echoed
what they heard in Nazi camps broke the spirit of many Jews; a number of them
committed suicide. Gothic tropes can be found in the recollections of
survivors. One describes fellow inmates with “yellow faces, more death’s heads
than faces; another describes them as moving and talking “in an atmosphere of
haunted unreality [in which] vision and sound were distorted.”
