Early one Sunday in May 1940, Fabius Gross was arrested at his home in Edinburgh. Gross, a 33-year-old, Austrian-born academic, was tall and lanky and mild of manner. He wore a pair of thin-rimmed, perfectly circular spectacles and a modest, brown suit. Gross walked calmly outside to a waiting police van, a wiry figure between grim-faced officers.
Two days earlier, Winston Churchill had become prime minister of the United Kingdom. After the outbreak of the war in 1939, panic about German spies living in Britain spread across the country. Much of the frenzy was whipped up by the press including, among others, the Daily Mail, which enthusiastically joined the call to arrest German and Austrian refugees. On his second day in office, Churchill ordered the arrest and internment, without trial, of thousands of “enemy aliens”, mostly on the Isle of Man.
Gross was taken to a makeshift barracks in the heart of Edinburgh, where he found his friend Hans Gál among the other detainees under armed guard. Gál, a 49-year-old Austrian, fled the Nazis in 1938 and, like Gross, found refuge and a new life for his family in Scotland. The two met playing in an orchestra and bonded, despite their almost 20-year age gap and considerably different dispositions. Gál was a professional composer with an artist’s temperament, while Gross, the younger of the two, presented as a level-headed man of science.
As night fell on the garrison, the two men turned down on the floor. Lying under thin blankets, Gál knew Britain had accepted some 70,000 refugees before the start of the war, that many British citizens were fighting overseas to save the lives of Jews under Nazi occupation, while others at home had acted as financial guarantors for those fleeing persecution. But he had also watched public opinion sour as prospects of a German victory became more real.
Gál lay awake, anxiously tossing. “Who is punishing us?” he wondered. “The same Britons that accepted us so kindly, acknowledged our work, offered our children hospitality, gave us the feeling of being in a new homeland… are they our friends?” He squirmed over to look at the friend lying beside him. Gross was sleeping like a child.
The Isle of Man is a mass of black rock and green pastures in the Irish Sea, almost exactly equidistant from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Its geographic position means that, even by the standards of a British isle, it is frequently rainswept. When Gross and Gál arrived in 1940, they joined about 2,000 other internees crammed into a camp consisting of 30 Victorian houses in Douglas, the island’s capital.
Weeks before, this small strip of quaint coastal land had served as a playground for British holidaymakers. Now, it was a hastily erected prison, surrounded on all sides by tall, barbed-wire fencing. From within their enclosure, they could see a patchwork of lush mountains and valleys, grey-gold sandy beaches and, beyond, nothing but open sea.
The tranquillity of the scenery outside jarred with the congested chaos inside the camp. Orthodox Jews shared close quarters with tradesmen, academics, artists, clerics, lawyers, musicians and political activists of all kinds. The government held a much smaller number of women and children at another island camp called Rushen, though Gross’s and Gal’s wives remained in Edinburgh.
Douglas locals gathered on the other side of the wire fence to gawk at the internees, some of whom were, in fact, Nazi prisoners of war. British authorities hadn’t had the time or desire to separate them from the mainly Jewish refugees. Gál was sleep-deprived and nauseated when a man approached him and asked for a smoke. Noticing the anguish on Gál’s face as he handed over a cigarette, the flaxen-haired youth smiled kindly and, in German, said: “Don’t worry. We’ll soon be liberated by the Führer.”
Gross and Gál were assigned to live in Central Camp, Number 2. Theirs was the narrowest of all the houses, a cramped series of dim, adjoining rooms. They lived with 70 others, sleeping two men to each bed and sharing two toilets, which were beset by constant blockages. Some houses in the camp were fortunate to count skilled cooks among their ranks, men who could make something of the meagre rations periodically thrown over the fence by guards. Gál and Gross did not live in one of those houses.
Their kitchen was run, Gál noted in his diary, by a talentless tyrant. He bossed around a small group of unlucky men who had volunteered to help, serving meals to their increasingly forlorn housemates. The porridge was overcooked and soggy, the rice undercooked and hard, potatoes arrived bobbing in a bath of murky water. Gál sensed a growing whiff of mutiny among the men. Except for Gross, who ate every morsel he was served without complaint. “Either he is a hero or he has no taste buds,” Gál wrote.
At night, the camp was forced to observe the national wartime blackout, by which all lights had to be shut off from sunset to dawn. Guards on watch howled if someone forgot, for instance, to turn off their bedside lamp. One evening, a guard began yelling, “Put that light out!” Barely awake men wiped their eyes, as the guard continued repeatedly shouting. Internees scrambled out of bed, searching for the wayward light. “Put that light out!” A more organised search began, with a dozen men joining in, until one of them found the insubordinate culprit: the Moon, reflecting off a window.
Gross was born in Krosno, Austria, in 1906. He studied biology at the University of Vienna and moved to Berlin to take up a scientific research position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1930. He was 26 when he and all of his Jewish colleagues were fired overnight, after Hitler came to power. Albert Einstein, a colleague who was one of the first to secure refuge in the UK, convinced ministers to allow more endangered scientists to work at British universities. Gross left Germany in 1933 with his wife and his infant son and was eventually offered the position of lecturer in experimental zoology at Edinburgh university.
Well-liked among the small number of Jewish refugees in Scotland, Gross acted as a guarantor for several children who’d escaped Nazi persecution. His semi-detached home became something of a community hub, bustling with German and Austrian kids who gathered to eat sandwiches and play games on weekends.
Now, he found himself marshalling another, more frenetic community of displaced people. Gross ran for, and won, one of the two leadership seats to represent Central Camp, along with a Christian pastor named Franz Hildebrandt. The two men chaired an 11-man senate, composed of elected representatives including Nazis and Communists, which met daily around a mahogany table. Gross and Hildebrandt conducted the raucous meetings, during which senators shouted over one another proposing wild motions, trying to mould them into practical proposals.
Every time Gross and Hildebrandt stepped out of their houses, briefcases in hand, they found a flock of internees waiting to unload their problems, minor grievances and major, including the lack of medical treatment and the poorly functioning postal service. “I have hardly time enough to breathe,” Gross wrote to his wife, Greta. “I get up at 6:30 every day (would you believe it, your own lazy husband?)... [But] as long as I think that I can help these hundreds of fellow refugees in their great distress, I shall go on with the job.”
Central Camp’s internees formed a society in miniature, including two orchestras, a theatre troupe, art classes and exhibitions, a debate society, a camp newspaper and a university that offered dozens of lectures every week on subjects ranging from divinity to infinitesimal calculus. Soon there were disputes over the limited supply of communal space: lectures were drowned out by musicians rehearsing; the card-playing contingent found it difficult to find a room away from heated political debates; reading in peace was almost impossible.
Gross and Hildebrandt, the camp’s designated mediators with the British authorities, spent long hours locked in negotiations trying in particular to improve access to vital medicine. As a result, a camp hospital was set up across two of the boarding-houses on the seafront, manned by a single general practitioner from Douglas. His main job appeared to be to deny almost every request to be sent to Douglas hospital for serious treatment. This did not bode well for an old friend of Gál’s, Arthur Paunzen. The elderly Viennese painter contracted influenza at the camp and was left with a lingering illness thought to be bronchitis. Gál visited him every day and watched as he got sicker, tossing in his sweat-drenched bed.
One morning, Gál spotted the camp’s doctor and demanded more information about his friend’s condition. The doctor shot glances at either side of the street and, swearing Gál to secrecy, confessed that Paunzen had a severe case of bronchial pneumonia, a dangerous illness that was difficult to cure. “Why is he not immediately transferred to a hospital?” Gál asked. Avoiding eye contact, the doctor shook his head and replied: “Only people in need of an immediate operation are taken to hospital.”
Internees at Central Camp struggled over whether they should resist or compromise with authorities. Signs pinned up across the camp informed them that “the measure of your co-operation and behaviour will decide the… consideration shown for your welfare”. Still, the question became so preoccupying that the debate society argued the motion “There can be no sound policy without compromise”, which was carried by a small majority. (In an abrupt tone shift, afterwards two speakers debated whether they “would rather be a bus than a tram”, which a review in the camp newspaper noted was a “continual struggle” between a literal and metaphorical interpretation of the motion.)
Gross opted for diplomacy in negotiations with British officers. Gál, by his own admission a hothead prone to angry outbursts against his captors, strongly disagreed with his friend’s approach. “[Gross] thinks that all resistance is senseless,” he wrote in his journal. “I consider the policy of meek submission to be mistaken.” Gross saw things differently. “My nerves are made of very tough fibre,” he wrote in a letter to his wife. “I don’t get as excited as most of the other people here.” The two friends argued so frequently that Gál began listing disagreements with Gross among the other daily routines in his diary.
Gross’s approach helped win one early concession: internees were allowed half an hour of swimming in the sea each day. On the first day they could, Gál stripped down to his underwear in his bedroom, wrapped himself in a towel and walked out on to the promenade where other internees were excitedly discussing their new privilege. Flanked by soldiers with bayonets, the men walked barefoot on to the soft sand. The sun tentatively broke through the clouds, as Gál stood breathing in the sea air. Later, bobbing out at sea with salty wavelets licking at his ears, he felt a calm he hadn’t known since he had been taken captive.
Gál was slim with dark, slicked-back hair and wore thick-rimmed glasses. He had started writing music as a teenager in Austria and produced three operas before he moved to Germany to become the director of a musical academy in 1929. Four years later, he was fired with other Jews, and the performance of his works was banned. Gál and his family fled first to Austria and then to the Scottish capital where, in 1947, he would co-found the Edinburgh Festival. His diaries about his time on the Isle of Man, Music Behind Barbed Wire, were translated and published by his daughter Eva Fox-Gál in 2014.
Gál discovered that the only instruments in the camp were two violins and a flute. He was inspired to write a song for this unusual trio, which he called the Huyton Suite, after a stop on the way to the Isle of Man. He spent the day in a trance, scribbling the music on his last remaining pages of manuscript paper. “I had the happiest day in a long, long time,” Gál noted in his diary that evening.
As more instruments were sent to the camp by loved ones, Gál assembled a classical orchestra, which gave regular shows in the living rooms of the boarding houses. A performance of the Huyton Suite, airy and playful at turns and wistful at others, was even attended by one of the British officers, who effusively praised the concert afterwards.
By June 1940, Churchill’s government instigated a deportation programme to send internees to Canada and Australia. The internment of refugees had become a blight on the prime minister’s wartime narrative, particularly after Hitler reportedly pointed to the camps as evidence that Britain was adopting Nazi policies. On July 1, a guard at Central Camp informed internees that all unmarried men under the age of 30 would set sail for Canada immediately. Under orders, Gross began preparing a list of all the eligible men for transport.
Incensed, Gál confronted him: “If a mere hundred people firmly decided to let themselves be shot rather than go voluntarily, it would make their whole plan unworkable.”
“To oppose their bayonets and guns would be madness,” Gross replied.
“Let them shoot if they dare. They would have to drag me to the ship on all fours to make me leave here against my will.”
Gál set about trying to find comrades for his would-be uprising. “Who’s with me?” he asked around the camp, receiving a succession of anxious and evasive responses. He realised he lacked the political acumen of his younger friend. Later that day, hundreds of men gathered on the seafront, wearing threadbare suits and holding battered suitcases, muttering as they waited to board the ship.
Less than a week later, news reached the camp that a ship carrying around 1,200 internees from the Isle of Man bound for Canada had been torpedoed by a German submarine. More than half of the people on board died. When Gál heard the news, his body turned cold. He had received a letter from his wife informing him that the whereabouts of their 17-year-old son, who had been interned at another camp, were unknown. Anxiety overcame him. At night, he lay awake imagining the ship sinking, picturing his son trapped below deck or among those whose lives ended in a scramble for one of too-few lifeboats. “I sometimes have to bite my pillow in order not to scream out loud,” he wrote in his diary.
Several weeks after the catastrophe, Gál was walking along the promenade with Gross when he received a telegram from his wife. His trembling hands opened the message, which informed him his son was alive in Canada. Gál’s legs collapsed beneath him and he began to weep, as Gross held his shoulder tightly.
Even in his relief, Gál was suffering. He was plagued by a skin condition he contracted from sleeping on dirty straw sacks during the early days of his internment. His face broke out in rashes, which began to slowly creep across his temples, forehead and scalp. Soon, Gál’s flaky skin turned into oozing scabs. He was taken to the makeshift clinic, which became his home for the remainder of his internment.
One morning, George Höllering, an ebullient Viennese film director, stormed into Gál’s room with a proposition. A stocky man with smiling eyes tucked under thick eyebrows, Höllering had once made a critically acclaimed film about Hungarian wetlands that was acted out by peasants and herdsmen. Now, he wanted to compose and perform a satirical musical about their internment in a few weeks’ time. Höllering needed Gál to write the score.
Gál laughed, asking how he was supposed to write music when he could barely open his eyes. Höllering assured him he could do it, before turning to his patchwork vision of scenes based on stories from the camp. He rushed out of the room to start writing a script, leaving Gál dazed and bemused. Then, without warning, a song for one of the vignettes Höllering had described glided into Gál’s mind. He picked up a piece of paper and began scribbling. The “idea has seized me in an extraordinary way,” he noted in his diary. “The music comes as if by itself.”
Gál realised the musical was not escapism. It was the opposite. He and Höllering could, through comedy, use it to shine a spotlight on the emotional and physical hardships of internment. They resolved the whole thing would be held together by a narrator sitting behind a harp strung with barbed wire. They called the musical, What a Life!, a simultaneous expression of wonder and despair. The poster depicted a man belting out a song while plucking the barbed wire harp and sitting on a crate of porridge, one of the most despised objects of camp life.
As Gál’s creative project took off from his sickbed, his friend Paunzen was still being refused transfer to the real hospital. He spent his days and nights in the dark and dingy camp clinic on a bare mattress, his strength and appetite diminishing. By the time he was eventually transferred to Douglas’ main hospital, it was too late. Paunzen died in early August after what Gál described as “indescribably heart-rending” suffering. “Murder has been committed on this man through indifference, thoughtlessness, heartless inertia,” he wrote.
After Paunzen’s death, the camp’s top official, a man called Lieutenant Johnson, summoned Gál into his office. Since his arrival a few weeks earlier, Johnson had set about implementing a regime of unwavering pedantry. Now, they sat facing each other across a rusting metal desk. The lieutenant looked up and grimaced at Gál’s scabs: “What have you got on your face?”
The composer explained that the doctor applied a white paste every day to treat his skin condition. Johnson began impatiently rifling through a notebook: “What did you have to do with Paunzen? How did you know him?”
“He was my friend of 20 years.”
“I may or may not believe that,” Johnson said. “Your letter contains a sentence that will get you into court for libel.”
Gál had written to his wife that he did not believe Paunzen’s postmortem. “I didn’t know a private letter could be libellous,” he told the lieutenant.
Johnson straightened up and said the offence would be escalated to the highest level, before barking at him to get out.
Gál recounted the threat to Gross, who consulted with lawyers interned at the camp. The forced deportations, the medical failures, the arbitrary threats. Gross had had enough, and he began to question his strategy of conciliation. “I have to try very hard to overcome the feeling of depression and deep frustration which often enters into my mind,” he wrote to Greta. A few days later, he joined other members of the camp government in resigning en masse. Gross, who had finally given up trying to reason with Johnson, wrote a letter to his superior, outlining a litany of abuses of power.
One consequence of the complaint was that Johnson “suddenly became quite tame and friendly,” according to Gál. He approved Höllering’s request to stage the upcoming musical in the Palace Coliseum Theatre, an ornate building outside the camp. The gilded theatre could seat over 2,000 spectators across two tiers of tightly packed seats. Decorative plaster engravings and brass chandeliers embellished the ceilings, and the stage was flanked on each side by marble statues. Excitement quickly spread among the internees and tickets — proceeds of which were donated to British air raid victims — sold out.
In August 1940, Churchill bowed to public opinion, which turned after the sinking, and suspended arrests of refugees. Soon, internees began being released from the camp sporadically. Gross desperately hoped to make it back to Scotland in time for the start of the university term and his son Julian’s fourth birthday. But the date came and passed. One week later, he received a package containing a squashed slice of birthday cake. It was from Julian, who was eager to include his father in the celebration.
His political duties relinquished, Gross enjoyed what passed for leisure: swimming in the sea, reading, practising violin. He seemed “a free man,” Gál wrote of his friend, “with shining eyes, like a schoolboy on holiday.”
Gross visited Gál in the clinic, where he found his old friend in a creative fury. With two weeks to go before the performance, much of the script and score were still unwritten. Rehearsals had begun, with Gál tapping Gross as lead violinist.
Tormented by his skin condition, Gál stayed up every night composing new songs. During the day, he spent hours horse-trading with Höllering. They wrangled over which scenes and songs to include, whom to cast and, most importantly, the tone of the show. Gál despised kitsch, while Höllering had a knack for requesting major rewrites and additions out of nowhere. With days to go, Höllering convinced Gál to write yet more verses, after offering to remove a number that he hated for its sentimentality. “Höllering, the scoundrel has taken me for a ride yet again,” Gál wrote in his diary. “Afterwards we all had a good laugh over the fact that everyone can somehow be bought; one just has to name the right price.”
On September 24 1940, the day before the dress rehearsal, Gál received news that his application to be released from the camp on medical grounds had been approved. He was scheduled to leave hours before the final performance of What a Life! and he found himself sheepishly requesting to extend his imprisonment by a day.
The dress rehearsal was a disaster. Höllering’s musical had ballooned into a show that included 200 performers. The sets barely hung together, and scripted scenes were in the wrong order. Even Gál, who was conducting the orchestra, seemed confused about the proper sequence of songs.
The next day, the Coliseum Theatre was packed. The curtain rose to reveal a barbed-wire fence and several bedraggled refugees with small suitcases. One of them began telling the audience that he had fled from Berlin to Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Paris and London before finally ending up on the Isle of Man. “Join the refugees and you will see the world!” he exclaimed. The audience roared with laughter.
One sequence consisted of a poem, recited half in prose and half in song, called the “Ballad of Poor Jacob.” It told the story of the “eternal Jew”. Having been brought up by abusive foster parents, Jacob wanders through life, from one country to another, getting bruised and battered by conflicts not of his own making. Old Jacob enjoyed people as they were / Sometimes good, sometimes bad, according to the times.
In the show’s final scene, a glowing moon rose above two men crammed into a single bed. A voice roared from offstage: “Put that light out!” The two figures jumped up and, in a panic, embraced each other. The curtain fell, as the audience erupted.
One of the camp’s leaders walked on stage and announced that it was Gál’s last night of internment. Though he was embarrassed to show his swollen and scarred face, Gál was ushered on stage, where one of the performers handed him a makeshift bouquet of flowers taken from the Coliseum’s garden. He looked out at the crowd of a thousand men with whom he had shared one of the most difficult and bizarre chapters of his life. Some spectators found the performance cathartic and cried. For most, the show allowed them to laugh at their own pain. Gál noted that “this slight distancing is sufficient to let one’s own life, in all its tragedy, appear as farce”.
The next day, September 27 1940, Gál left the barbed-wire enclosure for good. Gross would follow him about a month later. They remained close friends for the rest of their lives. On the ferry from the Isle of Man to Liverpool, Gál reflected on what had made the experience endurable: “Through this community our life here had acquired a new nobler meaning…We have replaced the book-keeping of civilised life where giving and taking are scrupulously calculated and balanced, by a new principle, according to which each one gives what he can and takes what is offered.”
Fabius Gross was our grandfather. He died of cancer aged 43 when his son Julian, our dad, was 13. Although we never met him, we see now how our father followed in his footsteps, not only by becoming a scientist and an amateur cellist, but also in his equanimity and irreverent sense of humour. Searching through his letters, we found a detailed contract Fabius had written in legalese before a family holiday to Sweden in 1948, in which he agreed to give his sons SKr1.5 per day in return for going to bed at a reasonable time, “it being regarded as unfair if the aforesaid brats try to extract permission for staying up longer from one parent after having obtained a refusal from the other parent, this being a deplorable practice altogether”. The contact was typed, sealed in wax and signed by the whole family and four other witnesses.
Last summer, when newspapers were full of stories of the UK government’s plans to send mostly Middle Eastern and African refugees to detention hotels in Rwanda, we travelled to the Isle of Man. We strolled along Douglas promenade and found that the theatre where What a Life! had been staged had been demolished to make way for a casino. We also ventured down to the beach Gál had described. The sea was still, and the flatness of the bay meant that we had to trudge over an expanse of slippery seaweed and large, jagged rocks before reaching water deep enough to swim in. It was one of the worst swimming spots we’d ever encountered.
In our hotel room, just a few doors down from the house in which Fabius was interned, we took turns reading his letters out loud to each other. It was the closest we have ever come to knowing him. Among them, we found one he sent our father on the eve of his bar mitzvah. “The biography of every man, written or unwritten, high or humble, contains ups and downs, successes and failures, bright and sad episodes,” Fabius wrote, a year before he died. “And I wish you the highest possible surplus of joys over sorrows in all the coming years. In order to have a full life, one has to work and think, as well as play and be lazy.”
Anna and Danny Gross are siblings.
Anna Gross is the FT’s telecoms, media and technology correspondent
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