Time Stood Still: My Internment in England, 1914-1918

"Time Stood Still was written by a painter named Paul Cohen-Portheim. He was of the generation whose lives were blown apart by World War One . We have so many examples, particularly of European men sent off to war; millions died; societies were shattered and were never the same after. If you think of Virginia Woolf ’s writing, there were so many people who weren’t even in the war themselves, but it dominates their work. What we don’t have is the voice of people who were of an age where they would have been sent off to war, but instead were locked up during the course of the war and experienced this global system of detention of civilians for the first time. Cohen-Portheim is a beautiful writer. It’s an important book not just in concentration camp history, but in world history, because before this moment, there were almost no concentration camps. There had been a decade during which great powers had created and run these camps in colonial possessions or territories when there were conflicts, but this is the moment when they come from the colonies into the heart of Europe and the centres of power. When the war starts, Britain decides it’s going to lock up enemy aliens—meaning Germans, Austrians and any military-age males who are nationals of the countries they’re at war with. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the number of detainees goes up exponentially. They decide they won’t just lock up the really suspicious people, they’re going to lock up everybody. Germany does the same and things escalate. And because the British Empire has holdings all around the globe, suddenly you have this bureaucracy of detention that comes to exist all around the world, not quite overnight, but in a very short time span. As other countries enter the war, it just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Cohen-Portheim’s book gives us this moment in time when the concentration camp becomes this completely acceptable, bureaucratized event. People are told to report, they register, they turn themselves in when they’re told to. They get a prisoner number. All the things that we later think of as part of these horrific concentration camp systems get established then. So, from a systems perspective, this book is really important because it shows us the creation of that. It’s also incredibly important because World War I internment is what rehabilitated the idea of the concentration camp. It was no longer this disgraced colonial tactic that everyone thought was awful. The Red Cross got involved. You could send letters, you could send money, there were lending libraries set up. It had this civilized aspect to it and so people thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t so bad.’ After the war, the camps never stopped. In the 1920s and 1930s, they’re everywhere, all around the world. They were normal. But from a personal perspective, Cohen-Portheim narrates for us the heartbreak and mental devastation of being locked up for something you didn’t do and that has nothing to do with anything that you’ve done. There’s no way for you to influence it by good behaviour. You are being locked up pre-emptively on the suspicion that you might do something. And you have no idea when you’ll get out. One of the really telling moments in his memoir is when he’s first arrested and he asks, ‘What do I bring?’—because the guy who comes to arrest him sits and is waiting for him to pack. It’s this really strange moment for us to think of now, but it was quite normal then. And he replies, ‘Oh just pack for a two-week vacation.’ So Cohen-Portheim packs his white linen suit because he’s a gentleman and what would you bring if you were going to stay at a friend’s house? Then, when he gets to the camp, he defiantly takes to wearing this white suit everywhere. It’s a wonderful expression of trying to stay human when you just can’t. He narrates the emotional challenges for everyone and labels it an evil institution. He acknowledges that he came through it okay, but that almost no one else that he was there with came out a whole person. Even that ‘best’ version of the concentration camp had a horrific toll on everyone involved. That’s a really important part of it, because from the beginning of this modern version of the concentration camp, you have the tools and the language of war being inserted into society to deal with civilians. People thought of it exactly the way that you framed it, as this normal, pre-emptive thing. But people who were actually involved in espionage had been rounded up early on in the war. Of the civilians who had been living in the country before the war started and were put in concentration camps, there were no cases of espionage and there is no historical evidence that this huge use of money, guards, and material—all of which took away from the war effort—actually had any productive use at all. Before they turned to it, early on in the war, the Home Secretary was questioned by parliament about why he wasn’t locking everyone up. And he said that there was no more to fear from a German grocer, who’d been here for 30 years, than from your average Englishman. It wasn’t just about people who had come recently, or people there were suspicions against, it was people who were part of the Anglo-German community and some of them had been there for decades. All that was disregarded: their history, their ties. They were basically treated as if they were prisoners of war, as if they had gone to fight. The basis on which they were held was the legal rules for holding prisoners of war. They could not have been worse off if they actually had gone to fight—unless they had died on the battlefield, of course. If captured they would have been held in the same setting, even though they had never taken up arms against England. The Germans did this too, of course. I don’t mean to just be beating up on the English. Yes, these are often held up as the best version you can have of concentration camps. When they went hungry, it was often because the general population also didn’t have much food because of the war effort and crops not being planted etc. That’s the reason why camps became so widespread, because the idea was that they weren’t so bad. But Cohen-Portheim is saying to us, ‘Yes, despite all those things, it was horrific to be there.’ His is an important voice when we start saying to ourselves, ‘Well, we let them play ping-pong or we let them have a lending library’ and that somehow makes it alright. His memoir is a good reminder that even in the best settings, it still takes a terrible toll, this indefinite detention, pre-emptively, for no reason."