Tales from a wartime internment camp
Nicholas Kurti, British Physicist and Hungarian Refugee
When the Second World War broke out there were many citizens of enemy countries who lived in Britain. The question arose what to do with these “enemy aliens”. The security of the country demanded that they should be under surveillance. Tribunals were set up which looked at the individual cases and divided them in three categories: A, B and C. Those in C could continue to live and work in the UK as before. Those in B were doubtful cases who were supervised and became subject to restrictions. Those in A were regarded as security risks and were interned.
Historically, Britain had always been generous to refugees. The best-known among them was probably Karl Marx — economist, philosopher and armchair revolutionary — who spent most of his time in the British Museum (or British Library as it now is). He was famous for his unsuccessful attempts to unite the workers of the world.
When my wife and I arrived on these shores in 1956, after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, we were universally welcome. Within a day of our arrival we were provided with a refugee passport. When, ten years later, I was elected to a Fellowship in Brasenose College, Oxford, it turned out that I was not the only one in the college who had come to Britain as a refugee. Well, more accurately, either they or ancestors.
The Fellow in History, Mr Collieu, was a descendant of the Huguenots who had found asylum in Britain in the 17th century to escape persecution by the Catholics in France. Nicholas Kurti, a Professorial Fellow in Physics, was a more recent refugee. Born in Hungary at the beginning of the century, he studied in the 1920s in Germany and France and got a research position in the Physics Department of the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) in the Weimar Republic as part of a team of three. In 1933, when Hitler acquired power in Germany, all three physicists left the country. They came to work in Oxford, where they established Low Temperature Physics in the Clarendon Laboratory.
Refugee scientists whose loyalty to Britain could not be doubted were made to work on radar and microwaves, for which there was an immediate need. Those who were regarded as somewhat less reliable were put on the atom bomb project, which was thought to be a pipe dream with little chance of success. Nicholas Kurti worked on the isotope separation of Uranium. His project came to an end when other scientists in the team were transferred to the US. Kurti stayed in Britain, but maintained his interest both in the bomb and in the world at large.
He liked to tell stories. I think he was not afraid of embellishing them when those minor changes he added here and there made the story more compelling. I remember one of those stories particularly well. It was about Dr Szollosi, an electronics expert, who came to Britain as a refugee from Hungary just before the war. He happened to be put into category A, those who were interned — though the decision-making was fairly arbitrary. Many of those in category A, with Szollosi among them, worked later in the British war industry.
When this story starts Szollosi was interned in a camp near Manchester. Kurti visited the camp and described it as a great place for learning where refugees from all over the world congregated, perhaps not entirely by their own volition. They ran a set of seminars, each of them worthy of a university course. The inmates discussed not only the past and present, but had various widely diverging opinions about the future as well. The British camp commandant was a man of great erudition who spoke several languages and developed an interest in the customs of the inmates. He did actually run one of the seminars on British medieval history himself.
The camp was divided by nationalities. The biggest barrack was that of the Germans, containing a large number of émigré Jews. The second biggest one was a Japanese one that was next to the much smaller Hungarian Barrack. The Japanese were a noisy lot. One night the noise was far too loud interfering with the Hungarians’ sleep. Next morning an angry Hungarian delegation, led by Dr Szollosi, went to the commandant to make an official complaint: “Sleep is one of the things that you should be able to enjoy in a well-run internment camp,” argued the Hungarians. The commandant apologised: “I fully agree with you, but please accept that this was for them a significant event. I could not possibly ban them from celebrating the fall of Singapore.”
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