Imprisoned for being refugees

The government was also reluctant to intern women en masse, with the Home Secretary John Anderson fearing “there would soon be a public outcry” when the great majority were “individually known to British subjects who are convinced of their friendliness”.

But, queried one Conservative MP, “is not the female of any species generally more dangerous than the male?”

Between May and June 1940, when the invasion of Britain seemed imminent, around 25,000 men and 4,000 women were interned, including Ruth Borchard. But it was only recently that her daughter Katherine Hallgarten discovered further details of her time in Holloway. “Mother died in 2000,” she explains, as she leads the way into her living room. “I was looking for something else, among all the family stuff flung in the room, and I came across a typed manuscript dated 1943. I asked my brother and sister if they knew anything about it and they didn’t. My first thought was, Oh goodness this is really interesting, and my second thought was, Why didn’t she tell us?”

The manuscript turned out to be an unfinished novel, now entitled We Are Strangers Here, telling the story of a young German refugee, Anna Silver, imprisoned as an enemy alien in 1940. The semi-autobiographical book is one of very few accounts of those interned in Holloway as suspect aliens during the Second World War. Ruth Borchard had never mentioned her novel to her children, but she had told them about being imprisoned.

“Mum told stories all the time, she was a storyteller. A story often told to us was that she was in Holloway. She said the worst thing was not knowing if I could go with her or not.” Katherine pauses and sips her tea. “But it wasn’t bad. She liked the women-together bit. But she didn’t like the waiting, waiting, waiting. It was a holding place.”

We Are Strangers opens in May 1940 with Anna Silver and her husband Bert, a scientist, appearing before an Aliens Tribunal. This marked the beginning of mass internment. At this point, 3,600 women, over half of whom were officially classified as refugees from Nazi oppression, were sent to Holloway en route to the Isle of Man.

Anna Silver is jailed at Holloway along with Nele, her 13-month-old daughter (Katherine Borchard stayed at home with her grandmother, but many women did have their babies with them). They arrive at the prison — fictionalised as Holmdale Prison, but instantly recognisable as Holloway — to find a grey and dirty yard encased by greyish black walls with rows of “hollow-eyed little windows”, piles of coal and smoky steam floating across from the prison laundry. Inside the central part of the prison, green, iron railings seem “to lead in all directions into a lower sort of infinity”.

Anna looks through the open doors of cells and, while she sees a few English convicts, the majority are internees, “calm ones, knowing ones, furious ones, frightened ones, desperate ones, bewildered ones, there they sat, in cell upon cell”. Like many newcomers to prison, she was struck by the noise, the “crying, sobbing, long-drawn-out whining, chattering, nervous laughter”.

Anna is immediately told that her daughter can’t stay, contrary to what she was promised by the tribunal judge and the police. “This is no place for a child,” an officer tells her, “you will get her back when you go to the Isle of Man.” Her first priority is to get Nele some milk, marking the beginning of “a war of nerves” when it comes to dealing with the bureaucracy of the prison system.

She also needs to reach her mother-in law Ida to ask her to take Nele, who will otherwise go to an institution. In the meantime, they are put in the prison hospital. When Nele refused bread and milk, and “kept scratching at the locked room and cried to be taken out”, Anna knows it’s better that her daughter leaves. Other women who have had their children taken are now constantly in tears; some “shrieked whenever the door opened”; in other cases “the nurses had to hold the mother while they tore it away.”

Anna tries repeatedly to get word to her mother-in-law, but it’s only when another prisoner, Hilde Gottschalk, bribes “an old gaolbird” with a box of cigarettes that a telegram is sent and Nele is taken away. Anna then finds peace in her “austere nun’s cell”, although being looked at through the spy hole is “indecent, how humiliating this defenceless exposure to anonymous observation was”.

After the evacuation of most of Holloway’s prisoners in 1939 around 20 women were left in the jail yet within two years it had one of its largest ever populations, with 863 inmates, many of whom were enemy aliens. The authorities were confused about the new arrivals. Prior to the outbreak of war the prison’s Convict Register included around a dozen “aliens” who had given false statements, failed to register or landed without permission, and who were then deported. By September 1939, however, up to 23 “Alien Suspects” were being admitted a day. On more than one occasion their “offence” was then crossed out and replaced with “18B”, the Defence Regulation under which Nazi supporters were arrested.

“In a funny way,” Ruth Borchard later wrote to her husband, “I liked being in Holloway very much.” She held English classes for other refugees and felt that she was “useful and needed once more. We did a good bit of work there.” She told her sister that she wanted to “make this a fruitful time of my life. I often feel if I had the choice between freedom and having time as now — I would not know what to choose.”

Everyone is eager for news from outside: will they be moved or released, has the invasion of Britain begun? Rumours are rife; the tea is said to contain bromide, just as during the suffragettes’ time. And then there is the racism. One day, outside by the vegetable plot, a woman walks around “with her eyes averted from their group in demonstrative loathing”.

She asks Anna, “Are you a Jewess?” And when Anna says her husband is a Jew the woman remarks, “Oh. Then you are polluted, too.”

After six weeks, Anna is finally told they are to be moved to the Isle of Man, and is terrified to find that her daughter’s name isn’t on the list.

Holloway’s governor, a man with “a gruff appearance and keen eyes” tells her there is nothing he can do. But when they arrive at Euston station, Anna is finally reunited with her daughter, and together they journey to Liverpool and from there to their next home, a seaside resort surrounded by barbed wire.

Ruth Borchard stayed on the Isle of Man for around 18 months, having been reunited with her baby daughter, Katherine and “she had a wonderful time,” says Katherine, “there was so much time to write.”

Unfortunately, there was such a shortage of babies to cuddle that she put a label around her daughter’s neck saying, “Don’t feed me and don’t hug me”.

 

This is an edited extract from ‘Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades’, a history of Holloway Prison by Caitlin Davies (John Murray)