Enemy alien

This episode is about one of those people, Leonard Adam.

He was a refugee from Nazi persecution, officially reclassified as an enemy alien.

His whole life gets rewritten by a shifting set of labels.

[dramatic music] We open as Britain declares war on Germany and a fresh wave of suspicion and bureaucratic cruelty breaks out on the home front.

This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

And all of the aliens in Britain who are of German nationality immediately become enemy aliens.

[static] Sir John Anderson's first task in Parliament as the new home secretary and minister for home defense was to announce that all Germans and Austrians in this country will be examined immediately.

All these coincidences can doubtless be rationally explained, yet they leave me feeling that I live in the wake of tumultuous decisions made long before I was born, that I'm in a web of unseen connections, in friction with the mysteries of an uprooted Italian past.

In 1940, when Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, all the enemy aliens living in Britain had to be imprisoned, or as Winston Churchill put it, collar the lot.

Marco, along with thousands of other Italians and Germans, was rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man.

As Rachel Pistol writes in Enemy Aliens, 2024, many Italian shops and businesses across the country were broken into and smashed by mobs.

Marco was lucky not to be placed on the SS Arandora Star, a prisoner of war ship heading to Canada.

More than 800 of these internees, including 442 Italians, died when the boat was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland.

and in 1934, in Kalgoorlie, Australia, anti-Italian killings took place against a similar backdrop of resentment against foreigners allegedly taking jobs.

Even assimilated Italians had their loyalty to their newly adopted lands questioned.