Structures and Memory; a place called Wurzach. Capital House Art House Jersey, May 2025

Wurzach, as the town was known before it was designated a spa town, subsequently known as Bad wurzach, was a place of internment from Autumn 1942 until summer 1945. English born men and their families 600 Jersey residents who had been born in UK at the request of Adolf Hitler, initially the demand was slow to be enforced, only Hitler himself checking up on progress forced the soldiers in charge to enact the demand. which was a reprisal aganist the British after capturing German generals in Iran.

Jersey Archive holds documents and artefacts relating to the interment, it includes drawings, made by some internees

It was not a labour camp, Schloss Wurzach was at the time a school administered vy the Salvatorian Fathers, who leased it to the Nazis during the war as a place of imprisonment for Corsican POWs and then The internees from Jersey.

On the 80th Anniversary of the end of the 2nd world war and liberation of Jersey from Nazi occupation and the release of the internees at Schloss Wurzach this project marks this occasion and Particular history, looking at the themes and broadening the reach or bring closer to a modern audience the reality of the situation.

Focusing on the absurdity of conflict, the whim of one with power and complicity of many.

theatre of the absurd: the Schloss is the stage in which a life was lived, a act was performed, parts were played and characters developed, stories were recalled, told, retold, reformed, immortalised.

Victor Croft/Graham (Internee)

‘I have not forgotton the sense of unreality which hung over our lives inside the wire, something which was never there outside in the town. Life as an internee was an artificial thing at best; we were housed and clothed, fed and watered, almost like somebody’s domestic animals, though perhaps not so well cared for. We were protected, too, from the struggle that was going on all over Europe; and the war bulletins and Red Cross messages, almost the only link with an experience which was involving most of our contemporaries much more closely , hardly .. gave us a proper idea of the evil that was being done to human beings over a huge area of the world.’

Graham, Close to the Madding crowd, p254