FROM a near-forgotten episode in Merseyside's WWII history, starkly vivid pictures have emerged to be shown in Liverpool.
SUCH has been the stability of postwar Europe that it is almost impossible to imagine the staggering upheaval to millions of people's lives during the period before war broke out.
It is almost beyond our belief that individuals who formed the backbone of their home countries had to flea to escape imprison-ment and death.
The plight of just two such men, who were artists from Germany and Austria, are featured in an unusual exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. In spite of having escaped from the Nazi regime to the haven of England and settled into jobs and family life here, fate had a further blow to unleash.
Several years after their arrival in Britain, these two artists, Hugo Dachinger, who was Austrian, and Walter Nessler, who was German, were classified as aliens and interned in 1940.
Initially, they were sent to an internment camp, in the unlikely setting of an unfinished housing estate, Woolfall Heath, in Huyton. A double barbed-wire fence and walls were built down the centre of the estate, with the internment camp occupying one half and ordinary families living on the other side.
As many as 17 internees were billeted in a house designed for a single family. Tents and huts were erected to cope with the overspill. The housing estate, built to take families from slum clearance areas, was unfinished and there was no running water.
When the internees arrived in the summer, conditions were bearable, but as winter set in they became appalling. Facilities were minimal and food and medical care were basic. The camp was staffed by the Army with guards standing in watchtowers day and night.
This alarming situation combined with the two men's creative drive to produce the work that the public can see for the first time.
