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Wartime works of art by German and Austrian internees are on display in the Isle of Man to mark 70 years since the opening of the internment camps.The artists were among thousands of men and women interned on the island during World War II.
Most were Jewish refugees who found themselves arrested by the British as enemy aliens in May 1940 after the fall of France.
The art of many of them had been condemned as degenerate by the Nazis.
To accommodate them, the British authorities commandeered seafront hotels, boarding houses and whole streets of residential homes, surrounding them with barbed wire.
Unconventional materials
The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters normally made collages, and painted conventional portraits of fellow inmates for £5 a time.
The artists worked with whatever came to hand. They painted on bits of old wallpaper, newspapers and orange boxes, with one sculptor carving a pair of sensuous nudes from bits of an old piano.
Martin Bloch's Miracle in the Internment Camp shows herrings miraculously transformed into mermaids as five men sit around a table.
The exhibition at the Sayle gallery in Douglas shows how, as one of the artists later put it, German and Austrian art that was being strangled on the continent, survived and developed in Britain's internment camps.
Herbert Levi was 10 when he lived with his mother in one of the women's camps.
"The Nazis thought they would soon be liberated by Hitler, and we, the refugees, especially the Jewish refugees, thought we'd be arrested by Hitler, sent to some extermination camp.
"That was the difficulty for us, we couldn't really enjoy the sunshine and beauty of Port Erin, because we didn't know what was going to happen to us," he said.This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.