SIR, —I should like to support Frau Steuer's appeal in last
week's issue of The Spectator. On every side one hears of families being separated through the recent internment orders affecting all categories of enemy aliens ; these orders one reluctantly recognises may be necessary in a time of threatened invasion, but there does not appear to be any justification for not providing camps to which married couples could be sent. If, as seems inevitable, in order to safeguard ourselves against the few who are dangerous, we are obliged to penalise a large number of innocent people, the majority themselves Nazi victims who have suffered terrible misfortunes and persecution, it is surely only right to spare them further and avoidable misery.
At least in cases where there is no charge or anything proven against them, the wife should have the choice of being able to accompany her husband ; many who have been left free, but alone and friendless in an alien country, would have not hesitated to do so, and, as Frau Steuer herself says, would be only too glad to work and contribute to the communal life of the camps. It is not easy to see why married couples together should he potentially more dangerous than in separate establishments' and, if it is merely a matter of more comphcated arrangements for accommodation, these difficulties should not be insurmountable, and ought to be dealt with immediately. Would it not be possible for married couples and families to be sent to the Isle of Man, where it is not necessary to impose such severe restric- tions, and they would therefore be in comparative freedom and able to maintain a semblance of normal life?
For many refugees their inability to take part in a cause which is as much theirs as ours is the culminating tragedy, but all whom I have met have been amazingly uncomplaining in their appreciation' of the Government's predicament, and the risks of " half-measures." Knowing what has befallen the German, Austrian, &c., refugees in those countries now under Nazi domination, and that they would be the first to suffer, it is an added hardship to them to be treated as a possible source of danger and suspect of collusion with the regime which they have every reason to hate and fear. If we do not do everything to alleviate the conditions we are forced to impose on them, and if we rob them of the personal relationships which are all they have left intact, we are denying the humane principles for which we claim to be fighting.—Yours faithfully, ALINE DUNLOP. Cuddesdon, Near Oxford.
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