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Colonel Berry (Simon Chilvers) has been put in charge of this POW camp when all he yearns for is to be at the battlefront with the Australian troops. Meanwhile, the internees are homesick for their homeland and their culture, so they put on an evening of Jewish music and dance to lift their spirits.
Curator’s notes
A moving scene between the mostly Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and their Australian jailors. The series comes alive when showing that it’s through music that the refugees and the soldiers find a basis for communicating across their cultural and language boundaries.
Until the end of the Second World War, when thousands of refugees from war-torn Europe poured into Australia, this country had seen very few immigrants who weren’t Anglo-Irish in origin. For the soldiers at the Hay camp, the refugees were so strange they could well have been Nazi spies, while the refugees couldn’t understand that the soldiers knew so little about the world of European fascism from which they’d escaped.
