The last book I wrote, with my wife Margaret Percy, was Tragic Heroes - The Burney Brothers of Hay at War. Those of you who have read it will know that Christopher Burney, who was incarcerated in 1942 by the Nazis for 526 days in Fresnes prison outside Paris, wrote a classic book about his experience called Solitary Confinement. This was published three times but disappeared from view in the 1980s, except for searchers of back copies on Amazon. Partly due to Tragic Heroes the classic has now been recovered and republished by Boiler House Press. On 15 April 2025 we launched it online and this may be viewed on U Tube.
Why is “Solitary Confinement” a classic? It is so because despite the hardships of cold, hunger and total isolation, Christopher showed not only the fortitude to survive but the triumph of the human spirit. He wrote at the end: “I knew that so many months of solitude, though I had allowed them to torment me st times, had been in a sense an exercise in liberty. For, by absolving me from the need either to consider practical problems of living or to maintain the many unquestioned assumptions in social life, I had been left free to drop the spectacles of the near-sighted and to scan the horizon of existence”. He had obtained a kind of serenity. The weeks and months of considering the huge questions of life like its meaning and the existence of God had freed him from succumbing to the everyday tyranny of incarceration.
This withdrawing into an inner world and consequent indifference to his surroundings helped Christopher Burney to survive his next journey through Nazi tyranny, Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He obtained what was called afterwards by psychologists a state of ‘camp autism’, the first step to survival.
I urge you to read Solitary Confinement. In the words of the great writer Rebecca West “Readers who are genuinely inquisitive about their own souls and about the prospect for our species should read Solitary Confinement”.