grants had arrived. By 1940, inspite of stricter immigration policies, some 585 Jews had entered Trinidad. Some were merely passing through, others would stay and put down roots. But with the outbreak of the Second World War, life for the Jews was not easy in Trinidad as well. As soon as Britain had entered into the war in 1939, all Germans and Austrians residing in the colonies were regarded as having “enemy alien” status. All over the British Empire, they were rounded up and interned.
As Farah notes in her paper:
“The irony of it all was that many of these ‘aliens’ had fled the horror of Nazism to seek haven in lands such as Trinidad, and were now uprooted much in the same manner as if they were still living under the Nazi yoke. To Hans ‘John’ Stecher, it was ‘indeed a deep insult to us, the first and most savaged victims of Nazism’.”
The enemy aliens were put into a camp in what became later Federation Park, and inspite of the fact that their ‘treatment by the Colonial administration left much to be desired’, they were all set free after the war.