大象传媒

Oscar Sorell, originally called Sulz, was born in a small town near Frankfurt in 1914. He was a member of various youth groups throughout his youth, but in 1933 his group was banned by the Nazi Party, which tried to make all young people join the Hitler Youth.

The following year meetings were broken up and many members were arrested. Oscar said: "We knew that trouble had started either from the communists or Nazis, and we were against any dictatorship"

The groups founded another organisation for people aged at least 18, but the Nazi Party's reaction in 1936 was to round up 160 members and put them in solitary confinement. Oscar was frequently put in solitary confinement during the 1930's and suffered for his stand against the Nazi regime. One of the founders of the group was sent to a concentration camp where he died in 1941, others managed to escape.

Oscar attributed his survival to two things. "If you are in the hands of an authoritarian regime, play the ignorant. Do not contradict them: they are always "right" I also had some very close friends whom I trusted, so I never felt alone and I gained the support of the head of Catholic Action. Whereas the Hizem [the Jewish Aid organisation] felt it would endanger their work for Jewish refugees if they supported me"

Oscar, who worked in commerce and exports, worked tirelessly to leave Germany and managed to get a permit to Sweden in 1939. There he obtained eventually a transit visum for Shanghai, via Portugal and Angola, with the real aim of reaching friends in South Africa.

With the help of the Director of Catholic Action in Portugal, he managed to travel! by cargo boat to Angola. There he worked as a manager in a Jewish hotel, but the authorities were pressurised for several months by the local Nazi German Consul and he was imprisoned in an Angolan jail before being sent back to Lisbon. After being collected by police officers from the ship moving up the river Tagus, he was imprisoned in semi-darkness in the Lisbon jail, he eventually made his way to the Portuguese Algarve, where he was arrested and again sent back to the Lisbon prison.

Catholic Action came to the rescue once more and he was eventually able to travel by cargo ship to near Gibraltar. His boat was towed behind the ship. His journey was fraught with danger as he had to leave the ship before it reached Gibraltar, and narrowly missed being picked up by a Spanish shipping convoy "They wanted to rescue me, but I thought I would rather drown than go to Spain and be handed over to the Gestapo who would have killed me" He was eventually found by a British ship, while floating in his small boat off Gibraltar. He was then detained in Gibraltar for three months before being eventually interned in Britain.

A year later, cleared of the initial suspicions that he was a German spy, he became a member of the Alien Pioneer Corps. He worked as an interpreter, first in France in 1944 and then working for British Intelligence in Berlin.

Now a British citizen of longstanding, after taking an M.A. in Behavioural Science he worked as a senior University lecturer until his retirement. He lives with his wife Molly in Bradford on Avon surrounded by his numerous carvings. These wood carvings, done in his retirement, reflect the experiences he was subjected to in his stand against the Nazi regime and his time as a prisoner of conscience.

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