Introduction by Nigel Grizzard:

Mazins was a well known Jewish Bookshop on the Whitechapel Road in London E.1 in the heart of the Jewish Quarter, which I used to visit to buy books.

They were a publisher and published Luachs - Jewish Calendars that showed both the Hebrew Dates and the Secular Dates together with the times for prayer and the dates of Festivals. 

The German Jewish prisoner who wrote the letter wanted one of these, obviously the letter touched the bookseller's heart and he kept it.

Fast forward to the early 1970s. The shop was run by Jack Mazin's daughter Esme and was three floors of papers, publications and books.

I was a student and walking along the Whitechapel Road saw the shop was being cleared out and everything going in the skip. This was quite normal for buildings and synagogues in E.1 at the time. I took a number of things out for myself including the letter after negotiating with the clearers and the transfer of an amount of 'readies' from me to them.

In one of life's strange coincidences my father worked as a journalist on the Sunday Mirror, the Fashion Editor was Felicity Green, one of my father's colleagues and Esme Mazin was Felicity's aunt. The family wanted her out of the squalor of the bookshop to a clean flat in the suburbs. Esme died in Hampshire in 1974.

The name of the prisoner who wrote the letter seems to be 'Krupka' and his internee number is 3582. This matches up with a 'Sissa Krupka' in the Douglas Alien Detention Camp administration and discharge register, held and catalogued by Manx National Heritage. According to this register, Krupka was in fact Austrian, and arrived at Douglas from Knockaloe Camp on 28th August 1915, and transferred to Alexandra Palace on 7th February 1919.