Unitárius peregrinus a Frimley Campben. Kiss Elek angol hadifogsága (1915. május 17. – június 28.)
A Hungarian Unitarian Student in Captivity. Elek Kiss’s Letters from Camp Frimley (May 17 – June 28, 1915)

Summary/Abstract: The First World War changed the destinies and crushed the careers of many foreign civilians who lived in Britain in 1915.Elek Kiss (1888–1971), the former bishop of the Romanian Unitarian Church, was among those civilians who were interned behind the barbed wire at the Frith Hill P.O.W. and Enemy Alien Internment Camp, at Frimley, in Surrey county.The camp, commonly referred to as Frimley, was a forty-acre outdoor camp housing civilians as well as Austrian and German prisoners of war. It was bisected by a public road, on one side the military prisoners, on the other side were the civilian internees. Elek Kiss, a Hungarian Unitarian student of Manchester New College, Oxford, was a civilian internee at Frimley in May and June of 1915.Among his comrades he mentioned in his journal the names of several German prisoners including many Jews.Kiss’s seventy-page archive contains the letters destined to his fi ancé. It is most probable that he never sent these letters, but kept them and brought them back aft er his release. Th ey then disappeared into oblivion for several decades until, fortunately, an anonymous person sold them to the Archive of theTransylvanian Unitarian Church.Th is paper presents a short introduction to the life of Elek Kiss and publishes his authentic Frimley letters. As far we know this is the sole Hungarian language documentation about the internees’ life at Frimley. The English language diary written by the well known painter George Kenner (1888–1971), who was an internee at Frimley at the same time, coincides in many aspects with Elek Kiss’s letters, both as a confessional and as a descriptive representation.

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