The Chalet School in Exile

[milesb]

Hello,

I am new here. The Nazis and the war are not a particularly favourite topic of mine, but you can't be interested in the twentieth century without bumping up against them, and I'm reading a book which prompts some questions that I'm wondering if you can help me with.

The book is 'The Chalet School in Exile' by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. It is the fourteenth book in the Chalet School series. This is a series of books aimed at pre-teen girls about a girls' school in the Tyrol. The first book was published in 1925 and there was a subsequent volume every year. Earlier books make passing reference to events in Germany, though I don't think the author had any real intention of writing a full novel about Nazis. But then history intervened (as it so often does). In 'The Chalet School in Exile', published in March 1940, following the annexation of Austria, pupils at the school fall foul of the authorities by helping a Jewish shopkeeper escape from the mob pursuing him. Gestapo officers come to question the girls, but the school has some political contacts, enough to stall any action. They use that time to get out of Austria. The pupils wanted by the gestapo must flee on foot into Switzerland (Sound of Music-style) whilst the rest of the school enacts a more orderly shutdown. The book then jumps a year. The school has re-established itself on Guernsey (so, go on, guess the plot of book 15!) and re-opens in August, 1939. We follow the first term in the new location and the book concludes as everyone is preparing for Christmas. This prompts a few questions.

1) 'The rise of the Nazis' is now an established literary genre. Nowadays, many novels are set in or around the Weimar Republic and depict heros/heroines unsettled by the emerging movement. 'Exile' might be said to be an early example - but when did this become a genre within which authors worked? Is Exile a lone example of this sort of novel being reduced at the time, or was it already a theme which was being discussed in narrative form?

2) There is a reference to an event which I really do not understand. At the book's conclusion, it is said that a number of the book's minor characters have escaped from the camp into which they had been imprisoned. The paragraph is this.

Knocked about and brutally beaten for the slightest offence, the wonder was that they had survived. Then, when the famous purge of the end of October had taken place, they had contrived to escape.'

What is this 'purge'? Was it a purge of camp personnel? Or a purge further up the chain which meant that somehow impacted the camp? I've tried googling it, but, as you might imagine, all that comes up are sites about Soviet purges.

If anyone's interested in the book, it's just come back into print courtesy of the niche publisher Girls Gone By and may be purchased on their website. There are lots of cheap copies on ebay, but these are mostly edited editions published by Armada and it's successor companies between 1967 and the end of the century.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Miles