A dandy's air turns stale in 19th-century prison

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A dandy's air turns stale in 19th-century prisonBy Boyes

DAVID IRVING was awakened at 6am by a thunderous banging on the reinforced steel door of his prison cell. Yesterday marked his first day as a convicted Holocaust denier. Irving has appealed against his sentence, but the chances are strong that, until 2009, he will be showering twice a week with five other convicts, working for €1 an hour and scrubbing the lavatory in his cell. “He’s a writer, isn’t he?” Helmut Huber, 53, the chief warden of the f stadt jail in Vienna, said. “We always need writers to prepare the laundry lists.”

There are 1,200 inmates in the prison, which was built in 1839. Signs hanging from cell doors suggest that Irving’s new neighbours are rather different from the ones he knew in Mayfair. One sign reads: “Hepatitis B”; another: “Hepatitis C”. Warders are advised to enter with gloves and be careful not to be bitten. “Fluchtgefahr” (Danger of escape) reads a sign hanging on a cell in C-Block. Irving is classified as a remand prisoner until his appeal is heard in about three months. If the sentence is upheld, as expected, he is likely to go to Simmering jail, outside Vienna. For the time being, work is optional — in the kitchen, the bakery or the library — but soon enough it will be compulsory. Irving will be able to buy English newspapers. “We are very liberal as far as newspapers are concerned,” Herr Huber said. However, the censorship of his post is being tightened. Judge Liebetreu, who imposed sentence on Irving on Monday, has been put in charge of sifting far-right propaganda out of his fan mail. And, with the help of a translator, the judge will ensure that Irving does not pass encoded messages to his sympathisers. The Austrian objective is to ensure that Irving, already something of a guru for neo-Nazis, does not become a martyr. That entails paring his world down to size. He is allowed to wear his own clothes rather than a uniform, but without regular dry cleaning, Irving has lost the air of a dandy. The floor of his cell is concrete and the walls are marked with graffiti. Through the bars of his cell window he can see the exercise yard below, but the window does not catch the sun.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2051967,00.html