South Africa took these prisoners partly to prove a point. As a member of the Commonwealth, Prime Minister Jan Smuts wanted to show that his country could shoulder its share of the war effort. He deliberately refused to hold German prisoners - there were too many Nazi sympathisers among hardline Afrikaner movements like the Ossewabrandwag, and the risk of collusion was real. Italians were judged safer. From March 1941 the first arrived by ship at Durban, then went north by livestock wagon to Pietermaritzburg to be deloused and inspected, and finally on to Zonderwater. The early conditions were grim and the first commanders struggled. The camp simply was not ready to house a flood of human beings to the standards the Geneva Convention demanded.

Then came Colonel Hendrik Prinsloo. He was, in one of history's quiet ironies, the son of a Boer commando leader who had fought the British at Spioenkop - and he turned this place of confinement into something close to a community. The prisoners built their own salvation: brick and timber barracks replaced the tents, laid out in forty-four blocks, each able to hold thousands. Prinsloo treated the men as adults rather than captives. He organised picnics and daily exercise, welcomed an archbishop's visits, and built up the morale of men far from home with no idea when, or if, they would return. Under his command the camp grew a soul. At its peak it held some 63,000 men at one time, and well over 100,000 passed through its gates across the war.

What flourished at Zonderwater would be remarkable in any prison and astonishing in a wartime camp. The Italians formed an orchestra. They staged operettas and plays, the men taking every role, including the women's parts. They held craft and art exhibitions, built a library of 10,000 books, and ran a school so successful that 11,500 prisoners voluntarily attended classes. Many were poor farmers who had never learned to read; illiteracy in the camp fell from thirty percent to two. Among the prisoners was a young sculptor named Edoardo Villa, captured in Egypt, who found his way back to his art inside the wire and would go on to become one of South Africa's most celebrated artists. He never left. His ashes rest today in the Zonderwater chapel, and his sculpture stands at the entrance to the cemetery.

The camp closed in January 1947, held open past the war's end only by a shortage of ships to carry everyone home. But Zonderwater never really emptied. The men who died in captivity - around 250 of them - lie in a cemetery still tended with care, where Italian flags flutter each year over a memorial service. And many of the living chose to come back. Within a few years some 20,000 former prisoners had returned to settle in South Africa, and their descendants - perhaps 40,000 strong - form a thriving Italian community to this day, woven into the country through restaurants, churches, vineyards and stone-built farmhouses. The barbed wire is long gone. What endures is what the prisoners called the Zonderwater spirit: the proof that even captivity, handled with dignity, can leave behind something worth remembering.