Britain’s Forgotten Deportees: Families Sent to Nazi Camps

SPEAKER_09 0:00 Most people know the story of Britain during the Second World War. The blitz, evacuation, rationing, victory in Europe. But few know of the British families who were taken from their homes and sent to prison camps in Nazi Germany. Not soldiers or spies, but mothers, children, and grandparents. Among them thousands from the Channel Islands, including my own family.

SPEAKER_05 0:25 I was terrified all the time, Molly, to be honest. I think it's sort of all these orders and shouting, and you must do this, you were scared to do anything wrong. And I think that's what terrified me, really. I didn't want to do anything wrong. Because if I did, you know, I didn't know what would happen.

SPEAKER_09 0:46 That's my grandma, Jill Chubb. She was one of the Guernsey Deportees, a group of islanders sent away to Biberak internment camp in 1942. Imprisoned and in squalor, it was in these barracks, surrounded by barbed wire, that she, along with the other deportees, spent three long years of her life. Just a handful of those who lived through this life-altering experience are still alive today, and this podcast is dedicated to preserving their memories.

SPEAKER_05 1:15 Everybody suffered in the war, and I think it's about time that they knew our story and what we suffered in the camp, in the camps.

SPEAKER_09 1:50 Now, I first interviewed my grandma about the deportation during my time as a journalist at BBC Radio Guernsey. Since then, I've always wanted to dig deeper into her story, to understand the true extent of what she and her fellow islanders went through. And now, more than ever, it's clear that time is running out. Even since beginning conversations to get this podcast in motion, a number of Guernsey deportees have sadly died. So that's why the time is now to tell their tale. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Guernsey, it's a gorgeous little island nestled between France and the south of England, sitting next to Jersey in the English Channel. It's part of the British Isles, but has its own government, and it's a beautiful holiday destination.

SPEAKER_10 2:39 You think of uh Guernsey, you think of tomatoes, of course, and you think of the greenhouses that were here. An idyllic life, yes, but it it was tough for some people.

SPEAKER_09 2:51 That's Guernsey-based historian Matt Lucas. The first and second world wars have been a passion or obsession of his for more than 40 years.

SPEAKER_10 3:00 These things we tend to uh look through with very sentimental eyes, but it was at times tough, but generally very pleasant, a big sense of belonging, a big sense of community, a big sense of things not changed or have not changed for generations, and the old traditions are still very much carrying on as they had done for hundreds of years, with certain things changing, but generally not a huge amount. The impact of the first world war, of course, was still acutely felt.

SPEAKER_09 3:36 And while, as Matt explains, life in the islands was difficult at times, the worst was yet to come. On the 1st of September 1939, World War II began. A war that would leave a lasting impact on the Channel Islands.

SPEAKER_10 3:53 When war breaks out, it's similar in a lot of respects to the mainland. Air raid precautions, the air raid wardens would be out, thinking of air raid shelters, military installations, there was obviously quite a few all over the island, and it did all over the islands, and that built up expecting a war, maybe similar to the First World War, and then of course May 1940, once the Germans attack really through the Low Countries, uh the Netherlands and Belgium, and into France, then you get a difference there between here and the UK, because you start obviously getting evacuees coming from France ahead of that German invasion that are starting to tell stories of what's happening. You hear these stories back in the UK, but you're actually speaking to people that, you know, were on the receiving end of the German Blitzkrieg. So there is a sense of worry, a sense of something is coming and it's it's not gonna be nice. But they're not gonna imagine that what happens actually happens.

SPEAKER_09 5:13 After the fall of France in 1940, the British government decided the Channel Islands were indefensible and demilitarized them. This left the islands vulnerable, and in June 1940, German forces started to occupy them.

SPEAKER_10 5:26 Civilian population is kept away from certain areas. Curfews I've mentioned, but obviously you can't go walking round some of the camps. You can't just go walking round the German defences and the defences you see on the coast, of course not. You can get about quite a few places, but are you going to have your own vehicles? No, the Germans have commandeered those. You see a difference with the defences that the fortress or Festungernsey starts to be created, and then you see a change in the population. You have a lot of forced labourers, paid labourers, slave workers. It's a big mixture of different people that will come to the islands. Well, obviously, they fortify the coast, they're building batteries in land, they're making those temporary defences permanent.

SPEAKER_09 6:25 By 1942, the war had been raging for three long years, and Guernsey had been under German occupation for two of them. Then came the devastating news: an order for deportation. Adolf Hitler had issued the order in retaliation for the Allies' internment of German civilians. It was also a tactic to increase leverage in prisoner exchanges and bolster the war effort by using civilian labour. The order targeted specific groups, British citizens who had moved to Guernsey from the mainland, Jewish people, and anyone the Germans deemed a threat to their war effort.

SPEAKER_05 7:01 Hitler decided that for every German prisoner he would take ten English men from the Channel Islands for every one German. So because my father was born in England, uh he's about six months when he came here with my gran, the first world war, he's still English. So that's why we had to go.

SPEAKER_09 7:31 But what exactly was it about being British that made you a target? Standing in his room adorned with World War II memorabilia, Matt told me it all begins with an event that happened thousands of miles away from this small island community.

SPEAKER_10 7:46 In Iran, of all places. The British and the Russians have an agreement and they want to remove the Germans that are in Iran. Iran is a neutral country and has been working with Germany as a neutral country, it's perfectly entitled to for goods and all sorts of commercial things. So there's quite a few Germans living in Iran, uh, a number of them are military age. Iran's next to Iraq, the British control Iraq, there's been an insurrection earlier in 1941, and that the British put down, and that is being backed by the Germans and the Italians to a lesser degree, and on the other side, of course, you have Soviet Russia. Iran is a is a bit of a potential problem. The British have approached the Iranian government, the Iranian authorities, or Persia, of course, as it is at the time. They were very reluctant to start with, but eventually they agree, and these um Germans are deported mainly in the end to Australia. So they're out of the picture. It's a bit of a we can breathe now, Britain and uh Russia. That problem of Iran, a potential problem, has gone. Adolf is not a fan of this, obviously, he is very annoyed. Um how dare the Allies interfere with a neutral country? That's something obviously Hitler wouldn't have done. So how can he get back at the Allies? Right, we ni we need to do exactly the same. But the only part of the British Isles that the Germans controlled is of course the Channel Islands. But actually there's no free movement in the Channel Islands for the civilian population, they're interned anyway. So what can they do? There is a loophole they can actually get the British, the people in Guernsey and Jersey, that were not born in the Channel Islands, actually born in the UK, and those that were caught up by the movement of war, 1939-1940, that their permanent address wasn't in the Channel Islands, they could deport these. Hitler wishes to have ten British people deported for every German that was deported from Persia. This is not practical, and the whole thing takes quite a while to actually be implemented. But 1942 it is started. There are over 2,000 people from the Channel Islands deported, and well over a thousand from Guernsey and Sark. Most of those end up eventually in Biberak. There's a number of other camps, so the initial deportation's really 1942.

SPEAKER_09 10:42 The deportation order tore families apart and people were given very little notice. My grandma was just three years old when her family was told they'd be leaving.

SPEAKER_05 10:57 I was born on uh 1939 and September the 16th. I was a week into my third year before we went to Germany. That was in 1942. The first thing I really remember, my mum told me we were going on holiday, so I packed my little bag and we went down to the Beaumont cinema. I didn't realise it was a cinema, I knew it was something, but we came home again, I was really disappointed. I thought we'd go on holiday. Anyway, we did, eventually, but it was to Germany. It was about September the 23rd when we set sail.

SPEAKER_09 11:36 At this young age, Grandma, she wasn't very tall. She had curly blonde hair. It grew darker over time, though, as she got older, much to the dismay of the Germans. She was thin but had strong little legs and she could run fast. Her father used to make her rope sandals, but she was never that keen on them. She wasn't used to wearing shoes and socks. Something that hasn't changed much even now. Now, despite that initial failed attempt to leave the island, her family was finally deported on the 23rd of September 1942.

SPEAKER_05 12:09 The reason why they couldn't go, first of all, because it was a storm and there were U-boats around, they had to be careful. We got aboard um a cargo ship, and I remember going down into the hold. There's straw, straw bales, and paraffin lanterns, very smelly. And then they closed the top doors on us, so we're sitting in the hold, basically, and I was a bit scared. My dad said there's nothing to be worried about, and my mother had my brother.

SPEAKER_09 12:38 Ralph Godwin is one of the Guernsey deportees, and he was a very similar age to my grandma when he was sent away on that cargo ship.

SPEAKER_01 12:46 Um Ralph Godwin, and I'm 86, and I had a twin brother who grew up with me, is no longer with us, unfortunately. So I'm carrying his memories as mine as well. But we are we're similarly inclined to see the same side of things, and in that way, as men do, we tend to look at the rough and tumble side of of life rather than uh the sweet side of life. I can remember that we we did have to go one day and we went down to the White Rock and then we were sold to go back because there's something wrong with the boat. The next day we went down and we went and got on this boat. It was quite a rough day, and my parents were neither of them very good sailors. We two boys eventually ended up on the top of the boat with a man, and I can't remember his name, who used to own the Fermain tavern, or run the Fermain tavern, because I had since the war talked to him about it, and he said, I looked after you two boys, your parents weren't any good. So when you sailed into St. Marlowe, he said they appeared again. We got on the train from St. Marlowe. It took two days to get to the Rhine. We stopped overnight somewhere south of Paris first time, and then that next night we were on the banks of the Rhine at Cologne. I have looked at my mother's diaries on that, and she made the comment that what a lovely strain journey it wasn't. But whether that that was her sense of humour, I don't know.

SPEAKER_09 14:41 So I guess some of the memories that you have from early on, where perhaps you, you know, wouldn't ordinarily remember things like that, it's a bit of you and your brother kind of piecing together pieces of the puzzle.

SPEAKER_01 14:52 Yes, and also geographically, I've always been interested in what's going outs on outside the window and what what part of the country we're in. Uh, never having been to France, of course, at at that age, it was always very intriguing and interesting. So the train journey went, but it certainly lasted two days before we got to the Rhine. And then we moved across the Rhine and went up to Dawson, which is northeast of the crossing of the Rhine. Just the other side of Dusseldorf.

SPEAKER_09 15:32 We'll come back to Dawson. It's an important part of this journey to Biberak. But for now, I'd like to share with you a lasting memory of the beginning of this trip. Something my grandma showed me. Her parents' identity cards.

SPEAKER_05 15:45 They had all had identity cards.

SPEAKER_09 15:48 These are little yellow one-page booklets with identity card written on the front with the German underneath. Inside are pictures of her father and mother. Wonderfully preserved mementos that took my breath away.

SPEAKER_05 16:00 This is your great-grandmother. I think she's about twenty four. Somebody gave her this saying up here before she went.

SPEAKER_08 16:15 Yeah, it looks like it says When thou passest through the water, I will be with thee. Isaiah.

SPEAKER_05 16:22 So they gave that to Mum before she went away. And this is my dad, Ali's great granddad, uh John.

SPEAKER_08 16:31 I've never seen a picture of him before.

SPEAKER_05 16:33 No. Good looking, eh? Just like you, darling. Can I say that? Yeah. Yeah, and that's my dad. He had blue eyes and black hair. And this is a stamp from German that they stamped the cards with. It's nice to show you that because they deserve to be honoured. Really pleased.

SPEAKER_09 17:55 Every one of the civilians were issued one of these before they went to Germany. But my question is, why was this even allowed to happen? I mean, why did the UK agree to Hitler's terms and allow for those people to be taken prisoner from Guernsey?

SPEAKER_10 18:10 There wasn't really a lot that the British could do, although, you know, it's people had been deported before, but for specific crimes, inverted commas, acts of resistance, etc., which was quite a normal thing to do in wartime. But there was there was very little the British uh could do. You could protest, but you c you can't attack the islands, you can't attack the shipping. Uh the British do attack shipping, of course, but that's on a on a military level, that's very different. And certainly the locals, if we look at the local government was obviously against it, but there was very little that they could do. They're totally outnumbered by the Germans. Interestingly, the German military is not in favour of this at all. And when you speak to people that were deported that were of an age to remember it, they will tell you that the German soldiers are are quite upset with this, and I can remember some of the people that were deported saying to me that the Germans actually came up to them and said, We are sorry about this. Why? This is not what we wanted to do. You know, they felt that the British and uh Germans should get on. This is not the way to treat the civilian population here. You know, this is a model occupation, people getting on, generally speaking. As my friend said, no real Nazis here. So having two thousand people deported was uh not on.

SPEAKER_09 19:44 And it was it was just a a statement piece, it was to prove that he could retaliate, because like you said, they were interned anyway.

SPEAKER_10 19:53 Yes, I mean that they're interned anyway, they the civilian population, it was this little loophole. Hitler's island madness, it's the Channel Islands are fortified beyond all military sense. It's the only part of Britain that uh the Germans have, British Isles, um, that the Germans are in possession of. And certainly controlling that part of the civilian population, it's it's symbolic, it's Hitler having his little bit of revenge.

SPEAKER_09 20:24 Now we've heard Matt say a few figures regarding the number of people who were deported. Two thousand across the islands, about one thousand two hundred from Guernsey, but we don't actually have an exact number of how many people were sent away.

SPEAKER_03 20:38 There's never been exact to the nearest person, because there were people who few people committed suicide before they went, there were a few people who didn't turn up for the boats, there were a few people who had last-minute exemptions, and so there's never been an absolute figure. You can actually say this is 1,124 people were deported throughout the channel lines. No, you can't say that.

SPEAKER_09 21:05 That's my grandpa, Alan Chubb, who shared in my grandma's journey for a long time, and is in fact the secretary of the Guernsey Deportees Association. Now it's quite horrifying to know that some people thought there was no alternative other than to end their own lives rather than be deported. But while we knew the war ended and the Allies won, people at that time didn't. And the thought of what might happen to them if the Germans won? Well. For Janet DeSantos, her deportation story is quite different for a variety of reasons. Firstly, she was much younger when she was deported, so much of what she knows are the things that she was told by her parents. But also, the journey that led Janet and her family to leave the island was all the more complex.

SPEAKER_07 21:55 My mother was Jewish, so that rather complicated things a little. It was only my mother and myself who were supposed to go, but um my father insisted on coming with us. My father was a a locally born person, but didn't need to go but came. Unfortunately, we were split up originally. We didn't go to Biberacarut to begin with. Uh my mother and I went to Compienne in France, which was a transit camp where mostly people were sent prior to going to extermination camps. And my father was sent to a a place called Laufen, which was where British men were. It was a camp for men only. I obviously don't remember anything about it, but uh I mean, for my mother, I should imagine, being, you know, being an Austrian Jew, it must have been uh pretty awful. I mean, I've I've been there myself, I visited it, and it was within walking distance of the railway station. It was a place where a lot of the French who had been in the resistance movement, if they were kind of arrested, they were put there, and then they were walked down to the railway station to and then sent to extermination camps. So the the road between the camp and the railway station is marked by footprints on the road as a something to remind people of what happened there. But eventually we were we were kind of sent on to to Biberak and reunited with my father.

SPEAKER_09 23:49 So was the intention that she was to be sent on to an extermination camp?

SPEAKER_07 23:53 She had kind of left um Vienna with two friends that when the Germans had um invaded um Vienna, when in fact, just before they invaded, I presume, and they had somehow come over to Guernsey, these three women, and they got themselves jobs with Guernsey families as kind of housekeepers. And my mother was in a house in Kobo in Guernsey and met my father, and they got married, and I was the result.

SPEAKER_09 24:30 Fortunately for Janet and her mother, either the British or Guernsey authorities managed to get them transferred to Biberac rather than an extermination camp, because her mother was British by marriage, but her mother's friends were sadly not as fortunate. Now, at this point you may be wondering, how on earth does anyone remember what happened to them at the age of three? Well, I'd put this question to grandma.

SPEAKER_05 24:58 Because it made such an impact on my life, probably. That's the only thing I can put it down to. But I I mean I've still got a good memory and still inquisitive, wanting to know bits and pieces what's happening now. So as a child I can imagine that yeah, that that's me. I just can remember. I mean, some people went there and can't remember a thing. And I can't understand it. But I mean, you know, that's my makeup.

SPEAKER_09 25:27 And it makes sense. The brain makes connections more strongly under certain conditions, like trauma, for instance. And her ability to recall these memories was really demonstrated when, decades later, she revisited Biberak with my grandpa. First, I want to tackle Dawston. You'll have heard that name come up a few times. Dawston was an internment camp that the deportees spent time at on their way to Biberak, and by all accounts, it was a terrible, nasty place.

SPEAKER_05 25:56 We're hungry. It was so dark all the time, it's um unbearable. I'll never forget it, and I'll never go back to Dawston. I'd sooner cut my throat.

SPEAKER_09 26:10 It was just a few short weeks. A pit stop, a fleeting visit. So why did it elicit such a fervent response?

SPEAKER_05 26:18 It was um a terrible, dirty, dark place. Everything was filthy, and it's muddy, muddy and dirty and smelly. We had to stand in the in the mud. Eventually we got um a room to stay, and the women apparently had to scrub the place because it was so dirty, and her bed bugs. Um it was hungry, we're hungry. And um it was it's so dark all the time, it's um unbearable. I know there was a canal along the side, I knew that, because it was always there were all puddles in the in the camp, where uh I don't know, the rain I suppose, and and I was always frightened about this canal because it was so it's higher than the actual camp. And then you get all these smells coming from wherever, and people you couldn't clean yourself. Your skin was always dirty, but from soot and things like that, you know, and you couldn't get clean. Anyway, apparently we were there for six weeks. I knew it was a length of time, but it was a bit long. You know, when you're little, time goes slowly, not as fast as when you get older.

SPEAKER_09 27:34 Speaking to me with a stern fervor, it was an incredibly moving experience hearing my grandma recall her memories. Though it happened so many years ago, these experiences have shaped her and have shaped the lives of all of the Guernsey deportees. And although Dawson is just a small piece of this journey, and grandma remembers very little about her brief stay at the camp, the experience was impactful enough that she has chosen never to visit the camp again, despite having been back to Biberak. Though she did tell me a little story about Dawson that sounds almost sweet.

SPEAKER_05 28:10 We met a man, Keith and I, we were we were wandering around the camp.

SPEAKER_09 28:14 Keith was her brother.

SPEAKER_05 28:16 He built a shelter, he was cooking something in the ground, and it was steaming, and it looked fascinating, you know. We wondered what as kids, and he said, I'll show you, he said, and he pulled off the turf of the ground, and it was a hedgehog. He cooked a hedgehog, it's like a pressure cooker, I suppose. He cooked it in the ground, and he pulled it up and he pulled the skin back just like that, and it's pink, pink meat. And he said, and this is what you do to survive. Whether I ate it, I don't know. I know he certainly did. But we went down again and we didn't tell my father or mother about that. We went down again and he showed us how to survive on stumps.

SPEAKER_09 29:06 Stumps, in case you're wondering, are basically the bits of a vegetable you'd usually cut off. Think the root end of a carrot or the tough ends of celery stalks.

SPEAKER_05 29:17 It was a dump. They threw all their rotten cabbage away and anything like that. And um he showed me how to clean it, how to clean the stumps ready to eat. And they were delicious, I mean, they were delicious. But um when my father found out he was furious and he said, You're not to do that again, you're not to go down there and see that man again. But even to this day, I like stumps, any sort of stumps. I love them. Can't get enough. So Alan knows that. So it's my favourite diet, stumps. Give me a stump and I'm happy. Anyway, that's my first recollection of going away.

SPEAKER_09 30:00 The odd thing about their trip to this horrendous camp is they never meant to be there in the first place. Here's grandma's husband, my grandpa Al, Secretary of the Deportees Association.

SPEAKER_03 30:12 The deportees turned up there and there was just absolutely nothing ready for them. They had to do their own building, they had to make the place wind and watertight where they were barracked, they were just given straw to sleep on, uh, full of lice and big bugs. There were no separate facilities for men and women, there was no facilities for women at all, no privacy. The camp command, I don't know if it was the first one or the second one, was quite sympathetic and allowed the men to build some installations, if you like, and get some water running, but it no, it was a terrible place.

SPEAKER_01 30:50 We obviously didn't have much we could do, so it was just existing, I would say Dawson was. In the end, of course, they realised Hitler realised that we were not in the right place, and we shouldn't be in he wanted us in a better camp. Eventually we moved south to Biberak, which again was a two-day trip.

SPEAKER_09 31:14 So if, as Ralph and Grandpa say, Hitler never meant for the deportees to go to Dawson, what happened? Why did they end up there?

SPEAKER_03 31:23 Well, I think that was because it was such a rush. Oh. That that was a consequence of the fact that nothing was planned really. Dawson was um a holding camp. It had been used for that purpose for or since the war started, and maybe even before the war, while the Germans were fighting the Russians and and the uh Slavs. So it had been used as a prison camp, but only for transit purposes, and it was a terrible place. A terrible place. Not many deportees will a even who do remember it will actually talk about it because it was. I and being the first place I suppose made it even worse, you know? Going from your normal home into a place like that, the shock of the whole thing would have been horrendous. And and a few people died there again.

SPEAKER_09 32:12 You know how horrible it is without having been there, so you must have had a an incredible picture painted throughout the the archiving process.

SPEAKER_03 32:20 I have, yeah. And also through Jilly Carr. Uh Dr. Gilly Carr went over there last year. She was representing the association, and that really was the first contact they'd had with Dawston. But it was, I mean, from what Jilly Carr has told me, it was quite an experience for her to do that, and it affected her deeply.

SPEAKER_09 32:42 So Grandpa mentioned Doctor Gilly Carr there. Well, she's probably the world's foremost expert on the subject of the deportation. She's been interviewing survivors and their families since 2006, and her recent book, A Materiality of Internment, explores the lives of those deported from Guernsey and Jersey through objects, artwork, letters, diaries, and memoirs. And as Grandpa said, she has been back to Dawston.

SPEAKER_04 33:08 I've I've been back to all of the camps now, and when I was when I was writing my book, for many years it was always Bibreck and Wurzek, and I've been to Liebenau as well, because that's where the majority of the internees were from, and also the majority of those who are still alive were from. So when I was writing my book, I realised that I needed to go and visit all of the camps because it really helps as a researcher to physically go there. That was really important. But when I went to Dawston, the site today, I mean, they in a way there's very very little to see. I went on the anniversary, the 80th anniversary of the deportees arriving, and my aim was to lay flowers on the graves of those who died and to go to the site of the camp and to get a sense of a feel for the town and a feel for the area around the camp. Because there were a couple of sketches surviving from Dawson, and I wanted to be able to see what the deportees could see, and when they described the environment in which they were living, in order to really get that, I had to go and see it for myself. For example, there's a canal that runs past the camp. A high embankment was built above the area of the camp. And so the when the ships go by in the canal or the boats go by in the canal, it's you know 20-30 feet above above ground level, if I can put it that way. It sounds rather I I'm not being very eloquent, but basically the deportees were very worried that if if the canal was bombed, then all the water would pour into the camp and they would drown. And and I kind of I needed to go and see that geographically. So today the area where the camp was is a place where um there's a sort of senior senior citizens shooting range where they go with their um and and do archery. And there's a couple of buildings still standing, which today are social housing, but they are camp buildings. I'm an archaeologist, and so I'm used to always looking at the ground and looking for traces in the ground. And you could see the concrete platforms of where the huts were with the odd bit of brick wall, and I was looking on the ground for artifacts, and actually I uh I'm just looking over to my shelves because I have a piece of drainage pipe for the camp that I picked up and brought home. Anyway, so you asked about the Vissal experience. Certainly, when I went to the cemetery to lay flowers, I was due to meet the Burgermeister and his second in command, and they they held a little ceremony uh in the cemetery with me, along with uh the local archivist. And I'd come along with some speeches from Guernsey to read out and from the deportees, and I just started crying. And it's almost like you can feel the emotions of people who were once there. And because I was representing the deportees and reading out their speech, and I could I could sort of feel the emotions from that, and somehow almost feel feel the emotions of those who were there 80 years ago. And so it was it was a very emotional experience.

SPEAKER_09 36:17 I really loved how Gilly spoke about how her desire to go to Dawston was because she had sketches and she wanted to see if they matched the reality of what the place was really like. Gilly is a big believer in the power of objects and heirlooms and their ability to shed light on the events of the past. She's learnt about and collected many during her years of research. And even though the deportees spent just that small amount of time at Dawson, a few items survived.

SPEAKER_04 36:44 Some of the artwork would appear to be here's a picture of a wood, here's a picture of a pathway through a wood with a little sign in the in the mid distance saying Dawson this way, with some buildings in the in the far distance. And you know, is this is this drawn from the imagination or is this real? And so going to Dawson myself and deliberately walked. So the camp is out of town, but walking from the area of the camp into town, I suddenly walked into an area where I thought, this is the area I can see in the drawing, and to be able to know, okay, so that was really drawn from life. That was a that was a real drawing and not from the imagination. And also, okay, but what is a deportee doing out of camp drawing this? And then in one diary, someone had written about when it came time to leave the camp to move on to the next camp. Some deportees were put in buses to the train station and some of them walked under escort. And you could be like, Well, this person walked under escort. I can see it. That's the view they were getting. But then at the bottom of the drawing, it said something like Biberach December 1942. So that person had kept the view in their mind, but drawn it when they arrived in Biberach and could get hold of paper and pens to begin to draw. And that taught me that sometimes objects made in a camp are made in the next camp when they have pen and paper or whatever to draw things, and that was an important discovery. But also when I went to Dawson in person, I saw for myself its industrial history. And some of the deportees had talked about it being polluted. But when I went myself and I could see there was an old coal factory processing place, not even a kilometre from the camp. And they, it's sort of a heritage, you know, there's some sort of the heritage elements there today you can go to as a tourist. And I could somehow it clicked more in my head to be able to see in the landscape how close the coal processing plant was. And and so when deportees talk about all the coal dust in the air and their clothes going black and their skin going black, and one of them made a little golly in Dawston. And on the one hand, you might dismiss it as saying, oh, well, this is an old-fashioned racist toy. But on the other hand, this golly was representing to them with its, you know, no matter the racist undertones, this was representing, in a way, a bit of camp humour that the coal dust is turning their skin black and their hair black and their clothes black, and here's a doll which represents that experience and that feeling. And sort of going to the camp made a lot of things fall into place in my mind, and I could understand the objects and the artwork better. And at its core, the book is about when we no longer have deportees around to tell us about the experience. How can we understand their artwork and the objects that they made? And I've studied over a hundred collections of these things, whether personal collections or in museums and archives. And so it's about being able to understand and interpret these things. And so going to the camp really enabled me to begin to understand the objects made in Dawson much better. And so that's why it was vital to go there.

SPEAKER_09 40:07 You mentioned the wonderful story of the golly that they created. Um, were there any other interesting, it was a very short period of time, other interesting objects or artwork from Dawson that you can tell us about?

SPEAKER_04 40:18 I mean, from from Dawson, there's very few. So I mean that that doll and the artwork I think are are some of the only objects. But the person who owned that golly doll also owned a doll maid in the early days of Biberach, and that doll, so the the the golly doll was called Billy Dawson, and the doll maid in Biberach was called Bibby Rag. And Bibby was a little white doll, and she had blonde hair, and she was sort of dressed Heidi style, and so it was really marking the contrast between the clean air and just the feeling of cleanliness after the filth of Dawson, even though no camp is clean, but it was a a comparative statement. And because I was in Dawson at the same time as year as the to the day that the deportees were sent away, I was able to sort of experience the weather and to sort of see what the climate is like in that part of Germany, and when the deportees were writing about the rain clattering on the roof and leaking between the, you know, one of the barracks blocks was falling apart and the water came in and it was just a miserable experience. I think the physical experience of having visited, and I made a point of walking from the camp to the train station, which is a few kilometres, and I think experiencing that for yourself, just the sort of gosh, this is a long walk, and gosh, this is really quite fatiguing, and gosh, it's cold, and it sort of helps you when you're reading diaries and memoirs, you're drawing upon your own experience of having made that same walk. But of course, they had had seven weeks of malnutrition, and you know, they didn't necessarily have the right clothing for the weather, and it just sort of adds that extra atom of understanding to be able to do that walk yourself.

SPEAKER_09 42:16 While Dawston may have been far more destitute than Biberak, the deportees weren't there long. It was just a small step on the road. They were soon carted off once more.

SPEAKER_05 42:26 The Allies were bombing, and I knew they were bombs going off because we were in industrial Germany, we're in Ruhr. We were taken out of the camp, and we had to we were on more cattle trucks, we had cattle trucks, and uh my father and mother they separated the men from the women, children, like you do see. And my father ran ahead and um he opened, there was a door open of this cattle truck, and my mother's screaming, my brother's holding under her hand, it's um chaos. Anyway, my dad, my mum ran to my dad and he pulled us aboard. We were very lucky. I think I think some people didn't make it apparently, but uh we certainly did. But we sat again in um enclosing with a grill at the top. It was a small grill, and that's all you could see. You could see the sky and a bit of sun, and you sat there and no facilities whatsoever for doing anything. So that was done in a hole. And uh I remember doing that. So we were there for a couple of days in the cattle truck before we got to Biberak.

SPEAKER_09 43:34 Although the deportees may have been venturing somewhere objectively better and more sanitary, Biberak was by no means a paradise. For all the worldly possessions taken from them there, the worst thing that was stolen was their freedom.

SPEAKER_10 43:48 The huts were overcrowded, uh, families, initially the men, of course, are separated, but families packed together, boredom, you're in another country, you're in the enemy country, you have no freedom. How precious is freedom?

SPEAKER_05 44:09 In Vivarak it was cold when we got there in November. I didn't know the month, so it's very cold. My dad had uh cut the toes out of my shoes because my feet were growing, and um yeah. And then walking up the hill, of course it was snowing, so my feet were getting pretty wet.

unknown 44:26 Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 44:27 Frostbite on your toes.

SPEAKER_05 44:29 I know, yeah. Yeah, but that's what they had to do, you see, they had to improvise for their families to help them, and they all did that. And the women did as well in the camp. But anyway, we got we walked up this m massively long hill. I never thought it was gonna end. We got to the top and there's a hit the use camp on the left, and they were spitting us. And kiss me. I wanted to spit, of course. And my mother saying, Don't do that till come on So yeah, so I was always like that I think. Anyway, we eventually got into Bibrac and uh they still um stood us in the square counting us for hours and um they kept recounting Iceway drive here fumpf Icewai Drive here oh with the fumpf you know with the fifth person children were getting fed up running round I wasn't one of them I must say apparently a a lady a couple of people had died in Dawston Manning and a little boy and probably and they kept miscounting because they missed the dead. They expected more people. Anyway, we got into the barrack eventually and um I was in barrack number three. We found a room where we had there was another family which happened to be Ralph and Neville and his mum. So there's mum, my brother Keith and me, and we shared the room through the wall in Biverack.

SPEAKER_09 46:02 As grandma says, Ralph Godwin and his family were there with them in barrack room three, second row from the main gate.

SPEAKER_01 46:09 And we were at the far end of that barrack because the other end was the end where you went down the end. What did you do down the end? We went to the toilet. To go down to the toilet was a cold experience in the winter.

SPEAKER_09 46:26 Before Biberak, Mrs. Wilde and Mrs. Godwin had never met before. Who'd have expected that all these years later their children would still be in contact, standing in the same room regaling these tales. So, in Ralph's room was a window that faced the door on the left, and to his right were the wilds.

SPEAKER_01 46:50 And that remained the same for the next two and a half years. And there was a table down the middle, there was a hot stove with a chimney stacked out out of it, which was our heating arrangement.

SPEAKER_09 47:02 It sounds almost cozy, but despite Ralph's surprisingly cheerful demeanour, we mustn't forget this was a prison. Eyes were on you at all times, and it was unclear whether you'd ever leave.

SPEAKER_05 47:15 I looked out of the um camp I was in, and the barbed wire and stuff, and I could see fields and the mountains, and I think one day I'm gonna run. I just want to get out of here and run. Just want to be free. And I think that's the thing that really hits you. You're confined into this small space with all these people, no privacy, except we were fortunate with our room. Otherwise, I mean there's loads of people in one room, you know. And it's very, very difficult.

SPEAKER_09 47:46 The different women, you know, with their different problems, and this sense of confinement was made worse by the view out over Biberak, a beautiful vista looking out over the Alps, which caught the eye of the people who were detained at the camp before the Guernsey deportees arrived. You see, Biberak didn't start out as a place for families.

SPEAKER_10 48:08 Camp at Biberac was, as some of you will know, is a pre-war German barracks, which it never really used as that, because that was 1939. It then housed Allied prisoners of war officers, British and French, etc., from 1940, under reasonable conditions, and some of those original deportees said, you know, the conditions actually were quite okay.

SPEAKER_09 48:34 But that soon changed for the new wave of deportees. The huts became overcrowded, families were torn apart, boredom set in, and their freedom was taken from them. It's hard to imagine how locked down these Guernsey families must have felt, how oppressive it must have been.

SPEAKER_05 48:52 I used to sit on the step by the gate, and I used to see these men coming in, frightening, very smart but frightening, shouting. Yeah, they shouted all the time. I hate to be shouted at, even now. And um it's Rouse, yeah. Aplugin! Ah, Rouse! Anglinho, no good, uh Kaputin, and all that sort of stuff, you know. There's an administration block there apparently, and they used to come in the Gesarpa and the SS men, and they used to go in the administration. But at the the camp they had um the the proper towers, you know, with the machine gun at the top and all those searchlights. I never believed that, but searchlights used to keep me awake. So my mum put a bla a blanket up, and I think with Ralph's mum as well. And I had the bottom bunk below my mother, but um it was so dark, and I used to have these awful dreams of things floating in the air towards me. So I used to climb up about to her bunk, and I used to say, Where's you mummy? Where's your mummy? And they had to stop me because they were frightened they'd I'll break my leg or fall or something.

SPEAKER_09 50:04 What terrified you most while you were there?

SPEAKER_05 50:07 I was terrified all the time, Molly, to be honest. I think it's sort of all these orders and shouting, and you must do this, you were scared to do anything wrong. And I think that's what terrified me, really. I didn't want to do anything wrong. Because if I did, you know, I didn't know what would happen. Serious, I think um I wasn't happy at all, really.

SPEAKER_09 50:33 But don't see people being who they are, stubborn donkeys, they just kept going. And though they lived life under lock and key, life ticked on, and there were many days which were normal, mundane even. So I'd like to paint a picture of day-to-day life in Biberak.

SPEAKER_05 50:52 The men were in a separate part of the camp, and the uh women and children were in another part. There was a curfew. So they were used to meet when the curfew, they were allowed to meet then. But when it was curfew about seven o'clock in the evening or something, everybody had to be in their barrack. So, and that's when the searchlights started, and the dogs outside and all that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_09 51:17 That must have been hard being apart from your dad.

SPEAKER_05 51:21 No, not really, it wasn't. I mean, we knew we'd see him in the day. He just wasn't there at night with my mum and you know, and we were fine with uh Ralph and his mum and and Neville. And um you know mum protected us and uh we see our dad the next day.

SPEAKER_09 51:39 And for Ralph, day-to-day life really wasn't all that bad. In fact, he had a rather sunny disposition reflecting on it all.

SPEAKER_01 51:46 I cannot say that I ever came away being frightened by the camp in any way. Simply because as I've said, I believe it was but large enough to to absorb a young mind within the context of of living. It was plenty going on, as it were.

SPEAKER_09 52:09 Why do you think there is this difference of experience? For some people it was this prison, this terrifying place to be, and for you and your brother it was it was a playground. Why why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 52:23 I think it's because we were boys. And uh we had the comfort of being very close. And we also had the comfort of my mother being the teacher down one of the teachers down at the school.

SPEAKER_09 52:36 Hearing this took me aback a little. I hadn't considered that the people at the camp may have worked or gone to school. They even had a camp librarian who we'll hear about in a bonus episode of the podcast. So despite everything, they weren't consigned to do nothing.

SPEAKER_01 52:54 Father worked at the Red Cross store with Mr. Matthews. They ran the Red Cross store, and uh it was not I wasn't saying a cosy situation, but there was a there was a generality about day to day. Mother went to teach, we went to school, we went to play, we came out and played, we had plenty of space to play. Day followed day. There were people doing theatricals and doing anything that would a small society would do. It come together, whether they I don't know whether they did step collecting or whatever, but there were things going on, and there was a theatre of group and the older people did gymnastics out on the on the parade ground.

SPEAKER_07 53:44 I was on the stage in the theatre at one of the because they used to put on lots of shows there in in Biberac. They were singing the Teddy Pears Picnic and I was a teddy bear.

SPEAKER_01 53:57 So we were allowed to do most things with regard to keeping alive and passing the time of day.

SPEAKER_09 54:06 And during his time working for the Red Cross, Ralph's dad kept a diary, which Ralph still has today, a wonderfully preserved red book. He actually got it out to show me. It's lined with thin paper and looks like an old school jotter.

SPEAKER_01 54:20 This comes from the Red Cross stores. My father was the keeper of the instructions on it, and he kept that journal updated on a daily basis as to the coming and going of p anybody of all nationalities, where they came from and where they went to. So there were a number of children, especially initially, because obviously we just come from Guernsey where life was going on normally, and some obviously was the women were pregnant when they arrived at the camp. But there was also arrival of babies during the other later years.

SPEAKER_09 55:21 Over the years, people have asked Ralph about the diary, and it has served as a useful trinket to flick back through from time to time for those curious about their family's past. And although it's simply a list of names, the diary also tells us a bit about some of the events that unfolded at the camp.

SPEAKER_01 55:38 It also refers in there to the latter end of the war we had a number of Jewish, North African Jews, who were, as I now know, were supposed to be going back to Italy. But of course of the Allied advancements up up Italy by the Americans and the British, they were cut off. So they got as far as Munich and were asked to turn right towards our camp. And they came into our camp. And there were two bodies split by a couple of days. We had thirty or plus the first day, and about sixty uh the other days. The interesting thing was that they were, as I say, North African Jews. They were in a pretty bad way, but they were being basically released by Germans because they just were uh being overwhelmed by that time. It's uh an aside which probably shows that where they came from and how they thought that within two days two days of being in our camp, they were knocking on our barrack door. Would we give you six eggs for something? They were already bartering. I always remember seeing them at that door and asking my mother, what are they doing? Oh they want to change something which they prefer to have.

SPEAKER_09 57:10 The lives of objects, like this little red book, are often more fascinating than we realise. The journeys they go on, the meaning they hold for us, objects can tell a thousand stories. We'll hear about some of the objects and artwork from Biberak that Dr. Jilly Carr has uncovered over the years.

SPEAKER_04 57:28 Oh, there are thousands, there are absolute thousands.

SPEAKER_09 57:32 But I want to stay on jobs for now. While Ralph Stad worked at the Red Cross and his mother actually worked within the camp, some deportees ended up working for the Germans.

SPEAKER_10 57:43 You had them here, of course, in Guernsey and Jersey, but you're seen as collaborating. But you have a family, you have a wife, you have maybe elderly parents, you have children to feed, and the Germans may pay you not a huge amount, but something to work. So what do you do? You're in the camps, you for some of the men you also have that same agonizing decision of if I can get some work outside the camp, which some men could get, they get paid, so they're able to at least alleviate the boredom, you know, and get some money and you know, the possibility of of getting better rations, etc. But you're then seen as collaborating. So it's it's difficult.

SPEAKER_09 58:34 And that was a decision my great-grandfather made. But as you'll hear, it certainly didn't give you a free pass.

SPEAKER_05 58:40 Actually, my father used to go to work for the Germans, go and a lorry. When I say work for the Germans, he did that because he sort of felt they they felt they had to do it, you know. He used to go and pick bread up for uh for the camp and stuff, and um anything they could find. Germans used to take them out working, I believe. They used to work them, the Germans. You know what they used to do. And um when Ulm was being bombed, Ulm, which is just down the road, uh my dad, um, they had to pick up bread, and it was full of glass, and they said, Well, you you did it, you eat it. I remember that. I thought it was a bit gritty. But that was it was. And the first um biscuit I ever had was um a parcel that had been sent to um Joy Godwin, that's Ralph's mum, from Canada. And we sat on the step with a little lump of butter and ate it. We cut it up, didn't we? We shared it. Because that's what I learned in the camp. Whatever you've got you share with other people.

SPEAKER_09 59:51 It must have fostered a really strong sense of community to be in it together like that. You're all there and none of you want to be, but you're helping each other out. You just want you want to make sure that each of you gets through it. It the community must have been strong in a way.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:11 I think that's um yes, it must have um people must have had strength from one another, definitely. And they had laughs together, you know, and uh yeah, I think that experience must have strengthened people, and other people know. They never got over it, you see.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:29 While we're on the subject of food, you'll be glad to hear that glass-filled bread wasn't the only thing they ate.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:36 Well, we had potato peeling soup. I loved it. I went down once with my dad to the canteen. It was a canteen in a soup kitchen, and I had a cup, and if you had a p potato peeling, it was lovely. Wow, the smell of it as well. Because I always wanted more because you just had one cup. I don't know how many times a week you did that, I remember once a week. We had other food as well because of the Ray Cross parcels. And that's the saviour, that's what uh you know, kept us going alright. So that was good.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:10 Potato peeling soup. Not quite potato peel pie, but I have to admit, I'd kinda like to try it. But the rations, the infrequent deliveries, the limited options they had available to them, this wasn't just a matter of going hungry from time to time. For deep Janet DeSantos, this extended period of malnutrition had a severe impact on the rest of her life. She kept a glass of water next to her during our interview because her throat dries up really easily, which she tells me is a direct result of being in Biberac.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:44 Well, I've got no lining to my throat. It just didn't develop because I didn't have proper food. Also, I've had a lot of problems with my bone structure for the same reason, because my bones didn't develop properly. And when I was in my forties, I think it was, something like that, uh, my spine collapsed. I mean, as you can see, they managed to put it back together again and it got me walking. But you know, you obviously if at the you know at that age you're not eating properly. I mean, we didn't have until the the Red Cross parcels started coming through. I mean, it was bread, water, and you know, potatoes, you know, that was about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:31 It's funny because um I think your parents install on you that everything's gonna be everything will be alright, and you absolutely believe them. You know, I trusted them. And I thought, yes, we will, and uh we will go home.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:46 As a father of two young girls myself, I found it quite moving to hear how the parents of Biberak shielded their children, considering what they must have been going through themselves. Because of course, while they gave their children this sense of hope that they would one day return to Guernsey, no one really knew. It must have been torture. But even in this situation, my great grandfather was still able to make moments in the camp special. What were Christmases like or any did you celebrate any Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:18 Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:18 Yeah, yeah, my dad made me a cabal's house without lights. But it was lovely, it was four, you know, four rooms and plain. Ah, it was great. I loved it. And of course he made me my shoes out of the rope from the um Red Cross parcels. So I used to like those and I used to take them off. I ran barefoot everywhere. They used to do the best they could for their children, the men. They made lots of stuff. And the women used to knit and you know, they used to rip things up and make others' clothes for the children.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:54 We had Canadian food parcels, which were elaborate affairs. We're full of they were almost twice as big as the usual Red Cross parcel. This was at Christmas, and it came with presents in a term of very nicely modelled chess sets, and also some games we didn't recognise, but they were wood wooden and really but I still have the chess set at home now.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:26 For the Guernsey deportees, these must have been the moments that kept them strong, small acts of kindness that kept them going, so it wasn't all misery. Grandma and Ralph even shared some funny moments. It seems they liked to play games with the Germans and push the limits of their patience.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:44 There's a man called Gustav and uh he had a limp. He had his polished boots he's always sort of, you know, like that. We used to run behind him and we used to imitate him. We used to go, you know, we used to imitate him and he used to turn around and we'd that's it. So we we found we thought that was funny, but we um we did that sort of thing. We made we did skipping and things, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13 What are the fun was, and of course the German guards could get very bored setting nothing happening around there. So we were always playing and they were watching us. We knew that we couldn't go too close to the barbed wire. There was a limit probably something like two yards. If you go any closer, then they would be putting their rifles up. And then we flee to the nearest hut, wood the wooden huts where you had a two-foot clearance underneath. In a sense, there was two foot clearance uh was very useful because it was these dark huts. There was a side, as I understand, not being a an an adult by that time, that things went on under those huts, which wasn't anything to do with children. Nothing you were privy to. Exactly. Yes.

SPEAKER_09 1:06:11 And some stories, well, they are funny only in hindsight.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:16 Funny moment. We went down to the Red Cross station, Red Cross parcels, and we had to have a look around. I remember looking around, and everybody started running off because I was the smallest thing in the finest. And um they ran off and they left me. And these big boots came in. Oh god, he's gonna shoot me. I sort of hidden terror behind this box. And he looked down at me and he said, Rouse! I thought, stop me. I ran like mad and say, wait for me. And he was always saying that there, wait for me. I thought they're gonna shoot me. Yeah, but uh that that was funny actually, you look back on it now, you know.

SPEAKER_09 1:07:03 So life in Biberak was tough. It was isolating. It was a prison. But the deportees never lost their sense of humour or their rebellious spirit. And as children full of curiosity, some days were a complete rush.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:18 Things like what would excite one was seeing in the daytime American bombers coming over in forty four, forty five, which would be bombing Stuttgart and the surrounding cities there and turning. Occasionally you see the odd bomber in distress and somebody you could say, Oh, he's down his parachute. But they would turn quite close in terms of twenty miles away, thirty miles away, you could say on a clear day, and then at night, of course, we could occasionally have the the British and and the French or any other night bombers came in. But we were not the only aircraft we ever saw that came close was towards the end of the war when two called them lucky lightnings. They they were lightnings, a type of plane with twin, what do you want to call it, twin bodies, and uh they scooped over they dropped leaflets at one time to say. I think it was basically just updating the war on us, which the Germans weren't very happy because of all these paper paper floating all over the ships.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:33 As aircraft filled the skies of a war-torn world, clearly they became something of a spectacle. As my grandma also recalled a couple of aircraft-related stories.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:44 I do remember something that stands out in my mind. It's um planes flying over and dropping silver silver bits. And I think there was that was to confuse the radar, apparently, but uh everybody that saw them come over used to cheer. You you couldn't do that, you know you had to stop. But so and then I remember one hit the Using, they used to practice zooming over the camp and he um inadvertently smashed into the ground outside the camp. So everybody cheered, poor little thing. It's gonna terrify me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:09:22 Now this story is very interesting because, as my grandpa explains, he heard the same story from Ralph, except Ralph's version was a little different.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:35 He said there was um an aircraft testing site close to Biberak, and he said one of their new jet aircraft flew over the camp and the tailplane fell off and it crashed in the woods, and everyone cheered. Now there was prior to that I'd heard a story that the Hitler youth used to buzz the camp and try and frighten the the deportees who were in the camp by buzzing it, and one of them flew too low and clipped the clock tower and landed in the woods and it crashed. Now it seems to me that that that didn't happen twice. So I th I'm not sure which which is the right story. Perhaps they both are, I don't know, but I think they're relating to the same event. But it just illustrates really how things get mixed up.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:27 And Grandpa says, during the process of archiving all of the Guernsey Deportees' material recently, he discovered numerous conflicts between some of the facts and stories of those in the camp. And these very subtle differences in their stories speak to something much bigger, I think. How history isn't one story, though it may be told from just one perspective. But to truly understand what happened in our past, we have to hear it from all angles, all perspectives. Now, what I really want to know was what it was like to get ill in the camp. Were there doctors on hand? Were the Germans helpful? What was the provision of care and treatment like? Well, what was there would have been minimal and inadequate by modern medical standards. There were limited medical care facilities, and the care they did receive would have largely been from other internees. You see, the deportees came from all social classes. Craftsmen were represented as well as teachers, clergymen, and two doctors who worked closely together with the camp nurse Annie Sig. So yet another scenario showcasing the power of community spirit in Biberak. But if you want a first hand account, well, it turns out one day in the camp, Ralph fell seriously ill.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:48 I had a very, very bad, bad throat. Not like the one I've got now, but at the time. And eventually the doctors at the camp decided that my throat was uh too bad, didn't need it. It was basically severe tonsillitis. German doctors or Ger uh no, English doctors at this, but with in agreement with German doctors because they they interplayed. And so one day I was called down with my mother at six o'clock in the morning down to the guard room, and another lady was with her little boy girl, and they were there, and we were then instructed that the mothers would go away, and there was a guard there with his rifle over his shoulder, and he would be taking us to hospital. And we perceived that two little children with this guard all the way the mull down the hill to the hospital, and we went in there. We went through to a ward where there were two nuns sitting there on chairs who had masks and chloroform ready for us, and we had to go and sit on their lap and then they chloroformed us. We woke up on a red rubber bed as you do in after an operation. We would now had had a to tonsils cut, and a couple of hours later they decided you're all right now but they were kind enough to supply a staff car, German staff car, which took us back to the camp. But to no any special look, just back to your barracks, into your straw palace. That was it. And your only comfort then would be a glass of water. And that was it. Get better suit, you might say.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:44 These are just a handful of the many experiences people went through during their time in the camp. Historian Dr. Gilly Carr has captured many, many more through her time speaking to and becoming friends with the deportees, many of whom have passed away over the years. Gilly also finds value in telling the story of history through the lives of objects.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:05 There's a particular category of artifacts that I've now seen about twelve or more of, and that is an engraved camp mug. Um, so when the deportees arrived, initially they were given pottery mugs, but these soon broke. But a little later in the war they're given aluminium mugs, and there was one deportee called Bill Balcom. And in the First World War, he had engraved shell cases, because that was one of the things that people in the trenches did. But during the Second World War, when he was in Bibrag, he engraved people's mugs and he was very skilled at this, and he would engrave them as gifts or as christening mugs. Many of the deportees had them as as children born in the camp who had these mugs. I mean, I I have one because an antiques guy in Jersey several years ago uh had one and he asked me if I wanted to buy it, and I thought, well, it's very useful when I'm giving lectures to sort of to show this example. But they're typically engraved with the the names of the person who they're they're for and lots of flowers and plants, but also they show views beyond the barbed wire. So some of these sort of famous views from Biberar camp, but also they show views inside barricades as well of the bunk beds and the stools. And I think they're great from that because they really give you this vision of the camp. But at the bottom, there's something very clever on them. Now, Bill Balcombe was known as Bill Balcombe of Everest, and it wasn't going to say climbed Mount Everest, but he would draw the profile of the mountain range on the bottom of the mug, and the mountain range would clearly have a bit missing, like it would have a bite taken out of it. And the children, I keep I call them children, they're you know, these uh people no longer alive now, but the the children who received these mugs said to me, Oh yes, he would say that this chunk taken out of the mountain, if ever there was world peace, that chunk would go back in the mountain, and so it sort of showed that there was still a war. And because he told this story, he was Bill Balcom of Everest. And after a while, and it took me longer than it should have done, I realized that when you turn that mug sideways, that mountain range is actually a man's profile, and you can see the his nose and his lips and his chin. And there's also on the bottom of these mugs a little what I'd thought was a little V for victory, but it was actually a sideways view of the eye, sort of drawn as a V. And so, you know, Bill really put his own very personal stamp on the bottom of these mugs because it was him. But those are brilliant, I love those. But there's also fascinating things made out of tin cans because the Red Cross would deliver food parcels, and the idea was that everyone got one food parcel per person per week, but that wasn't always the case. But nonetheless, within this parcel is a whole lot of raw materials for making objects. So you've got the wooden crate in which all of the parcels arrive, you've got wood, you've got the cardboard from the parcels, you've got the packing material. Instead of using styrofoam or whatever you would use today, they have oh bubble wrap, they had these strips of coloured plastic, thin strips of coloured plastic, which the deportees would weave and thread into things. Um, there was the parcel string, which deportees would unravel and plait and turn them into shoes and all sorts of things. There were the tins, there were food tins, all sorts of things were tinned. There was tin cheese and all sorts of stuff, which doesn't come in tins today, but came in tins then. Tins of cigarettes and which would be wrapped in cellophane, and they would use that cellophane and they would plait it and make pretty pearlescent things. So all sorts of things made of tin, cardboard, string, plastic strips came from the camps. And people bought a lot of it home, and so there were hats, handbags, purses, hair curlers, trays, all sorts of things made from these. So I I mean in in the Occupation Museum in Guernsey, for example, they've got some hair curlers made out of bits of tin, so the women could still try and change their appearance so they didn't look like bedraggled, dirty prisoners, but instead could keep up their morale by styling their hair and maybe making little handbags with coloured threads to lift uh a dirty outfit and um a pair of slippers woven out of parcel string, again, because their shoes would have been falling apart. And so I think you can see how people are it's a way of fighting back against the Germans. It's a form of resistance that you're, you know, they might be keeping you as dirty disheveled prisoners, but damn it, you're not going to, you know, you're not gonna let them get you down, and you're gonna show that actually, no, you can hold your chin up because you can, you know, be something other than they're trying to make you be.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:07 Do you think it helped to empower them and feel in control of a situation which could otherwise feel helpless to be able to have this ability to this ingenuity, this art, this creativity?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:21 Yes, yes, definitely. And you find people making things out of red, white, and blue as well. And from the artwork, you can see that people had patriotic interior design, if I can call it that. They would have, they would make union jacks to pin on the walls, they would make V signs which they would hang above the door. You might have heard about the carnival that was uh an August bank holiday carnival, I think in 1943 in Brack, I'd have to check the year, where they held a fancy dress carnival and the Germans made a cine film of it, a propaganda cine film to show, oh, look what fun people have in camps, look how well we look, we take care of our prisoners. But every barrow block put forward an entry. And at the point at which that cine film got converted to video in the 1980s, one former deportee, Eric Sirit, provided the voiceover. He's no longer alive, but I interviewed his son in one of the early days of my research. He said he was talking about that he remembered that people would make outfits representing St. George and the Dragon, Britannia, and Uncle Sam, you know, one of the allies. And so people were making very patriotic costumes as a way of still keeping their national identity. And I think there was a big sort of pride in being British and having a stiff upper lip and showing the Germans they couldn't get you down. And yes, so very much you see a lot of that sort of resistance going on.

SPEAKER_09 1:20:51 And resistance and liberation is the subject we're turning to next, as we find out how it felt for the deportees to learn that the war was over, that they were being released from their prison, and what it was like to return to Guernsey, an island that had changed in many ways since their departure.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:09 They're being completely away, possibly from families, and away from their homes at that crucial time in their lives. So when they come back, there's an attitude that people aren't quite the same again here.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:26 They were fighting for the town towards the end of war. I know that there were tanks in the in a field. There were tanks in a field, because I could hear the shells. Could hear them. But my mother in the meantime had pulled us under a bunk and told us to get down, we were going home.

SPEAKER_09 1:21:46 Liberation Day at last. After three long years in captivity, came a day that will be remembered for the rest of time. News had made it to the camp, the Allies had won the war, and the islanders in Bibarak were given their first promise of freedom.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:03 I quickly packed my bag, actually, packed my panda, put my bag, and went and joined her under the bed, and then I wanted to know when we're going home. But we had to wait a few weeks for that.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:14 Unfortunately, winning the war didn't mean a straight path home for these islanders, this community. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting. It wasn't even clear that they'd ever see Guernsey again. Just like the path into the camp, the path out was long and winding.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:31 When we went on to well, because we were relieved slightly before Guernsey, and we were out on the camp listening to the speaker box as when Churchill came out. I remember listening to him. Obviously, we didn't have a clue who Churchill was and all like that, but obviously our parents were very, very taken by it. To be standing in Germany free, hearing that was something I do remember.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:03 And uh our dear Channel Island are also to be free today.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:10 We were rescued by the French Moroccan troops, which uh they're a bit, you know, surly. You wouldn't speak to them. They don't go near them. And then the Americans came, and that's the first time we've tasted chocolate and had chewing gum, and I'll never forget them. They're the first soldiers I saw smile ever. So I'll always remember them and thank them. They took us around the town and then brought us back up. It was interesting to see it.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:40 So at the time of the liberation of the camp, were were you sort of swarmed by by Allied troops then?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:48 And they came and Well, we would the people who liberated us were a French tank squadron who made sure that they dealt with the Hitler youth camp below us first, and then turned up. But there were French around, and then very quickly American American soldiers were around. The end of the war was happening around us. Russians were coming in from one side, French were coming in from there, and Americans from there. I think I believe the the French moved on, but a little aside, when we were allowed out into Biverak to see the town, we were told and given a red, white and blue Union Jack to put on shirts. This was to make sure that people we were not Germans when we went to the camp, because there were a lot of French troops who were African French, West African French British. They could be inclined to shoot anybody who looked like a German. These symbols for them to be recognized. But luckily I think they moved on within a two or three weeks.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:01 Do you remember the feeling in the camp?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:04 There was there was an excitement about it. And we were very quickly moved on from the camp, but not immediately sent from Germany. We were now we sent to p a holding camp on an airfield uh where the Americans and Canadians were. It was a grass airstrip, which is now much more, about forty miles away from Biberak, which is now a Orionair. That's why I understand it.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:40 And it was here at this airstrip that each family had to wait with baited breath, hoping and praying for the news that it would finally be their turn to fly.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:50 I drove out of that camp in a lorry when I was that age, and they took us to this holding uh it had tents, and they wrote up who was flying. You know, you you you were given numbers when you're gonna fly and all to do with your name and everything like that. And we were the last one of the last planes to go out because W. And I used to go down every day and look at the notice board and see if it was our turn to fly. I wanted to fly. And um anyway, we did this day. We um got on a plane. It was a Dakota, and it had parachutes hanging from it. And I sat with my dad on a bench, and my mum had my brother, and it was an electrical storm we threw through. And I think that affected my hearing and my left ear. I had trouble ever since that. Anyway, then of course we went to Burnley. That's the last time I was in Biberak and Germany, and then of course, as Alan said, we drove her over the line inadvertently. I couldn't have to get out. Talk about flying, put your foot down Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:27:02 It was interesting to me to hear how this flight could have been what caused my grandma's hearing loss, how this one event so many years ago had a ripple effect throughout her life, not just emotionally but physically too, just as it did for Janet, who, as we discovered previously, has no lining in her throat due to malnutrition. Shortly we'll explore the lifelong impact the camp has had on the deportees and the lasting legacy of this piece of history. But first, back to Liberation Day and the moment when the flight that grandma was waiting so patiently for had arrived.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:36 We ended up in Burnley, yeah, staying with a grocer. He got a tablecloth out. I asked if it was somebody's birthday because Mrs. Godwin had a cloth she used to put out for people's birthdays. They were nice people. That's where I thought I'd stay. I thought that was my home until I realised there, and then we were told we're going to Guernsey. So that's what I remember.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:02 Ralph left the airstrip with the Canadian Air Force on a propeller-driven aircraft called the Douglas DC-3, which was used during the war to transport paratroopers and glider-borne troops behind enemy lines. We flew from there to North Holt in London. So Burnley, London, the deportees ended up all over the place. They didn't just return to Guernsey, they were split up and sent to many different parts of the UK. Janet ended up in the south.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:32 We stayed in in Devon because my father had an aunt and uncle who who had retired to Devon, and rather than coming directly back to Guernsey, we stayed for a short period in Devon.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:49 And for some people, the UK became their permanent home, and they never did come back to the island. Some had lost everything, while others may have had family elsewhere or simply. Wanted a fresh start. For others, well, not everyone survived the journey back. Others were too weak to travel immediately and may have died in medical facilities in France or Germany. And then there are those who had died in the camp while the war was still raging. Did people die in the camp while you were there?

SPEAKER_05 1:29:21 Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't remember offhand how many, but quite a few. Yeah. And they honour their memory the same day as the 23rd of April, where we honour our day over here. So at the same time they're doing their service and we're doing our service here.

SPEAKER_09 1:29:40 But many, many deportees were keen to return home, as you might imagine. But three years on, the island felt very different to them.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:51 It's it's strange actually because we came back by boat and I wondered what my family looked like. I pictured princesses and people like that, and no, quite not quite like that. Poor little devils. They were thin as well. We were very thin and they were thin. So they'd been through a lot over here as well. I remember that and then going up to live with my grandma, because that's the only reason we could well we could get back because we had to establish, we had a place to come to, apparently. And I remember being my grandma and then going down to live in Ruth Isabel.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:24 Yes, so apparently there's something quite amusing. When we got back, my cot was ready for me, you know, kind of in in in our house where we lived. Uh but unfortunately I'd grown, so so I didn't fit into it. But you know, the I I don't really remember, and just that I mean I had a very happy childhood in in Cobo, and and one thing my parents wanted to send me to a private school here in St. Peterport, and I just refused to go. A bus used to come and stop, and I'd refused to get on it. And so in the end, they gave up, and I was allowed to go to the local school, the Cattle school, with the local children, and that for me was fine. And uh, you know, that helped me, you know, to to get back into the local community and make friends, and uh that was the effect, I you know.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:26 And while the children were able to bounce back, kids are resilient, the weight of what had happened seems to have weighed very heavily on the shoulders of the adults. Janet says her mum was never the same again.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:39 I was told that my mother originally was a very, you know, loved singing, she played the piano beautifully, all this type of thing was very popular over here in the island, and when she came back she was a different person. She wouldn't play the piano anymore. Well, you know, you can understand that when you've been been under threat for two and a half years, wondering what's going to happen to you. Um if I remember correctly, whatever, you know, things I've heard. There were Jewish people who who came to Bibarak and they were then, you know, sent off on trains. You know, it was just a stopping point prior to the extermination. Her brother, who managed to escape Vienna as well, and he came over to the UK with the Free Czech army. And they obviously kind of met up again after the war. And the first time we went over to visit him, he actually had bought a piano for my mother because he remembered her as somebody who was never, you know, kind of far from a piano, and she just she just wouldn't sit down and touch it. I mean she changed apparently, you know, from what I hear, she was very, very different after to what she was before.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:56 And is that something that carried with her for the rest of her life?

SPEAKER_07 1:32:59 Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:59 Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:33:00 You know, she wasn't uh a happy I I think it just you know, stemmed enjoying things basically.

SPEAKER_09 1:33:09 And through all of this change, some who returned felt like strangers in their own homes. Another deportee is a woman called Jill Oliver. Jill is ninety, so she was seven when she boarded the cargo ship, and ten when she was liberated from the camp. She now lives in the USA, and that's due in part to the feeling she and her family felt on arriving back to Guernsey after those three long years.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:35 It was not long before we went to England. My dad's car was stolen, his boat, he had a sailboat, even the head was removed. Furniture in the house was all. My mother had fitted furniture made in because they were quite wealthy in the island, and that was totally robbed from them. All the fitted furniture were pulled out of the walls and put in one room. At least it was put in one room. Now we have no proof whether it was the Germans or the people on the island that did that. And Dad could not start his practice again. He had a I was born in 39RK, and that's where he had his practice. Again, it was a matter of them accepting us. My dad started two of his sons in the policy with up in a business, the jewelry business. That got them started, but my dad couldn't do his dentistry anymore there, so he went we all went to England and he associated because he was much older, and to start doing another dental business was too hard on him. So he really didn't have a good life, my poor dad. But he loved America. He did end up coming and he's buried here.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:03 And Jill's was not an isolated experience, as Dr. Jilly Carr came to find out through her research.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:10 One of the things that I realized right at the end of the book was the story of people coming back to the Channel Islands and finding their houses were looted, somebody else was living in their house, their business, their shop had been taken over by someone else. Basically, people came back to find they'd lost everything. And, you know, the kids had lost out on their education, people had lost out on earning money. And I think that this these sorts of anecdotes are known and they're known to have happened to a few people. But when I was doing my research, I found that it seems to have happened to everybody, that everybody came back to find, almost everybody came back to find their houses had been looted, that their house had been destroyed, that they basically had to come back and arrive back destitute and had to build up again. And I think this is much more common than has ever been acknowledged before. I think before it was assumed to have happened to a minority, but I think it was actually the majority.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:20 Now, one thing that changed dramatically after the war was, of course, the language. In pre-war Guernsey, many people spoke Genesie or Guernsey French. Although its use had declined over the years, around 25% of Guernsey's population still spoke it as their primary language. Many more understood it but preferred to use English. But as Matt Lucas explains, by the end of the war, its decline accelerated.

SPEAKER_10 1:36:47 Language-wise, it's not quite the death knell of the language, but it's a big thing. Because obviously a huge amount of young people go, they're the future of the language, they have several years in the UK. They're not they're not speaking the language, they come back, and you can see a sharp decline in the use of the language. It's the same in Jersey, of course, to 1945. So certainly there's a a big impact in the language, big impact then in the uh the culture. You know, I'd said at the start how life hadn't really changed much here for hundreds of years, obviously there's little bits you had. But between after 1945, you see there is a quite a change, certainly in in culture when it look comes to the language. These young people have been away 1940 to 45, whether they were in camps or whether they were evacuated to British cities. So when they come back, there's an attitude that people aren't quite the same again here. How has the land changed? Well, you can just drive around Guernsey and you will see the huge amount of concrete that the Germans are put in around the coast. To start with, those mines are there, the barbed wire is there, so it takes you know a few years for all that to be cleared, and obviously the ground to be uh sculpted and made to look nicer, scrap metal drives uh cutting up the German guns that are still here, and then getting used to to island life, so it changes a considerable amount. Go to somewhere like Alderney, which obviously the civilians are vast majority evacuated in 1940, they come back, um Alderney's really in ruins, it's it's completely wrecked. The Germans have taken everything out of the houses, anything they could burn in the end, roofs have gone, doors it's uh uh in the houses. Alderney is an absolute mess. And obviously you have uh a much darker history in Alderney. But it is it's quite different when the civilians get back. And as I said, for those children, five years away, five years for an adult is is quite something, but for a child, your formative years the impact is felt and it will be really ever since, subconsciously as well as consciously. You go through a traumatic experience like that, it will affect you, but it will also affect future generations. They've done quite a few studies of people that were in places like Auschwitz, and that trauma does get passed on in all sorts of different ways: food, freedom, things that you just really wouldn't think about. Now, of course, it's more of a tourist destination to do with that, but for the locals, 1945, 46, 47, 48, most of them weren't thinking that. They just wanted their old lives back and to just get rid of the thoughts of the occupation.

SPEAKER_09 1:39:58 Now, this is just one of the lasting legacies of the war on Guernsey. We'll dig into other ways in which the Guernsey deportees' lives were forever altered by their experience and why 50 years later they decided to make a return trip to the camp where they were once interned. And then when you went back to Biberak, what was that like?

SPEAKER_05 1:40:28 I think it's uh uh terrible. I felt terrible.

SPEAKER_09 1:40:38 It's 2012, sixty-seven years since the end of the war. By now the face of Guernsey has truly shifted, having established itself as a financial hub. The site of bunkers and fortifications on the island's coastlines now just a tourist's curiosity. But it is in 2012 that the deportees decide to go back, to return to Biberak.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:03 And I think my parents, I honour and respect them, and that's why I went back to Germany. And I that's it really, just to do that for them. And all those years ago I went back, I couldn't go back again. I wanted to pay them homage, basically. So I don't know how they did it, these people. They're brave parents. Very brave.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:24 But it wasn't just about paying respect to her parents that brought grandma back to this place that she could barely speak about for decades. This was something she needed to do for her.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:35 I went with Alan because I couldn't go in a coach. And um we drove up the hill and he said you didn't walk all this way. I said, Yeah. He said it was just up here, I said no, round the corner. So we had a long way to walk up the hill. And I supped outside and said, I don't know if I can do it. Anyway, uh I said, Well, I've come here all this way, and I'll regret it. I thought to myself, you know, if I go back, and I really want to honour my dad and mum. So anyway, we went in and I just stood there and cried. Just couldn't move. And um anyway, I thought, nope, I'm here now, and so I stayed and went to the museum and saw the cars that I remembered and then the dress uniforms they used to wear, the Germans and stuff. And um that's the last time I've been back.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:32 This was a visceral experience. Judging by the look on grandma's face as she told me what it was like, visiting Biberak was intensely emotional, difficult but necessary. But it wasn't just important for her. Grandpa too learnt a lot about his wife there in Germany.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:50 What we haven't said was that although we went back to Biberac, we couldn't actually stay in the town. Jill didn't want to stay there, so we stayed in outside in Bacau, bad Bacau. So we just used to drive in there every day. I wouldn't say I was unaware of the trauma that she was going through, but she kept it to herself, very much so. I was um quite amazed first thing I that amazed me really was I'd heard her telling about her walking up the hill from Bebrack Town up to the camp, and she had described the the walking and all that sort of thing. And um when we drove up there in the car, she actually remembered exactly where the camp was. So I knew that that was a memory that was her memory and not some something anyone had told her, because she said, Oh no, we just go round the corner, it's at the top. And of course now that camp is a police training academy.

SPEAKER_09 1:43:46 A police training academy, a far cry from the internment camp it had once been. And the people, well, they were welcoming, friendly, apologetic even. Going back, grandma says Biberac was completely different.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:01 They'd re-landscaped it, so because it's a police academy, but the only thing that they had saved was the clock tower from the administration block. And that clock tower, I said to somebody years ago, Sabine, I think, it'd be nice if they kept it. You know, that's the only thing that's left standing, and they left standing in their grounds. It's been done up, I think it's in a museum or in the grounds still, but they've at least they preserved it, so that's the only thing that's remains of the camp.

SPEAKER_09 1:44:34 For you, um, did some of the memories come flooding back when you went to Biberak? Did you s picture yourself again at the age of four or five in certain places?

SPEAKER_05 1:44:45 I did, yeah. Especially um standing where my old barrack was. And um that was upsetting. Because the last time I was there was when I was five and a half, and I was with my mum and dad, and my brother, uh, who's no longer here either. That's what really upset me. But um I knew I had to do it for them, so yeah. That's what I did. You do it for anybody, you know. And you honor your mother and father. Because they put up so much, I mean, young people like that, helping us to get through it.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:28 Grandma mentioned her brother there, Keith, who died a number of years ago. I wanted to know how Biberac impacted him.

SPEAKER_05 1:45:35 Badly. He was never the same. He um he hated the Germans, he wouldn't talk about them. We laugh we used to laugh sometimes about things that happened, but he was very, very anti, so therefore he wouldn't talk about it. That was it really, it upset him emotionally, and he wasn't very well with it as well, so it didn't help him know to talk about it. It affected him greatly. I think, um, from what I understand, when a police came knocking at the door, my my brother was with my mother, and um there's a man in uniform, was a German actually, not police, and I think that shook Keith. I think he's frightened at the shouting and commanding, and I think that helped to make him not very well. He stammered badly. That's in Germany he started stammering. For the rest of his life he was like that.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:33 So it wasn't even just the time in the camp, it was a lasting thing all the way through.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:38 Yeah, it was yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:40 His stammer was brought on, you think, by the trauma.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:44 Yes, yeah, the traumatic experience of going and you know, meeting this man at the door, commanding man, and I think it's the whole experience of before and after in the camp and afterwards.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:57 Because he was obviously a bit older than you, so I guess it it hit him harder in a way.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:01 Yeah. I don't know what he remembered of it because we never talked about it.

SPEAKER_09 1:47:07 Keith or Uncle Keith, as I call him, suffered greatly, and for him it was better not to talk about his time at Biberak. But for grandma, spending just a week out there with Grandpa profoundly changed things for her, and in a way, unburdened her.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:23 We stayed out in Bachbaden, I think we were there for a week, roughly, and that was interesting as well. The man that owned the hotel, I think he's his father was connected to Biberak sometime in the war, and he apologised lots of times for many. Yeah, you know, they're they're nice people. I met some nice teenagers in Bible. They they were the same, they they couldn't do enough to help you, so it all it had changed a lot, but the only thing that I really enjoyed is um um I was asked to go to a monastery somewhere. I didn't mind going, so I went to that, but they I'd like to have the freedom to say no, because they'd bossed me around for so many years, and I did say no on a couple occasions, and I thought, got ya. I thought, I thought this was lovely to have freedom of choice, you can't take that away from you. Definitely, you can't beat it. That is total freedom.

SPEAKER_09 1:48:36 So, although this was a tough experience that challenged grandma in many ways, it also did her a world of good.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:44 Yes, it did. It did me a lot of good, and it's like um a chip off your shoulder, not not like that, you know, but mentally, and I thought, yes, I've done what I had to do, that's the last chapter I'll do. But it's not, you see, because it goes on and on. I mean, Ralph has come here today and Janet um to talk to you, and it does carry on. And I think it will if um youngsters remember it and not forget and try to put themselves probably not in our position, but uh to understand, you know, and to realise what we went through to get back home.

SPEAKER_09 1:49:24 Did it start another chapter for you?

SPEAKER_05 1:49:26 Yes. And I'm still here. It's chapters ago, and I think this will be the last chapter, but as you said, it's um it gets easier, you can handle it more, but it's still very poignant. And uh I talk about it, but I won't be able to do much talking about it for the next couple of days or so. But it's easier to remember because I'm at more at peace with myself.

SPEAKER_09 1:49:55 Do you think the journey ever ends?

SPEAKER_05 1:49:59 No. Don't think it does. The journey never ends until the day you die, then it carries on somewhere else. I believe you learn all the time. You learn something about different people. All the time in your life, you learn something. And uh but I feel um now I can um I want to reach outward outwardly to people that are hurting. And I like to talk to them and really reassure them that everything's alright, if that makes sense. It's that's how I feel. People talk to me when I play batonk and about whatever they're suffering and stuff, and I I I really want to help them. Probably that's and that's a good thing. So you never stop learning about people and yourself.

SPEAKER_09 1:50:51 So, this welcome reception, this newfound connection, it has all fostered some amazing relationships, a moment of reconciliation that paid. Paved the way for a much needed shift, which, as Jilly Carr explains, made a real difference in the lives of the deportees.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:08 I think for some it's been transformational. When we went in 2006, the local rector, the pastor, gave a sermon in the church where he apologised for what had happened during the war. And we all knew it wasn't, you know, he wasn't born then, it wasn't his fault, but he was he was apologizing on behalf of the Germans, the German nation, whatever. And even though you know, it wasn't it wasn't like it was an apology coming from the Chancellor or the leader or anyone like that, but it was just coming from him, and many of the deportees started to cry, and I cried as well, because I could just feel their how they were feeling. For some, hearing that was so important for they themselves to come to terms with what had happened in the past. And one man afterwards went up to the pastor and shook his hand and said, I didn't want to come to Biberach. I, you know, I've always hated Germans and hated, you know, my life has been really badly impacted by being in the camp. But let me shake your hand. Thank you for saying that. That's really meant the world to me. And he came back again the following year. And I think being able to face that past because these the camp remains in the memory as a place covered in barbed wire with guards in uniform, with dirt and filth and not enough food and all of these things. And to see it again in the present, invariably in the summer, no barbed wire, welcoming people, lots of food, lots of kindness, flowers, it can act in some way, I think, to replace the dark images in your head. And it can be very um, I always say that that reconciliation is a process, it's not a it's not a moment, although it might have been a moment for that man, but it can be a long journey and it's something that has to happen individually for each person. It's not a matter of the bailiff standing up and saying we are reconciled, it's a matter of each individual person feeling that they've reached a place of healing, or whatever you want to call it inside themselves, where they can say, actually, these people are all right. And I remember Tom Tom Wenfrey saying to me when I I think it was around about his 90th birthday, I was chatting to him, and he said, you know, he now counts the people of Bibrak among his among his friends. And he he said, you know, when he first went to Biberak, he held a lot of was it hatred, maybe not hatred, a lot of resentment in his heart. And he went to the school to give a talk to local school children. He said, How can I hold resentment against these kitties? You know, there it's not their fault, it's nothing to do with them. And I think that the process of going, the process of experiencing it today, of meeting people, of receiving kindness and warmth, and sometimes an apology can go a very, very long way. And I remember the following year when I went to Wertzack, and the pastor stood up in the church service and said, I'm not going to apologize because it's too late for that. My apology would be meaningless. And I thought to myself, No, you're wrong. You're wrong. I think people still need to hear it, and maybe they need to hear it again and again and again, because that shows that you mean it.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:29 What this underscored to me was the true value of an apology.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:34 Absolutely, absolutely. I've seen it for myself, and I and I've seen how much it moves people and how much people need to hear it. They need to hear it. Even if it's 80 years later, and it it can be transformational.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:50 As you'll have gathered from hearing the differing stories of Ralph and Grandma and Janet, that these stories are passed down in fragments rather than in a complete form. They differ from person to person, begging the question: what can we define as historically accurate? In many cases, Gilly had to interview family members because it wasn't possible to speak to the person who was deported themselves as they'd passed away before she began her research. And Gilly says this is a big problem when it comes to remembering what happened.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:22 I think collections get passed down, collections of objects, sometimes they get thrown away. But whenever I interviewed the people who had not been there, they did not have the stories. Quite remarkably so. And they would often have if they did have stories, they were inaccurate, very incomplete, they were told wrong. And so very early on I knew not to I could follow up leads that they might have suggested and to find out the true story, especially as there were still people I could still ask who were still alive, but very much the stories passed down were rarely accurate. I'm not saying they were all wholly inaccurate, but I'm saying that they had not been remembered correctly. But they had the collections of objects, and so many times I would say to the grandchild or the child who had inherited these objects, I'd say, What's the story behind this? And they would say, Oh, I don't know. Oh, it was made in such and such a camp. And perhaps they themselves had not asked the story about objects. Or I think um what I'm seeing, I think, is that if I can refer back to those who were sent to concentration camps and labor camps from the Channel Islands, they did not tell the next generation what had happened. They really didn't speak to their, it's mostly men who were sent away, not wholly, but mostly men. They would never tell their wives of what happened to them, they would never tell their children, they would not want to pass that horror onto those who love them. And I think there might be an element of that of wanting to protect the next generation by not really wanting to tell them too much. I think it's it's great that your grandmother has told you her stories, and I hope that you'll remember them and remember them correctly. But for the most part, the next generation might have the objects, but not the stories. And I think by being able to write my book, I can tell those stories. And when you've seen many collections, you start to see repetitions and patterns, and you start to say, okay, well, I've seen those sorts of slippers before. I know who made them. I've definitely seen one of those engraved mugs before. Oh, they've got some hair colours and curlers, I know the story there. Oh, they've got one of them, yes, I know about those. And you start to see a lot of a lot of repetition. And so hopefully the story of the objects is told in the book, such that people coming along with new collections might be able to slot it right in and to say, okay, I I see what those stories were.

SPEAKER_09 1:57:49 Speaking of stories being passed down, there's one story Grandma shared with me long before I thought about making this podcast that has really stuck with me. And I think it's one of the most defining moments in her journey. How when she was at a wedding in Majorca, she saw a young couple cradling their baby, just a tiny thing, and every time the baby saw her, it would smile. It seemed to have taken a real liking to her. At some point, the parents let her hold the child, and it was only then that she found out that they were from Germany. And it was at that moment, seeing this innocent child and its parents, that she realized she couldn't hold on to her hatred of the Germans anymore. It was a moment of realization that it wasn't the fault of the new and upcoming generations. They didn't do this to her. It was then that she knew it was time to let go of some of that deep-seated anger that she'd held on to for so many years. Now, one piece of the lasting legacy of all of this is the German fortifications that still adorn the coastlines of Guernsey. Bunkers, gun emplacements, tunnels, observation towers. For many, these are sites of historical importance or mere curiosities. But for Jill Oliver, they are a constant reminder of a past she'd sooner forget.

SPEAKER_06 1:59:13 I wish they'd get rid of the cannons and the bunkers. Because it's such a peaceful island. It's a beautiful island. That reminds you of death. Who wants to be reminded of death? And look at Alderney. Have you been to Alderney? Oh, that was so cruel. So cruel.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:49 This to me is a story that spans the generations because it speaks to something much much bigger. The power of freedom and the pain of having it ripped away. It's a lesson that we need to learn from. And with everything that's going on in the world right now, it's a lesson we need to hear more urgently than ever.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:08 Coming away from Germany, you realise how precious peace and freedom. Freedom of body, freedom of will is very important. And that's one of the things you learn. And I I would hope that people can learn that without going to wars. Except you've got people that want lots of power, greed, and strength. But hopefully one day people will learn.

SPEAKER_09 2:00:40 A recent development and a nod to the lasting legacy of the deportations are the Stolperstein or stumbling stones that have been erected. Fifteen in Guernsey and 20 in Jersey. My grandma was part of the steering group that brought them to the island.

SPEAKER_10 2:00:54 And these commemorate people that were involved during the occupation and involved in resistance activities. It's not resistance generally as we imagine. A lot of them died in various German prisons and German camps. Again, it's quite different what happens compared to what happens later. And some of them did survive. Frank Faller will be a very famous example of someone who was a a resister, if you think of the Guernsey, um, the Underground News Service, etc. And they're really all over the island, those uh fifteen. It's a very interesting topic that we need to you could do a whole uh podcast on that alone.

SPEAKER_09 2:01:41 And maybe one day I will. Among the people named on the stones laid in Guernsey are three Jewish women who were all deported and later died in Auschwitz concentration camp. And also being honoured is Janet's mother, Elizabeth. Now I want to leave you with this lasting thought. For anyone who's ever been afraid to share their story or wondered whether they should.

SPEAKER_05 2:02:07 I think um you've got to have the strength to do it, and the courage to be able to tell the truth. That's what I live by, really.