The writing of history is akin to a relay race: the baton is handed on to the next researcher who comes to the task with new energy and determination. Each researcher builds on the insights and material of predecessors, revising, adding and, in turn, bringing their own interpretation and understanding to events. To my great satisfaction, this book – first published in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the islands – proved a springboard for further research into this period of the islands’ history.
One man in particular took on the challenges thrown down in my final chapter. Frederick Cohen, then president of Jersey’s Jewish Congregation, began the painstaking research into the lives of all the Channel Island Jews during the Occupation which resulted in the publication of a monograph, The Jews in the Channel Islands during the German Occupation. After years of work, he has pieced together the circumstances of their lives and what happened to them.
One of the most extraordinary stories he unearthed was that of Albert Bedane. On Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2004), a small ceremony took place in the Occupation Tapestry Gallery of the Jersey Museum in St Helier. The Bailiff, the head of the Jersey government, unveiled a cabinet displaying the certificate and medal awarded to Albert Bedane, an islander, recognising him as a ‘Righteous Among the Gentiles’ by the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Centre in Israel.
Albert Bedane makes a rather unlikely hero. As rumour has it, he was something of a ‘ladies man’, a physiotherapist and masseur to the island farmers. But for two-and-a-half years, he hid a Dutch Jewess, Mary Richardson, from the German authorities and Jersey police. He also offered refuge to escaped Russian forced labourers. If he had been caught, he would have been deported and would probably have died in a concentration camp (the fate of fellow islander, Louisa Gould). After the war, he was not one to blow his own trumpet and when he died in Jersey in 1980, few attended his funeral. By the time I began my research in the early nineties, no one mentioned Bedane’s name to me – he merits only a footnote in my history. Now he is an island hero and his story is even featured in study packs produced by Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust.
Nor was Bedane the only islander to shelter a Jew. Dorothea Weber hid Hedwig Bercu for over 18 months. The risks were enormous, and the difficulty of feeding such guests considerable. Bercu and Weber were helped by a German officer: an extraordinary story of friendship across enemy lines. Bercu subsequently married the officer and moved with him to Germany where they raised a family.
But while Bedane and Weber’s bravery has given Jersey reason to be proud, the new material uncovered by other researchers such as Paul Sanders (The Ultimate Sacrifice) and David Fraser (The Jews in the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law 1940-45) has raised more difficult questions about the conduct of the islands’ governments. Was there more they could have done to protect individual islanders, in particular the Jews? Why did they put such effort into protecting the Freemasons but not the Jews? Why did they agree to the German decision to make the possession of a wireless a criminal offence – an agreement that led the island authorities down the slippery slope towards collaboration? Their handing over to the Germans of islanders caught with wirelesses sometimes had tragic consequences.
The most egregious example was the case of Frederick Page, an English-born First World War veteran who was prosecuted for listening to an illegal wireless and, under a particularly harsh sentence, deported to Germany where he died of ill-treatment in 1945. More evidence has emerged in the last few years that some island officials were aware of the moral dilemmas they faced. They justified their actions on the grounds that they had to consider the greater good of the island populations, and that on a few occasions that required the sacrifice of individuals. The debate over the merits of this policy will continue; some historians will point to the decision of the Danish government to resign rather than implement the German order to deport the Jews; others will argue that the island authorities acted as a buffer, protecting islanders from the full force of direct German rule. Yet others will argue that this is a discredited position – one used in the sixties to defend the behaviour of the Vichy government in Occupied France but which has now been exposed as having little basis in contemporary records.
One of the most difficult aspects of the Occupation for the islanders to come to terms with was the close involvement of island officials in implementing the German orders against the tiny Jewish community. The new material shows that in Jersey at least, officials attempted to mitigate some of the anti-semitic measures: they refused to implement the wearing of gold stars; through an elaborate subterfuge, they Aryanised businesses by ‘selling’ them but returned them to their rightful Jewish owners after the war. But that is only one small part of the picture. Other documents give new detail of how island officials made no attempt to protect the few Jews on the islands. They quizzed frightened individuals about their Jewish ancestry, and imposed strict curfews on Jews – they were only allowed to shop between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. Jewish businesses were closed down and families struggled to survive without their livelihood.
The Jews were terrified. On Jersey, two committed suicide, one was admitted to a mental asylum where he died, the cause of death recorded as ‘maniacal exhaustion, insanity’. A Guernsey Jew, Elisabet Duquemin remembered, ‘every day for a year-and-a-half until I was deported to a German concentration camp, I lived in fear and terror. I was in trauma all the time. Every day I was frightened, and did not know if they would take me away, or my baby daughter, or my husband.’ Elisabet, her eighteen-month-old daughter and her husband were all deported but mercifully survived.
What makes the documents so painful to read is the deference of these frightened individuals and their naive faith in the island authorities. Many of them made no attempt to hide their Jewish background and some attended the island government offices to volunteer information on their grandparents’ ethnicity. One, Esther Lloyd, even did so erroneously and found herself deported to an internment camp where she fought to correct her mistake: ‘never shall I be honest again. If I had not declared myself this wouldn’t have happened’ she wrote in a diary.
This is the kind of material which makes the Channel Islands’ wartime history such a unique and vital part of Britain’s Holocaust history. The level of petty detail pursued by island officials calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s phrase, the ‘banality of evil’. It was small actions on the part of thousands of local police and town officials all over Europe, unquestioningly obeying authority, which had terrible, evil consequences. What has always made the Channel Islands’ record so important is that it punctures that British complacent assumption of a national immunity to this combination of amoral bureaucracy and anti-semitism.
For many countries occupied by Germany in the Second World War, facing up honestly to their wartime record has been a slow, piecemeal and painful process, because communities were so bitterly divided. What is evident since I published The Model Occupation in 1995 is how far Jersey has come. Key to that process has been the leadership of the Bailiff, Sir Phillip Bailhache. Born after the war, he has brought a new understanding of the imperative of accepting the ‘warts and all’ history of the Occupation as a way to shape his ideal of a ‘socially inclusive identity’ for Jersey in the twenty-first century. His innumerable speeches delivered at Holocaust Memorial Day services and other official occasions in recent years show clearly a man who has thought deeply about the issues. While he vigorously defends the island authorities, he also acknowledges openly the ‘moral ambiguities’ which confronted many islanders in the Occupation and which brought out both the ‘worst and the best of human nature.’
Jersey now has a prominent memorial on the harbour quayside to the 22 islanders who died as a result of imprisonment in German prisons and concentration camps. In 1998, the first memorial service for all the islands’ Occupation Jews was held in the Jersey synagogue; it was attended by the heads of the three island governments. A plaque has been put up on Jersey to their memory. A website, launched in 2003 and dedicated to the Occupation (www.occupationmemorial.org), carries information and photographs of each individual’s story. Schoolchildren in Jersey are no longer just taught about the ‘guns and tin-hats’, but about the suffering of many islanders and of the thousands of forced labourers brought to build the huge concrete fortifications on the island – many of whom died from exhaustion and malnutrition.
While Jersey has done much to face up to its past, Guernsey has been more reluctant: a small plaque was finally put up in 2001 to the memory of the three Jews deported from the island who died in concentration camps. But at the 1998 memorial service for all the islands’ Jews, the short speech of the Bailiff of Guernsey, Sir Graham Dorey, referred only to the fact that the Jews on Guernsey were foreign-born and their deportation was implemented by Germans without any reference to the role of the island authorities. There are other gaps due more to indifference and apathy than any active wish to forget. There is still no memorial on the site of the SS Sylt camp in Alderney. The concrete ruins which once housed many of the forced labourers – including many French Jews and German political prisoners who died there from ill-treatment – are barely visible under the bracken. As the Bailiff of Jersey himself said in his 1998 address, it was the carelessness and indifference of people which enabled the Holocaust to happen, and it is to combat those characteristics that the duty of remembrance lies so heavily on ensuing generations.
Madeleine Bunting
January 2004
The Ultimate Sacrifice Paul Sanders. Jersey Museums Service 1998
The Jews in the Channel Islands during the German Occupation 1940–45
Frederick Cohen. Jersey Heritage Trust 2000
The Jews in the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law David Fraser, Sussex Academic Press 2000