This Liberation weekend we took a walk par les c’mîns d’St Ouën. We parked up at Les Laveurs and wandered along the coast toward Sands then tip-toed through the marram grass (blianc jontchet), speckled with sea-pink Jersey thrift (iliets d’mielle), to cross the main road and join the lanes. It was an overcast yet bright Sunday matîn with a welcome warmth in the unseasonably strong breeze. A large red mechanical potato harvester was making its way slowly along un clios d’patates off Chemin du Moulin. I remembered man péthe telling me that when they were children, he and his brothers had walked this road regularly, knocking on doors to sell the crop of parsley (pèrsi) they had grown in a small field off Route de l’Etacq.
Lé pèrsi was also one of the crops man grand-péthe produced after la Dgèrre, along with du brécolîn, both for export to the UK. In addition, he cultivated twenty-five thousand pliantes dé tonmates and tchînze vrégies (fifteen vergees) d’patates for the local market. I have written before about Pops’ four-month prison term in the winter of 1942, followed by his internment in Germany. His resulting deteriorating health meant the bulk of this work eventually fell to his children. Man péthe remembers Pops’ strength and determination to carry on; the strips of rubber cut from wellington boots strapped to his knees, so he could drag himself up the cotîl behind the fork to pick up the freshly dug potatoes.
When they were deported, the journey to Biberach by train took three days and nights. Ma grand’-méthe often recounted how she had not expected such a long journey and had had to shake her baby son’s nappies out of the train windows whenever he needed changing. I watched the potato pickers standing in the back of the harvester deftly sorting the seed from the crop and remembered the advice Pops and Granny were given on arrival at Biberach from those who had been deported ahead of them. ‘They told us that if the Germans gave us some boiled potatoes we should take them even if we didn’t want them, as they would have liked the extra food.’ For six weeks, mes grand-pathents lived on soup twice a day, before being transported seventeen miles south to Bad Wurzach.
I remember as a child that whenever there was a thunderstorm Granny would shudder and recall her terror at the sound of thunder echoing around Schloss Wurzach, the huge baroque German châté in which they spent the next three and a half years. I have marvelled online at its opulent ceiling paintings and polished sandstone staircases adorned with statues of cherubs. The elegance and beauty of the building are at such stark odds with the experience of its prisoners, who were reduced to scraping dirt from tables with broken bricks and sharing the kitchens with mice and rats. Its grand corridors and high ceilings made for a damp, cold living space tinged with the smell of poor drainage and inadequate sanitation.
Lé mangi continued to be scarce and in his memoirs Pops recalls stealing des patates and coal briquettes from the stores of the neighbouring Hitler Youth camp and smuggling them in the lining of his coat (câsaque). ‘We would then wait until we had enough for each person in our room to have a potato and cook them in the ashes under the fire.’
We ended our circular walk with a visit to the Channel Island Military Museum, housed in a bunker next to Lewis Tower. Although I had visited many of the concrete bunkers dotted along the north-west coast of the island, I had never been inside this one before and was surprised at the quantity of Otchupâtion artefacts and memorabilia packed into the glass fronted displays in each room. The collection is vast and wide ranging, from guns (armes), missiles (fîsé), handcuffs (minnottes) and German postage stamps to road signs, footwear, bicycles (bikes) and soap (savon). One display contains the contents of a typical red cross parcel: tins of spam, sardines (sardinnes), cheese (fronmage), and butter (beurre); packets of prunes (preunes), raisins (raisîns), tea (thée), tobacco (p’tun) and matches (alleunmettes); and, of course, powdered milk. For Granny and Pops, who had their two-month-old son to feed, the milk rations did not stretch far enough:
‘There was a field along one side of the camp where we were allowed to play football twice a week. There was a nunnery along one side of the castle and French prisoners of war worked for the nuns doing their gardening and growing their vegetables. They had a huge vegetable patch alongside the football field. I would sit down with my back towards the Frenchmen and pretend to be talking to Richard, my baby. As I could speak French I would be talking to the French man behind me and I would arrange to get some eggs that he would take from the nuns. I would watch for him to leave work in the evening, all the people were in the castle as we weren’t allowed out after dark. We would then watch for the German guard to pass, as the guards went around the camp all day and night. The Frenchman had to walk alongside our camp to get to his sleeping quarters and the guards would let him in his room. It was then I would run out and throw the cigarettes from my Red Cross parcels over the barbed wire fence. He would then pass me some eggs through the wire on the end of a rake. We got quite a few eggs this way and it was an important part of my baby’s nutrition as we beat one into his milk each day. The Germans told us we would be shot if were were caught in the yard after curfew, but I never found out if they would carry out their threat as I was never caught.’
In one display case is an original copy of an ‘evacuation’ letter. I try to decipher the faded typewritten words and wonder at the horror mes grand-pathents and so may others must have felt on receiving such instructions. Above are drawings and paintings by camp internees of Biberach and Wurzach, hand-made Christmas and birthday cards and letters on writing paper headed with the instructions: ‘Write very clearly on the lines to avoid delay in censorship. No enclosures allowed.’
Every inch of the walls in this bunker mûsée is covered in posters, official notices and black and white photographs. Haunting images of the old Forum cinema draped in swastikas, anti-tank obstacles (hedgehogs) on the beach at L’Êta and the Nazi flag flying from the Pomme d’Or Hotel. Chilling notices about people put to death for owning homing pigeons. Orders regarding curfews, black out regulations, and the prohibition of alcoholic spirits, wireless receivers and use of cars for private purposes. It really is an astonishing collection and one that paints a picture of a time that we in our current position really cannot fully comprehend. That we come together every year to remember is so hugely important. May we live to never witness such atrocities or truly understand the experiences of our ancestors.