79 years after the occupation of the Channel Islands ended, novelist and journalist Kate Thompson writes about visiting Jersey, where she uncovered an island full of stories about wartime resistance.
I fell in love with Jersey on a trip to the Jersey Festival of Words in September 2019. I defy anyone who visits not to. Its colour and charm is spellbinding. The wild flowers that smother the countryside fill the air with their fragrance. But there is something else in the air in Jersey, a tangible sense of history, a connection to its cataclysmic past.
You see reminders of it in the glimpses of bunkers and other German fortifications buried beneath the wild brambles. But for me, history isn’t about guns, fortifications and bunkers, it’s about oral history. People. The most powerful reminders of the Occupation come from the people themselves.
I was privileged to interview many islanders about their memories of this time in my five visits to the island. Some came in the form of pre-arranged interviews, others came when I pitched up at Age Concern coffee mornings and sat and listened spellbound to the back and forth memories, the unfiltered gush of social history that brings the past alive.
Some islanders were suspicious about ‘what sort’ of book I was writing, fearful it would over simplify or focus on the clumsy and tired collaboration narrative. But I was always treated with warmth and hospitality.
2024 marks 79 years since the end of the Occupation and for some these stories have rolled from islanders’ lips many a time, but for others, they were telling it for the first time. “I don’t know where that came from… I shouldn’t really be saying this…” was a common refrain in interviews. After so many years, the need to share overcomes the desire to forget, for this is an island simmering with stories.
I have nothing but respect for the people who survived five long years of Occupation and faced devastating moral choices, privation, starvation, fear and boredom.
The Channel Islands Occupation in books tends to be framed by the narrative of collaboration versus resistance, which remains contentious to this day.
On one of my trips, a tour guide told me how an elderly woman went into a care home recently and was roundly ignored by all the other women in the communal lounge. Her crime? She was a Jerrybag.
Memories are long in the Channel Islands, as they are in all countries which have withstood war. Occupations inject poison into the areas which have lived through it.
And yet not every woman who fraternized with a German was a collaborator. Sure, there were some who slept or socialised with Germans, inspired by greed, malice or, in rare circumstances, ideological sympathy. But there were also many who simply fell in love. Fewer than 90 illegitimate babies were born as a result of these liaisons, despite press reports citing far higher numbers.
Resistance such as that seen in occupied France simply wasn’t possible. The geography of the islands meant that there were no forests or mountains to hide out in. The Channel Islands were simply too small and the scale of the German presence too vast.
My overriding sense is that we will never know the true extent of resistance. It might have been largely unorganised and organic, but there was a tribe of spirited men and women operating in a clandestine way to do their bit to strike back against a totalitarian regime.
Here are my three favourite islanders who embodied Jersey’s resistance:
The shopkeeper
In July 1941, Louisa Gould received a message that her son Edward had been killed in action in the Mediterranean. Three months later, in October 1941, a Soviet plane piloted by a young man named Feodor Buryi was shot down in Germany. He was caught and sent to a prisoner of war camp, before being transported to Jersey to work.
Feodor was one of many captured Russian soldiers termed Untermenschen by the Nazi regime and used as slave labour.
He escaped and Louisa agreed to shelter him, saying: “I had to do something for another mother’s son.” She treated him with love and respect, bathed his wounds and altered her son’s clothing to fit him. Bill, as he became known, stayed with Louisa for 20 months until she was denounced and arrested.
Louisa was taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She never came home. In the last winter of war Louisa was murdered in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück.
Jersey’s plucky posties
For the first time in Jersey’s history, the wartime postal workers were hell-bent on not delivering the mail.
When it came to delivering hateful informers’ letters like the one shown above, for many it was a step too far — especially when they knew that those who had been denounced faced arrest and a potential death sentence in a Nazi prison.
Certain postmen either chucked these informers’ letters straight in the boiler, or they would steam them open. Letters which weren’t destroyed would be held back for three days before they were date stamped and then delivered.
In the meantime, the postman on his rounds would have warned the recipient that a search was imminent, and the radio or other forbidden item would be hastily removed. To me this is a story of quiet resistance.
The saviour
During the Occupation, Albert Bedane was a physiotherapist with a secret. Behind the doors of his imposing townhouse in St Helier he was hiding a Jewish Dutch woman called Mary Richardson in his cellar.
Given the close proximity of his home to that of the German Secret Field Police, this was a courageous act. If he had been caught, he would have been deported to a Nazi prison or concentration camp.
As the Germans were preparing to deport Mrs Richardson she managed to escape and hide with Albert for more than two years until the end of the war.
After the war, Albert rarely talked about what he’d done. Today, he is an island hero. In 2000, Albert Bedane was posthumously recognised as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ and awarded a medal by Israel’s Yad Vashem for saving Mary’s life.
The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson is published on 15 February, 2024.
Read more about this book.
Kate has written two other features for Historia: Why I started a podcast – and what I learnt celebrates the voices from her interviews with Britain’s wartime generation; Bethnal Green’s underground wartime library explains how working-class East Enders had access to books, entertainment and culture in an underground library during the Second World War.
Other features on related topics include:
“Put those Christmas lights out!” The Home Front during World War Two by Jean Fullerton
Some reasons why history gets lost by VB Grey
The voices of the Second World War by Ros Taylor
A surprising gap in Second World War fiction by Liz Macrae Shaw
Review: When the Germans Came by Duncan Barrett by Mary Chamberlain
Review: The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain by Duncan Barrett
Writing popular history: three lessons learned by Eric Lee
Researching rural Devon in the 1920s and 1930s by Vanessa de Haan
Images (all supplied by the author except no 2):
- Albert Bedane’s identity card: courtesy of Jersey Heritage
- German soldiers on Jersey, August 1941: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-228-0326-34A/Dey (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- Poison pen letter: courtesy of CIOS Jersey
- Louisa Gould’s identity card: courtesy of Jersey Heritage
- Jersey Post Sorting Office, where informers’ letters were intercepted: photo reproduced courtesy of Dave Vautier
- Mary Richardson’s identity card: courtesy of Jersey Heritage