‘‘
Maurice was shot while joyriding in a cart
like this
Cutting down trees was expressly forbidden. “People took up skirting boards,
floorboards and the honour boards in the
schools. I know for a fact that my father
cut down trees. But get caught, and you
were gone, they just completely wanted to
dominate the local population.”
The big problem was a lack of fuel to
cook with. “There was a community oven
you could use once a week to cook your
food. There was a lot of help amongst the
community, if you had a surplus of something you would give it to someone else.”
But even smallest acts of resistance
were dealt with harshly, and resulted in
the deportation of around 570 islanders to
concentration camps.
“It was the ultimate punishment for
anything that you’d done, certainly hiding
things like tobacco, and food.”
The Gestapo presence, particularly in
the capital St Helier, meant that people had
to be especially enterprising. “There was
certainly no coffee – we made that out of
acorns, so you would grind up acorns, and
then roast them.
“My father used to grow his own tobacco. He smoked in those days, though he
gave up after the war,” says Maurice chuckling at the irony of this contradiction.
People in Jersey walked on a knife edge
between collaboration and co-operation,
and some people did become surprisingly
rich. “My father always told a story about
people driving to the bank with a truck
full of Deutschmarks they were going
It was very
dangerous
listening to
the BBC
to convert,” recalls Maurice. “They were
supplying the Germans with materials and
spying on the local population as well.
My mother always said that when the
war ended, she’d know the people who had
been trading with the Germans because
they were the ones with all the money, and
over a period of five years, there was quite
a lot of money to be made.”
And collaboration went beyond
trading material for Deutschmarks. More
than 900 babies are known to have been
fathered by German soldiers stationed in
Jersey. And many children grew up as islanders not knowing their father had been
a German officer.
Island girls who fraternised with the
occupiers were mocked as “jerrybags”.
This personal collaboration caused a lot
of resentment, and after the war, resulted
in many acts of revenge on the island.
“Some of these girls were thrown on to
barbed wire fences,” said Maurice.
But after a while, resentments faded, and
people decided to put the war behind them.
Jersey Islanders realised they couldn’t go
on living as they had under the occupation.
“At some point, they decided to put
it all behind them, and move on, to do
things differently and to forget the war.
There was no use in harking back to the
war and looking for revenge.”
Even after the troops had left, the
German occupation left a mark on those
who lived through it. ‘My mother became
a great stocker of everything, everything
Many women who collaborated with German soldiers had babies. They were subject to retribution
at the end of the war-like this French woman with
her baby having her head shaved and paraded
through the streets
that was needed for the family. After
that, she was a hoarder all her life,” says
Maurice.
“She’d learned that if you didn’t have a
store of products to support your family
you were going to starve, so everything
was put away and kept.”
The liberation of Jersey in 1945 by the
Americans bought the island freedom and
an end to the struggles of war. And for
Maurice it also brought other unimagined
delights.
“I’d never seen a banana, and I’d never
seen an orange before. I thought it was
something to do with football, So, I just
started kicking it,” he recalls smiling.
And when asked to sum up the war
as a whole he said: “It was a hell of an
adventure.” n
Liberation: German soldiers leaving the Channel
Island for the last time but as prisoners of war
27