The World Upside Down
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information turned the members from a subsistence surviving group to a
gathering that reflected on life’s greatest questions. The power generated from
the reading of classic, traditional, and popular authors gave the Islanders a
notion of a historical world view, normalizing their fear, uncertainty, and worry.
Initially, the society was an urgent practical means of keeping the
Germans from learning about a dinner where meat was served. Later, as
members read and reviewed works by Shakespeare, Catullus, Charles Lamb,
Wadsworth, Seneca, Thomas Carlyle, and Marcus Aurelius, among others, they
became passionate about the themes. One member, after reading Carlyle’s Past
and Present, had the group reflect on the presence of a soul, quoting from the
book, “but yet it is a pity that we have lost the tidings of our souls” (101).
Guernsey Islanders also experienced other significant sacrifices. With
only one day’s notice, some of the island’s children were readied and sent by
transport ship to England: “Families had one day to decide and five years to
abide with it... Some families dressed up their children, as though they were
going to a party,” undoubtedly a coping mechanism to keep the children from
being anxious on this urgent Channel crossing. “Of all of the things that
happened during the war, this one—making your children go away to try to keep
them safe—was surely the most terrible” (229). The notion of sacrifice and
sanctuary here are closely related. Books—and their themes, lives, philosophies,
and characters—formed the nucleus of a sanctuary for the islanders: “we clung
to books and to our friends; they reminded us we had another part to us” (64).
And several of this novel’s characters reflect on the personal and national
sacrifices made by the authors of the works that they read. As in The Book Thief,
books (and knowledge) were sacrificed by burning them to provide basic heat
for shelter, but the knowledge symbolized by those destroyed works of Catullus
and Wordsworth generated a greater sacrifice.
But sacrifice and sanctuary also took on a deeply personal meaning for
the islanders. Elizabeth McKenna, one of the fiery young residents, began a
series of sacrifices when she fell in love with Christian Heilman, a German
doctor who was assigned to Guernsey. Described as “the German you
imagine...except he could feel pain” (168), Christian fathered the child named
Kit with Elizabeth. Shaffer and Barrows make some sympathetic references to
the German soldiers on Guernsey, many of whom viewed the island as a
sanctuary from the war on the continent.
But Elizabeth’s nature was one of fighting and sacrificing for what was
good and right. After caring for a dying, vermin-infested teenage Polish
indentured worker, Elizabeth was arrested, sent to a French prison, and then to
Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. She was executed there after trying to defend
a young Jewish girl from a brutal beating.
In the most classic sense, redemption in The Guernsey Literary and
Potato Peel Pie Society is portrayed through Elizabeth’s atonement for her
daughter’s illegitimate birth from her liaison with the enemy doctor. Elizabeth
nurses a seriously ill “slave laborer,” is imprisoned for her defiance, and