Author keeping Occupation memories alive

Sunday 25 January 2015

Islanders will be hearing of the friendships forged out of suffering that survived the Second World War and helped keep history alive.

An author who’s writing a new book about the experiences of Channel Islanders in Nazi prisons and concentration camps will explain how these wartime friendships became vital for survival when she speaks at tomorrow’s ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Dr Gilly Carr said: “I will examine the way that Channel Islanders supported each other during their ordeal, forgetting inter-island rivalry, and fought to keep each other alive. I will talk about the ongoing fight to keep that memory alive in the decades after the war, exploring how Islanders helped each other claim compensation from the Germans in the mid-1960s.”

Over 250 Channel Islanders were deported to Nazi prisons and concentration camps, shackled in cattle trucks, beaten, starved and crawling with lice.

Dr Carr will focus on the two that claimed the lives of more Islanders than any other –Frankfurt-on-Main and Naumburg-on-Saale.

She’ll talk about how it was down to one Guernsey man that Jersey families first learnt of the deaths of their loved ones and how Frank Falla kept up a friendship with a number of those families long after the war had finished.

In the mid 60’s he helped many of them compose their testimonies and claim compensation for Nazi persecution. He made sure Islanders' sufferings would never be forgotten, archiving the testimonies and writing down his own experiences of the Occupation in his book ‘The Silent War’.

The ceremony, part of the national commemoration, takes place at 1 pm tomorrow in the Occupation Tapestry Gallery at the Maritime Museum on the New North Quay.

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, and to challenge hatred and persecution in the British Isles today.