Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (22 page)

Particularly disturbing was the sight of their countrymen turning from “scarecrows” in 1942 to “skeletons only” by 1944. Bill Warry said that he often passed people in the street whom he knew well but didn't recognize because they had changed so much.
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As the joke went, Guernseymen and women had their own version of the S.S., the “Skeleton Society.”
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Worse still, in Ord's view, all of these physical signs of hardship were juxtaposed against the comparative robustness of the German troops, who seemed to have “‘fair round bellies,’ if not ‘with good capon lined.’”
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Under these conditions, food became an obsession. Even during the benign first six months of Occupation, Winifred Harvey likened most conversations to those held on Antarctic expeditions, because they all revolved around food.
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Dorothy Higgs suddenly interrupted her diary in mid-1943 with the expostulation, “
BLOW! I WON
'
T
talk about food!”
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Of course, she was back to the same topic in the very next entry.

Although there was little of comfort food or drink available, Islanders did still use what they had as a measure of solace in difficult situations. It was only a month after Ambrose Robin had been so excited to give his Uncle Phil a treat of bacon for breakfast that Robin awakened in the night with pain in his blind right eye. He could see that the nurse who was in to care for Phil had the light on, and soon after four, the nurse called his name. Quickly he awakened his wife Amy and Aunt Adele, and they all “were just in time to see dear old Phil breathe his last.” While the nurse and Amy laid Phil out, preparing the body as people had always done, Robin went down to the kitchen to make a cup of genuine tea for all, which they drank in Aunt Adele's room. Real tea, so rare as to be almost like medicine, was to be used under just this kind of duress, as the cure-all for shock and the means of comfort.
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More often, food was a means to communicate love. Islanders planned for months and scrounged what they could to show their affection for others, particularly on key occasions such as birthdays or Christmas. When Ken Lewis turned twenty on February 9, 1942, he received modest gifts. But, oh, what a birthday tea he had! Ken wrote with relish about the “boiled potatoes, tongue, golden plums in heavy syrup which had jellified, with a whipped Orange Jelly, pancakes crumbled in the pan, Barley Rolls and Auntie Ethel Le Page made a plain cake coated with choc. icing w/ K. L. in icing made w/ butter and sugar.” This was a truly remarkable spread, and it must have been a concerted group effort of saving back rations and pulling out jealously guarded tins and jelly dating from before the Occupation. But Ken's delight is so apparent as he lovingly recounted the meal (“It was the best feed I had had in some time”) that everyone must have believed it well worth the effort.
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The telling aspect to such stories is how pathetically rare they were. Any extra food that a family could obtain was more a source of guilt than of triumph. One thing emerges with clarity about the food situation during the Occupation: the hardship was not evenly distributed across the Island. It was much the same as during the American Great Depression; the advantage lay with those who could grow their own food.
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As a rurally raised Guernseyman mentioned to me a few years ago, “For townspeople, it must have been hell.”
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This basic inequity was apparent to all, as the means of survival lay with having some land resources, perhaps even a decent back garden, or with having the possessions/money to augment one's rations through barter or the black market. The worst suffering would fall on those of average
to below-average economic resources living in town.
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“I don't know how people live,” wrote Jack. “People like myself are lucky to have ground.”
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Dorothy Higgs, whose entire day was made up of raising food, milking goats, and devising and publishing unusual recipes in the paper to help the Island cope with shortages, was doing well for her family. However, she worried constantly about those without the “private resources” of land. More than once she wrote to the effect that “It makes one feel so ashamed of having a bit extra.”
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At the same time, she was giving away goat's milk and then goats themselves to her sister Muriel (nicknamed Mu), who kept the sick in the neighborhood supplied with milk. When a hen was killed, there was meat and broth to be sent to the hospital.
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Once in a while a particular need would come to light. The milk woman told Mu one day in the bleak March of 1944 of finding a seventy-six-year-old woman weeping by her empty grate because she did not have breakfast of any kind to give her nineteen-year-old grandson, and there was nothing to be had for his dinner that night as well. It was a Monday, and bread was not given except on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. A weekly grocery ration was given on Tuesday, and it simply did not come close to lasting the week. Dorothy decided to send this woman carrots every Sunday and whatever bread they could spare to get her through Mondays, “but there must be hundreds more like her that we can't help.”
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All of these little efforts were drops in the ocean, and the Islanders knew it. One March when potatoes were scarce, ten people came to Jack's door one day to see if he had any spuds to spare. He had given 10 lbs. to Martel, 15 to Tom Roberts, 8 to Pattimore and 4 lbs. to Miss Matthews, but, as he said, “I cannot continue at this rate.” Although it was “awful to have to refuse,” there was little else he could do.
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Hunger was often kept a private issue, and in a land where all the civilians looked like ragged skeletons, it was difficult to tell who was in immediate danger of starvation. Many would not burden others with their suffering; if they were helped, they would be taking food out of the mouths of their benefactors. Sometimes the problem was not starvation but the more hidden danger of malnutrition. The tendency would be to “fill up,” if at all possible, on anything available, and the person still might not get the nutrition needed to survive.

Thus, a reader can feel the palpable horror that Dorothy Higgs felt when her “little gnome of a gardener” died of starvation. This death actually occurred during 1945, when starvation was very high, but it still came as a shock. Dorothy had given him a good bowl of soup each day at lunchtime, and it can be assumed from her surprise at his death that he did not complain more of hunger or look thinner than anyone else. Dorothy had earlier described him as “definitely simple,”
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and, trying to understand his death, she pondered that perhaps “it takes intelligence to manage the rations.” She also knew that her gardener was a “feckless creature” likely to spend any cash he had (or trade any food) for tobacco, and his landlady was “a proper slut” who did nothing to look out for him. But all of this reasoning was to no avail; Dorothy apparently blamed herself for not seeing signs of his impending death, even though such signs probably did not exist.
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Another source of guilt over suffering that the Islanders could not prevent was found in the distant relationship between the populace and Organization Todt workers. These forced workers (slave labor) brought to the Island by the Nazis triggered both pity and fear in Guernseymen and women. Forced to survive on “sour German bread and watery soup,” compared to which Guernsey rations were “luxurious fare,”
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they were barely alive and “devilishly hungry”
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all the time. Jack Sauvary learned from the sanitary inspector that these impressed workers from the defeated nations were dying at a rate of fifteen per month.
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Gertie Corbin wrote that “foreigners”—the general Island reference to forced workers, many Dutch and French, that differentiated them from the Germans—were constantly begging for food at their door.
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The sight of these men tore at the hearts of Islanders. In November 1942, a group of Frenchmen were brought over, forced to camp out overnight in Havelet in the rain, and then “marched up Havelet by fat Germans; they were white and shivering; their thin coats soaked through.” The scene that day at the Market, which Winifred Harvey went on to describe, was “tragic.” People responded with a sympathetic outpouring, giving coffee or food from their own small rations to these poor men, many elderly or young boys of thirteen or fourteen.
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Through the treatment of the Organization Todt workers, Islanders could glimpse the dark cruelty of the Germans, an underlying evil that would only fully come to light with the 1945 liberation of the concentration camps. Their deepest fear was that their own men and boys would suffer the same fate. Many tried to help the OT workers, but were simply overwhelmed with the extent of the need. Kitty described how these “poor, half-starved slaves roam the streets in a ragged and filthy condition,” going from door to door in the hope of finding food. Kitty would give a couple of them a bowl of soup, only to find a dozen waiting on the doorstep the next day. Just lack of provisions meant that she had to turn them away, distressed to know that they would find the same situation at the next house they approached.
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Yet there is another side to the Islanders' relationship with these tattered wretches whom they saw but did not know. They legitimately had much to fear from these slaves who seemed adept at slipping away from their captors to try to find food by one means or another. First, the OT workers were considered a health threat, spreading lice wherever they went, so that some Islanders would no longer sit on public benches, and they were believed to be the source of the waves of strange illnesses that seemed to sweep through Guernsey.
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The outbreak of typhus, a disease vectored by lice and fleas, among the workers in early 1943 caused great concern, in part for the workers but also for the Islanders. Weakened by hunger, the average person would have difficulty surviving the high fevers of typhus, and an epidemic could be devastating.
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The Islanders did not blame the slave workers for their filth, disease, and need to beg, because these conditions were imposed on them by their German masters. They
did
blame them for situations where, as Kitty Bachmann wrote, “local benevolence towards these poor unfortunates has sometimes been rewarded with villainy.” An elderly woman several doors up from Kitty had two Organization Todt workers visit her. As she answered the front door to the first of the pair, the other man slid around to enter her back door and steal her handbag.
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Even sympathetic Islanders had an uneasy feeling around the forced laborers, fueled by accounts of assaults and thefts and aggravated by the workers' sheer numbers and any language barriers. Jack Sauvary wrote of passing a number of OT workers lined up for their evening meal on Christmas Eve, 1942. It was “dark as a grave,” and Jack “was almost afraid passing as they might have bagged me in the lane and taken my bicycle.” He could hear them talking all around him, but could not understand what they were saying (“Talk about chatter. It was like a lot of ducks”), an uncertainty that only heightened his sense of threat.
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It was difficult to know how to respond to these slave workers, simultaneously so pathetic and yet so threatening in their desperate need to survive.

Whether through the suffering of the Organization Todt workers or the grinding hunger of family, friends, and neighbors, not to mention themselves, Islanders could readily see the effects of malnutrition throughout the first four years of the Occupation. They
were worn down by a low caloric intake, a lack of vitamins, and a loss of calcium that made them subject to fractures. Even before conditions were at their worst, Islanders were unable to fight off disease, and the way was cleared for illness and early death. In the face of such deprivation, a dark contending for food could have emerged. This would have rent the community, negating any possibility of resistance and possibly leading to widespread collaboration with the simple goal of survival. Instead, what surfaced was enhanced cooperation, a determination that the whole community survive, and a banding together to find creative solutions. By taking this approach, Islanders established the first pillar on which to build resistance: the belief that they could rely on the goodwill and support of their neighbors. The second pillar supporting resistance would also be communal: the construction of a common ideology that Guernseymen and women could pit directly against the beliefs of their Nazi masters.

PATRIOT GAMES

It was July of 1940 at St. Sampson's Bridge, and three women were embroiled in a private battle. They had been involved in a discussion of the war situation when one woman innocently prefaced her remarks with, “If we win…” One of the other women immediately pounced on this phrase, shouting, “
If
we win, don't you say that. It's
when
we win.” At that point, Jack Sauvary passed by the women, and the appeal was directed his way, “What do you think this awful woman is saying—If we win,
IF
we win. Of course we will win and don't say that again.” Jack figured that it was just about time to laugh at this fervor, so he quietly took his departure.
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