Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (46 page)

As is clear from this account, States officials took the same position toward deportations that they did toward requisitions, evictions, and rationing, imposing themselves as middlemen so that the Germans would not carry out their orders directly. In Leale's postwar report, he stated that in most situations, the Committee was “given every liberty to state our case with the utmost frankness and to argue about it.” Then the Germans' decision was made, and the consequences for the population of noncompliance by the Committee were made clear. As Leale put it, the Germans “were always at the right end of the gun.”
¹⁷³
In this same report, Leale described the deportations as the “cruellest” problem that they had to face, and clearly all the deportations haunted him. Again, the decision was whether they “should cut ourselves completely adrift on the grounds that the thing was unclean,” or whether, considering that they could not prevent them, they should remain in the middle and seek the maximum exemptions and the easiest path for those affected. Leale and the other officials believed that they only would have achieved “a little notoriety” by refusal to cooperate, losing any influence on the process that they might have had.
¹⁷⁴

Even as Leale spoke, he could have no idea of how much the entire history of the Occupation of Guernsey would later be judged by the fate of Therese, Auguste, and Marianne, although not by the other deportations. Rather than focusing on the failed attempts to exempt the women, later writers have sometimes implied that officials were willing and eager to sacrifice the three for some other gain they sought for the Island.
¹⁷⁵
Yet, we have seen that the only Jews officially identified in Guernsey were the four women who stepped forward to register. Even on the day of deportation, the women reported to the harbor without being arrested or “handed over.” It is a fair question to ask why States officials and the general public did not anticipate the different fate that awaited Therese, Auguste, and Marianne than lay in store for the other deportees, including the Duquemins and Elda Brouard.

Numerous people have pointed to the fact that although genocide of Jews had taken place earlier in certain locations, the systematic Final Solution was still in the planning stages at the time of the April 1942 deportation. The Wannsee Conference, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who had been tasked by Reichsmarshall Göring the previous year with devising a “solution of the Jewish question,” had only taken place on January 20, 1942.
¹⁷⁶
This means that Therese, Auguste, and Marianne were among the first Jews to be transported from Western Europe to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in the summer of 1942. It would have been unlikely, therefore, for Guernsey to know in April 1942 what the future held for the Jewish women transported to France, for the formal policy was not yet in operation.
¹⁷⁷
With the restrictions on outside information coming into Guernsey, Islanders were not even in the position to hear substantive rumors concerning such organized genocide.

Our problem is our post hoc awareness of the Holocaust, a knowledge that has come to plague our analysis of events as they unfolded. Popular histories derive some of their interest from a writing style incorporating “narrative backshadowing.” Narrative backshadowing allows us to view the past from our vantage point in the present, with all paths seemingly leading to an unavoidable end. According to Gary Saul Morson, such backshadowing implies that the signs pointing to that end were as visible in the past as they are now in retrospect.
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Narrative backshadowing is a writer's tool that gives the little frisson of irony to the mundane statement, and historical fiction makes great use of the technique for dramatic effect. “What are they going to do?” says a Jewish passenger in the movie of Katharine Ann Porter's
Ship of Fools
, with a philosophical shrug. “Kill all of us?” The viewer feels the chill of superior knowledge, but also marks the unsuspecting passenger as naive or a blind fool.
¹⁷⁹
So even those who attempt a fair analysis of the path that took Therese, Auguste, and Marianne to the gas chambers end up playing defense, explaining why the Controlling Committee, or Islanders in general, did not see an end that seems so obvious to us now.

The only way to shake free of backshadowing and to identify clear mistakes in judgment, ones where the consequences were discernable at the time, is to posit other outcomes. Everyone knew that Jews would face discrimination under the Nazis, but the four women initially deported were sent to France, where many had been sent for various reasons and had returned unscathed. Yes, France was occupied by the Nazis, but, we seem to forget, so was Guernsey. As far as anyone could know, the three Jewish women were deported to face the same discrimination in France under the Nazi occupiers that they were likely to face in the future in Guernsey under the Nazi occupiers. A second factor to consider is that Islanders were also not able to prevent the September 1942 deportations of the English-born to Germany. How much more threatening would it seem to be slated for a camp in Germany, the very heart of the enemy state?

If there had been
any
knowledge, or even solid rumor, of death camps operating in the Third Reich, there were enough people slated for deportation to Germany in September 1942 that some pockets of physical resistance (or mass attempts to flee the Island) would have been likely. But even private accounts anticipated only separation from loved ones, and the bad food, isolation, and other rigors of a prison camp—rather than mass execution. And what if Hitler had, in retaliation for the bombing of Hamburg or other events during the war, systematically executed English and Americans from Biberach? Would we make an assumption of anti-American and anti-English feeling, as some do of anti-Semitism, among the States officials as a factor in the deportations?

Debate is certainly warranted as to whether a policy of performed compliance, where middlemen serve as “buffers” between the occupier and the populace, is superior to a last stand of defiance and blanket refusal to cooperate even in minor ways. The tradeoff is between the ability to obstruct and gain small advantages for the occupied by ostensible compliance (at the cost of an appearance of collaboration in the public transcript) and the clear, symbolic patriotism of having no cooperation with the enemy whatsoever (at the cost of ceding all governance to the occupier and forfeiting any influence over events). It is reasonable to discuss which would have been the better path. What is not reasonable is to accept the sanitized German documents and carefully worded States' replies of the public transcript, using them to imply that there was voluntary Vichy-like collaboration on the part of States officials, without seeking insight from contemporaneous, nonofficial sources into the States' actual strategy and motivation.

Perhaps we should also question our strange, bifurcated view when it comes to the Germans themselves. On the one hand, we expect the States officials and public to know, because
we
know, the full extent of the evil heart of the Third Reich, and to anticipate the horrors of the Holocaust. At the same time, we pretend that this same Nazi regime that could butcher millions without compunction would have been cowed into changing their plans for Guernsey had the Controlling Committee just stood up to them forcefully enough. As John Leale said, in obvious frustration, after the war, “Full marks for wishful thinking should be given to those who pathetically clung to the idea that the Germans would shudder if we showed our teeth and snarled.”
¹⁸⁰
Mistakes and miscalculations were natural for all in Guernsey, who were often deprived of full information and always lacked unfettered choice. But neither the Controlling Committee, the Guernsey populace, nor—for those who prefer to blame the victims—the women themselves were responsible for the deportation and subsequent deaths of Therese, Auguste, and Marianne. The responsibility falls squarely at the feet of the German occupying forces.

Narrative facility, whether found in the deconstructing of propaganda, construction and spreading of subversive stories and jokes, or exercising the conscious duplicity of performed compliance, is a necessary skill in the undermining of power. As an aspect of rhetorical resistance, it is a wielding of the resources at hand through language and improvisation to shift the ground under the dominant. As we will see in the next chapter, it is also a natural ally for other symbolic forms that emerge as tools of resistance.

CHAPTER FIVE

A Subtle Resistance

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN A POOR CHOICE OF BOOKSHOP FOR ONE OF THE MANY PLAIN
-clothes Germans to frequent. Run by Miss Gaudin, a woman noted locally for her uncompromising spirit cloaked beneath a façade of cheeriness, the bookshop on Smith Street was also known by customers as a place to obtain forbidden war news on the QT. On this particular day, the unfortunate German entered and requested a guidebook to Guernsey. Miss Gaudin sailed up to him with the book, chirping gaily, “Here you are! But you're the first tourist we've had this season. It's rather a pity because you won't be able to get any fishing or bathing—the Germans have put a stop to all that!” To the delight of the Islanders present, watching and enjoying this little performance, the German was at a loss for where to look and what to say.

Miss Gaudin specialized in more than the discomfiture of individual Germans. Behind the counter, she kept a box with the day's news typed out and available to her customers, an information service aimed at “encouragement and enlightenment” during the period when wireless sets had been confiscated. According to accounts at the time, a small crowd of Germans piled into the shop one day, parading all over the store, upending things and making their presence very much known. Just as one German was about to open the box containing the forbidden news transcription, Miss Gaudin snatched the box right out of his grip, with a cheerful, “That's no good to you. Look at this! This should interest you!” Rev. Ord expressed the opinion of many in Guernsey when he wrote admiringly, “She has the pluck of a regiment.”
¹

Personal actions such as the ones taken by Miss Gaudin, whether conducted in private or public, are an integral part of the shape that resistance took in Guernsey during the Occupation. Some have found it challenging to develop an appreciation for the potential of such acts to undermine a power differential. For good reasons, history has a distinct preference for the overt moments of active resistance—for Nat Turner, Alice Paul, Emmeline Pankhurst, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their exploits do not require double readings; they are what they appear to be, and clear intentions are embodied in distinct actions. The phrase appended in the 1970s to some whose powerless condition led to adoption of a mask of deference and covert obstruction was “participating in their own oppression.” It is only recently that academics have sought an understanding of the more subtle forms of resistance sheltered beneath the disguise of cooperation. After all, what has been called “Uncle Tom behavior…may be no more than a label for someone who has mastered the theater arts of subordination.”
²
Beneath this mask of deference lay a “history of foot dragging, false compliance, flight, feigned ignorance, sabotage, theft, and not least, cultural resistance,” adopted
as the appropriate—indeed, the only long-term effective—means of resistance to the violent enforcement of slavery and Jim Crow.
³

In our understanding of the Guernsey resistance, it is now clear that we need not choose between the false dichotomy of collaboration and willing consent versus armed resistance and overt rebellion. Under a situation of armed tyranny, the Guernsey Islanders developed what many oppressed populations have sought: a “practical” means of resistance, and one suited to the unique demands of their situation.
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I have already discussed the first two aspects of rhetorical resistance: the use of a shadow discourse as a method of control, and the utilizing of narrative construction and interpretation. This chapter will detail the shape of the third prong of rhetorical resistance in Guernsey, an active and generally more apparent resistance clustered around communication, symbolism, and the flow of information. First, I will consider the three primary forms of communication that constituted active rhetorical resistance: defiant speech, the coding of messages, and physical resistance or “body rhetoric,” including various forms of self-exemption from German orders. In the remainder of the chapter, I will examine one particular aspect of resistance in depth: the role that hidden wireless sets played in the movement of information and the undermining of German control. This form of resistance to German edicts made subversives of average people, opening them to the danger of lateral surveillance by collaborators and retaliation by Occupation forces.

In their willingness to take these risks, the Islanders displayed their uncompromising desire for psychological involvement in the British war effort, and their heightened determination to seek control over their own lives. In this chapter, I hope to challenge the view that has confined true resistance in Guernsey to sabotage or other “exceptional moments of popular explosion.” The political territory of a subjugated people is far broader and often occupies a space somewhere between resigned acceptance and overt demonstration. There is a danger that in acknowledging only the dramatic, unmistakable act, we will “focus on the visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond.”
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Instead, active resistance often may be found in what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak,”
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the subtle, personal, and often discursive means that come to hand when other tools are unavailable.