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A new online database created by a Cambridge academic is helping to spread the stories of those who resisted the Germans during the Occupation and were later deported or killed.
According to Guernsey-born Dr Gilly Carr this "is the last untold story of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands."
Dr Carr, who has carried out extensive research into what happened in the islands during the war, and has written widely on the subject - including co-authoring “Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands, 1940-1945" - hopes the new website will also correct many misconceptions about the Occupation.
A tie-in exhibition which opened in London last month, at the Weiner Library for the study of the Holocaust & Genocide, and which continues into the New Year, which Dr Carr has helped co-curate, also highlights these untold stories.
In an interview posted on the library’s website, Dr Carr says: “...Everything that people thought they knew about the German Occupation of the Channel Islands is – at best – partial and – at worst – inaccurate.”
#ItemOfTheWeek: Memoir by Spaniard John Dalmau, a Nazi slave labourer in France & the Channel Islands #OnBritishSoil https://t.co/V8RL92Satb pic.twitter.com/gJptc5VZNH
— The Wiener Library (@wienerlibrary) November 1, 2017
Dr Carr has named the website in honour of Frank Falla, a Guernseyman who was sent to Frankfurt am Main-Preungesheim and Naumburg (Saale) prisons. After the war, he gathered victims’ stories and successfully fought for compensation from the West German government. He died in 1983, and in 2010, Frank’s daughter gave Gilly her father’s extensive archives, which she describes as “the most important resistance archives to ever come out of the Channel Islands."
“I’ve been writing the background stories for the website of islanders deported to Nazi prison, concentration and labour camps,” she added. “So far I’ve written 75 out of 200 plus. Every story is a labour of love. I see each as a form of ‘rescue’. While I can never go back and rescue any of these people from their camps and prisons, I can rescue their story and experiences for their families and for the Channel Islands.” She’s very keen to hear from anyone who can help her with her research.
Dr Carr is giving a talk entitled “Frank Falla versus the Foreign Office: the Fight for Compensation for Victims of Nazi Persecution” at the Weiner Library in London, at 18:30 tomorrow (Tuesday 7 November).
Book now for talk on the fight for compensation for victims of Nazism in the #ChannelIslands: https://t.co/EJBG80r6sx #OnBritishSoil pic.twitter.com/xrUwliV9Yh
— The Wiener Library (@wienerlibrary) November 4, 2017
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