The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies by Philip R. Stone Rudi Hartmann Tony Seaton Richard Sharpley & Leanne White

Author:Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, Tony Seaton, Richard Sharpley & Leanne White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The situation is little better in Jersey and Guernsey, although fewer traces remain. Rather than being sites which people expressly avoid, more of them have been obliterated in the landscape. It seems that while traces remain, the power of the darkness of these sites is too much to tolerate. While labour camps have been categorised as merely the ‘accommodation’ of the men who worked on the bunkers (Ginns 2006, p. 74), a neutral word that implies nothing sinister, we know that the reports exist in Jersey of Russians being kept in cages or wire compounds within camps such as at Lager Udet in St Brelade. Moreover, some camp commandants were known for their brutality, such as at Lager Immelmann in the parish of St Peter (ibid, pp. 78–80). There are also numerous reports by local people of the torture and bad treatment of the foreign workers by their overseers. One of the better known accounts was that of Senator Edward Le Quesne in Jersey, whose diary entry for 20 February 1943 recorded that he had seen in the parish of St Ouen a Russian in the pillory with two branches of trees tied tightly around his neck with the man just able to touch the ground with his toes. As he had an armed guard standing over him, nobody was able to help him (Le Quesne 1999).

While one might have imagined the labour camps of the Channel Islands to be the prime sites of darkness today, this is apparently not the case because they are simply ignored rather than actively avoided. It is possible that these places have lost much of their darkness because they have been neutered through destruction or neglect. But, by not confronting what happened at these sites or to the people who were forced to reside there, local people are able to continue ignoring them. Nevertheless, this does not mean that these sites do not have the power to grow darker if ever they are uncovered and draw an audience. To excavate sites such as these, however, risks revealing something which people may not yet be prepared to face. It is known, for example, that Jews were among those brought to the Channel Islands to work for the OT (Cohen 2000, pp. 121–154; Sanders 2005, chapter 6), and this adds to the potential feelings of anxiety about what could yet be revealed.

While labour camps are not presented as tourist sites, it is not entirely true to say that they are not visited; local historians or researchers sometimes visit these sites, and former OT workers have also made the pilgrimage back to the sites of their suffering. Photographic evidence exists of this in Jersey, probably in 1970, when resident Spanish Republicans who stayed behind after the occupation visited the sites of camps in the island (Gary Font pers. comm.). A similar event also took place among former prisoners when the memorial plaque was attached to the gate post of the concentration camp of Sylt in Alderney in 2008.

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