The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting

Author:Madeleine Bunting [Madeleine Bunting]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Beermart eventually managed to get transferred to Cherbourg. Once there, he slipped through the German net and joined the French resistance.

THE JEWS

It was the French Jews who christened Alderney ‘le rocher maudit’ – the accursed rock. Eight hundred of them were brought to Alderney to work for the OT after they had been rounded up in the ‘rafles’ (raids) organised by the Vichy government. They were all married to ‘Aryan’ Frenchwomen, and were thus designated ‘half-Jews’ by the Germans. Instead of being sent to the gas chambers, they were detailed to work as slave labourers. They counted themselves the lucky ones; a few food parcels managed to get through to them from their families, and few of them died.

Albert Eblagon, now a frail nonagenarian, was lucky enough to be sent to Alderney because he was married to an Aryan; his unmarried brother died in Auschwitz. Most of the French Jews sent to Alderney were older than the Russian slave workers. Many of them were middle-aged or even elderly, highly educated, and had held prominent positions in pre-war France; they included a large number of doctors, the former head of the Pasteur Institut, a parliamentary deputy, First World War veterans, civil servants, writers and lawyers. Eblagon had been a publisher’s travelling salesman; he says modestly that everyone else was much more high-powered than himself. The Jews’ consignment also contained a handful of Chinese, Arabs, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks who had been included in the rafle of Marseilles to augment the numbers.

The first transport of French Jews arrived on Alderney in July 1943. They were put in Norderney camp, in a separate section from the Russians. Accounts vary as to their working conditions. Some of the Russian survivors claim that the Jews were better treated, and Albert Eblagon says that less than a dozen French Jews died, although the low death toll may have been due to the fact that they were only on the islands a few months, at a time when most of the hard construction work had already been completed. But according to statements made to French war crimes investigators in 1944 by two doctors who had been among those transported, Henri Uzan and J.M. Bloch, the treatment of French Jews was as cruel as that meted out to the rest of Alderney’s slave workforce.

In August 1943 [Uzan’s report reads], we were loaded onto boats with kicks and shouts. The Germans spat on us from the bridge above us. We stayed like that for twenty-four hours. It was a very rough crossing for everyone. A German, Heinrich Evers, greeted us with slaps, kicks and threats of his revolver. I was carrying two suitcases, and a soldier grabbed them from my hands. We had to march to the other end of the island. There were among us many who were more than sixty years old and who were ill. We were put to sleep in barracks without straw or blankets – only some dried leaves to sleep on. In the morning we discovered that we were covered with lice.

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