Just weeks into their marriage, Iris Prigent began to wonder if her new husband had a dark secret. In his sleep he would push her out of bed, then appear to let someone else in. Her doubts grew in the following weeks when she’d wake in the middle of the night to find Gordon standing to attention beside their bed shouting ‘Achtung! Achtung!’
Iris, 88, remembers: “When I asked him in the morning what was going on he’d get upset but would never tell me. I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake marrying him and moving all the way to Jersey. I’d say, ‘You keep shoving me out of bed. If you don’t want me I’ll go back home’.”
In fact, Gordon did have a terrible secret – but nothing Iris could ever have imagined. And when he realised he was about to lose the love of his life, he finally opened up about the horror he had kept to himself for nearly 30 years. Gordon is thought to be one of just four Channel Islanders sent to one of the SS-run concentration camps on the nearby island of Alderney, the only Nazi death camps on British soil, during the German occupation.
The Sylt camp, just 70 miles from Bournemouth, was as bad as any in occupied Europe. Inmates were subjected to hard labour, torture, starvation and murder. Victims included hundreds of French Jews transported from the notorious Drancy transit camp. Yet after the war the horrors of Alderney were downplayed.
An official 1981 report was generally agreed to have softened the worst details to quell the shameful idea of English Channel death camps. And, as everywhere in Europe, the Nazis destroyed records to hide their crimes. Meanwhile, ex-prisoners such as Gordon were so traumatised they were unable to recount their experiences for decades. But a new review into the occupation of Alderney, out next month, could finally reveal its full horror – including mass graves on what was dubbed “Adolf Island”.
A panel of international experts led by UK Holocaust envoy Lord Pickles has been examining archives across Europe to find the true number of camp deaths. Some believe its findings could rewrite Holocaust history. Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, whose father fled Nazi Germany, welcomed the review when it was launched last year. She said: “It is time for the UK government and the Alderney authorities to finally face up to the horror of what happened on British soil. There can be no more lies and no more cover-ups.”
Iris already has a good idea of what they will uncover. Gordon, who died in 1991 aged 67, was so traumatised by his nine months in the Sylt camp that he never mentioned it to his first wife in 20 years together. Says Iris, who married him in 1974: “He kept it to himself all those years. Then, little by little, he started telling me. They were stuffed in bunk beds with three people in. That’s why, on a bad night, he’d shove me over so that the third person could get in.
“The Germans would get them up in the middle of the night and they had to stand to attention or be killed. That played on his mind for the rest of his life. It was sometimes the littlest things. On our first Christmas I bought him a lovely pair of pyjamas with dots on them. He said ‘Sorry my love, I can’t wear them.’ They looked too much like what he had to wear in the camp. So I took them back and got plain ones.”
Born in St Helier, Jersey, Gordon was 15 when the island was occupied in 1940. At 18 he fell foul of the Germans when he was called up to paint their tanks. He refused, pointing out he was a builder not a painter. He was arrested and sent to work on a farm in Alderney run by the Nazi forced-labour body Organisation Todt.
Also there was friend, Walter Gallichan, who had volunteered for the job after his family fell on hard times. Set to work in the mess kitchens, the pair were found listening to the BBC on an officer’s radio. Punishment for the 19-year-olds was Sylt camp.
Iris says: “They had to get up at 6am. They were given a bowl of cabbage soup and that was it for the rest of the day. Then they were marched from one side of the island to the other and made to plant potatoes and things, then marched back. Gordon said guards would beat or whip them if you weren’t quick enough.
“One time Walter’s cabbages weren’t deemed to be evenly spaced so they hit him over his back with a shovel. Gordon went to pick him up and the Germans hit him so hard they knocked his front teeth out just for trying to help. Another time, one of the men asked for a second helping at breakfast. Gordon said they put him in a box, folded him and shut him inside and he died in the box. They told everyone, ‘This will happen to you if you do the same thing.’ After that Gordon never wasted a morsel of food, never, all his life.”
Perhaps the most traumatic moment was towards the end of the war when US warplanes flew over the island en route to France and inmates were made to dig their own graves. Iris said: “The Germans were afraid they were going to land. Gordon said everyone had to dig their grave and stand by it so if any of the Americans landed they would shoot you and you’d just drop in.” As the Nazis panicked, in August 1944, Gordon was transported with other prisoners to Guernsey for onward shipment to a death camp in Germany.
But after the Allies blockaded the French coast he was allowed to return to Jersey on condition he reported daily to the Germans. Iris is convinced many hundreds of those sent to Alderney never made it out alive. She says: “They say a lot of Jews are buried on the island. Gordon told me the Nazis made sure their remains will never be found. There’s an area of deep sea north of the island called Hurd’s Deep. Drop anyone in there and you’ll not get them back.”
After the liberation in May 1945, Gordon’s friend Walter was so traumatised by Sylt that he was sent to Jersey’s St Saviour’s asylum where he spent 30 years.He died in 1988 aged 64. Iris remembers: “Poor Wally’s brain really went. We’d have him over for Sunday lunch once a month. Sometimes he was all right and sometimes he’d sit there and not say anything. It took Gordon many years before he could go back to Alderney for the annual remembrance service.
“One year we took Wally too. Where the camp entrance used to be there are just some old concrete posts. Everything else has gone. But during the war there was a wall covered in German writing. Do you know, Wally stood there and read the whole thing in German, looking at it as if it were there even though it had all gone. In his own mind he could still see it.” Neither of Gordon’s marriages produced children, something for which Iris says he always blamed Hitler. “We tried but it just didn’t happen. I’m not sure why but it was always Hitler’s fault. So many things that plagued Gordon’s life were because of him.”
Sylt was one of four Nazi camps on Alderney, which had been largely evacuated before the invasion. They were named after German North Sea islands – Borkum, Helgoland, Nordeney and Sylt. The first two were “volunteer” labour camps were workers were paid but nevertheless harshly treated. Nordeney and Sylt were SS concentration camps after 1943, subcamps of Neuengamme outside Hamburg.
Nordeney held mainly Russian and Spanish slave labourers. Sylt had many Jewish inmates. Prisoners at both camps were forced to work on military fortifications as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. During the occupation the Crown Dependency governments of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark remained responsible for civil administration of the islands. To this day speculation rages as to whether some of these administrators were collaborators or heroes. It is estimated that as many as 6,000 labourers went through the Alderney camps and 700 lost their lives. Next month’s report may tell us a great deal more.
Iris believes Gordon, whom she met on holiday in Malta, managed to avoid remembering the horrors of the camp for most of his life. She says: “He never really spoke about it. We did go to a reunion once and this Frenchman called Papa came up to him and said ‘Ah, Blondie!’ – that was his name in the camp.
“It turns out they were in the same hut together and we became the best of friends. We would go to France and stay on his farm – even though we didn’t speak French and he didn’t speak English.” Iris, who now lives in a retirement home on Jersey, says Gordon would be happy that the full truth about the death camps might finally come to light. But she says: “I’m sure he would also think this should have been done a long time ago when those who went through it were still alive. It’s good that they’ll be setting the history books straight. But it’s all a bit late in the day now.”