After they had liberated the camps the soldiers had inspected the prisoners, trying to find out where they were from and calling in the doctors to see what illnesses they had. Jack had managed to avoid the worst of the dysentery and other debilitating illness. Others had not been so lucky. The man he had seen fall down had died on the very day the camp was liberated, a distinct lack of fortune that Jack had thought he himself had once had. After that the British prisoners had been separated out and taken up to Sweden. That time the trains had been much more comfortable, and they had been looked after with the care that only doctors could prescribe. Jack had had his trip through Europe after all, only he could barely remember it. He laughed bitterly to himself, which brought about a racking cough. Then he remembered where he was.
Somehow, either through his postcard or some other means, the authorities had managed to find his father’s parents, his grandparents. They had cared for him these past few months, feeding him despite his protesting body. He coughed again at the memory of food.
A shape appeared in the doorway, lit white by the sunshine streaming in through the window. His eyes struggled to adjust as he saw an outline of curly red hair. The thought made him sob uncontrollably, thinking of Johanna. He had gone looking for her, but he had failed. She had died somewhere in a camp on her own, lost and desperate. He had failed her as he had failed so many others. For the first time in his life he closed his eyes and let the tears flow. He didn’t care anymore; there was no reason to live, no reason to be ashamed. He let go until he felt a pressure on the bed next to him and he opened his eyes again. He was met with the fierce intelligence of brown eyes staring into his, and a hand on the back of his palm.
He would have recognised those eyes anywhere, but he couldn’t believe it. He was hallucinating again, as he had done in the camp. His mind was broken and lost beyond reason, just like his mother’s.
‘Johanna?’ he breathed.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. Never again.’
‘How?’ He didn’t understand.
‘You kept mentioning my name in your sleep.’ Her voice was like salve on his wounded soul. She lay her hand on the back of his. ‘You said Johanna, Johanna, over and over again. Your grandparents said it was the only thing that came out of your mouth through the long months of your recovery.’
‘They found you?’ His voice was a grating whisper. ‘How?’
‘Shhh,’ she comforted him. She seemed frailer than he remembered, gaunt and malnourished like the people in the camp, but words could not convey how glad he was to see her. ‘Your grandparents searched through the few belongings you had, and they found the list with my name on. Without it they would not have found me. They took a gamble and they managed to find me, through the war office. The camp they were holding me in was liberated before yours, and the English brought us here to recover. I’m here now, shhhh.’
She leant down closer and kissed him, pressing gently against his mouth. Her lips were warm on his and he closed his eyes, breathing her in, savouring the moment, the future he never dared hope would come.
Epilogue
After the War
The islands had been liberated after the rest of Europe, forgotten about and abandoned as they had been at the start of the war. The Islanders had suffered in that time, but they had come through.
Ghosts walked past as he walked down the High Street of St Peter Port and the memories flashed into his mind as he passed the buildings he was so familiar with. The shops and sights were almost as they had been before the war. The swastikas had gone from Woolworths and the Union flags were back on their poles, blowing gently in the cool autumnal breeze. He breathed in the salty sea air, not realising how much he had missed it. He had thought about never returning, but that seemed too much like admitting defeat.
The island had changed so much since he had first arrived as a child. Even though the Germans were now gone, the scars of their presence were still visible. There were still signs in German around the place, and the fortifications that they had added to the island were still there.
He thought of the number of people they’d lost over the years, the names running through his head. Too many. His grandparents, David, Henry, William, Frederic, Nicholas, Henrik … He didn’t think he would ever see the German again. He would be a prisoner somewhere as Jack had once been. The rest were still on the island, but none of them would speak of what they had been through.
There was one person Jack had not thought of.
His mother.
He didn’t blame her for what she had done. It had hurt at first, of course, but he couldn’t think of it as the easy way out as so many others had done. What she did couldn’t have been easy, and she was far from the only one on the island who had taken such measures. She couldn’t take the darkness anymore, that much was clear, and he didn’t blame her for that. If he blamed anyone, he blamed himself. He hadn’t been there when she died, and he still wondered whether his mere presence could have done something to stop her. Johanna told him there was nothing he could do, that his mother’s darkness was something that controlled her and wouldn’t listen to reason, but a small part of him couldn’t help but wonder. He would build a bigger memorial to her memory when he got the chance.
He took hold of Johanna’s hand and led her across the street. Somehow, she had come back to him, and he would never let her go again. Neither of them had wanted to return to their old homes. They had come here to start a new life. It was a new world, still recovering, but full of hope. Their new house was in a part of the island where they had never really spent time together before. Here they would be allowed to rebuild their lives and maybe start some new ones.
They had been married in London now that the war was over, so that his grandparents could be involved. They had promised they would come and visit the island once he and Johanna had settled, and they were more than welcome.
The war was over, but it would be years, maybe even decades, before the recovery was complete. Some people would bear the scars for the rest of their lives. In a weird way it felt as if they had come full circle, but in reality many things had changed and would never be the same again. He had thought that he had lost everything, but there was still hope.
Would Europe ever be free from war? For Jack the scars of the war would always be there, but they would be able to start a new life together. A new start. Somewhere in this island there was a future for Jack and Johanna; they just had to find it.
*
9 May 1985
Alice Godwin walked into the church, nodding at the other parishioners as she went. The inside was cold and dark as churches always were, but she wasn’t there for comfort. She was there because it was Liberation Day and she wanted to pay her respects to those who had suffered. Not just her parents, but her grandmother after whom she was named. She took up her usual space in the pews, in the middle, not too close to the front, but not at the back. One of the organisers had lit a number of candles that stood around the church, their flickering glow reminding Alice of the stories she had heard about the occupation as a child. Her father had been determined to talk about it as often as possible, determined that their pain would not be forgotten.
She looked around the church, noted the familiar faces and threw them a friendly smile. Her eyes fell on the back row. There was a man sitting there whom she didn’t recognise. He must have been in his late sixties or early seventies. Old enough to have lived through the war. His tall frame was obvious as he sat down, once over six feet tall but now hunched and frail. Once-good looks still showed on his face, but time had given him many wrinkles. Piercing blue eyes shone under a heavy brow, showing intelligence and a wariness that spoke of the things that he had seen. He didn’t smile when she looked at him, but merely nodded, a shallow movement that acknowledged her presence but didn’t overstep familiarity.
Alice remembered the stories of the German soldiers during the occupation joining the congregations but
sitting at the back to give the Islanders their space. The man reminded her so much of a German soldier her father had once shown her a picture of. German or not, she flashed him a smile as she had with the others and watched as his stony facade melted a little. There was a kindness there despite everything.
Turning back to the front she closed her eyes and thought through the words she had mentally prepared earlier that day. She wanted to thank all those who had helped her parents survive the war and remember all those who she knew had not made it, whether she knew their stories or not. She had just finished her whispered prayers when the service came to an end. Many others said their goodbyes and made their way from the church, but Alice stayed behind to light a candle for the grandmother she had never known. She watched from the corner of her eye as the old man did the same, closing his eyes and muttering something in German. Despite her best efforts her mother had never managed to get her to learn anything but the rudimentary elements of the language.
She smiled again as he opened his bright blue eyes and stared right at her. It was becoming a habit. For the first time since she had seen him, he smiled back, before placing a battered leather notebook next to the candle he had lit. With a heavy accent he uttered one sentence as he passed her, leaving the church.
‘It was my liberation too …’
Historical Note
The thing that inspired this story was the photograph of a policeman in the uniform of a British bobby holding open the door of a car, clad in German identifiers, for a German officer. It begged the question: ‘What must it have been like for the police in the Channel Islands to go from serving the British Crown to serving the Nazis?’
The story grew from that seed, bringing other aspects of the German occupation of the Channel Islands into it. I have gathered stories from across the islands, deciding to have them occur on Guernsey, rather than trying to stretch the story across multiple locations, which also provided that sense of being trapped on the island where all these horrible things were happening.
When I first pitched this story to my editor, we had no idea that I would end up writing it in the middle of a pandemic. Whether experiencing isolation, panic-buying, rationing, and overriding fear made the novel better or not, I will never know, but it certainly helped give me some perspective for the difficulties the people of the Channel Islands went through, on top of the sympathy I already felt for them during my research.
The story of the occupation of the Channel Islands provides something unique, that sense of a place that is very British being controlled by the Germans in a way that people on the ‘mainland’ never experienced. It helps us to see what life may have been like had the Third Reich made it as far as England, and it asks many questions that those living in Britain at the time asked.
The love between Jack and Johanna is central to the story, but there were so many other stories to be told, and many more that I didn’t have space for. A number of the stories in the novel are adapted from real-life events. The German sergeant handing his pistol to a veteran of the First World War and ordering him to shoot did happen. (It’s true what people say, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.)
Sadly, three Jewish women – Marianne Grunfeld, Auguste Spitz and Therese Steiner – were deported from Guernsey and lost their lives in Auschwitz, and they were not the only ones to lose their lives. The leader of the Frenchmen who landed on the beach singing the French National Anthem was indeed executed in Jersey for his role in the French Resistance.
Many Islanders were deported for various reasons, not just the policemen who were accused of stealing supplies from both the German and local stores, but also the English who were deported by order of Adolf Hitler himself as vengeance for the accidental shooting of a number of German POWs.
Towards the end of the war the Germans were abandoned on the island. Food became very scarce, more so than when they were making potato peel pies, and those in charge refused to surrender, instead ordering the soldiers to ‘defend the island to the last’. As they were at war, the Germans were not allowed access to the Red Cross supplies brought to the islands by the SS Vega. The German forces did not surrender until after VE Day, on the 9th of May.
Other aspects of the story were simplified in order to help the narrative. I have kept the same kommandant throughout the story, while in fact there was more than one, and the trials of the policemen accused of stealing went on for a long time, being tried by both civil and military authorities.
It was important to show that not everyone in the German army was entirely unsympathetic to the Islanders, nor were they all card-carrying members of the Nazi Party.
As with all my stories I hope to show you, the reader, what happened to these people, but leave it up to you to question what was wrong or right. Things are never as simple as being a case of good versus evil, even if some are capable of great evil.
M J Hollows – July 2020
* * *
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Acknowledgments
As the saying goes, it takes a village to write a novel. Thanks and love always goes to my parents, who have supported me at every turn. Without them, I would not have the opportunity to write this. I’m eternally grateful to Abi Fenton at HQ Digital/HarperCollins for trusting me enough to commission this novel; Finn Cotton and Helena Newton whose insightful edits and suggestions helped to make The German Nurse the novel it is; and everyone else at the publisher. Thanks goes to my agent Robbie Guillory for his support and for being an excellent sounding board for my ideas and questions. Without the recommendations for reading materials of Judith Finnamore from the Priaulx Library in Guernsey I would not have been able to write this novel. So my sincerest thanks to her and all those that have taken their time to catalogue the occupation of the Channel Islands. As always, I thank James Friel and Jeff Young for their tuition on my MA in writing, for giving me the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to write; my PhD supervisor Cathy Cole for her patience while I conduct extra-curricular writing and for reassuring me that I’m doing good work. Thanks to Cheryl Bellis for encouraging me to have a happy ending, for once. This is all your fault!
Final thanks go to the staff of Caffè Nero in Liverpool One for their bravery in opening up and going to work after the initial lockdown and providing me with enough coffee while I worked on the edits for this novel; and to anyone else I may have inadvertently forgotten. I’m grateful to all of you. But, most importantly, I thank you the reader for picking up this novel. Words cannot convey how much you reading this book means to me, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed it.
If you loved The German Nurse, try another heart-breaking WWII historical novel from M. J. Hollows!
As Europe is on the brink of war, two brothers fight very different battles, and both could lose everything …
While George has always been the brother to rush towards the action, fast becoming a boy-soldier when war breaks out, Joe thinks differently. Refusing to fight, Joe stays behind as a conscientious objector battling against the propaganda.
On the Western front, George soon discovers that war is not the great adventure he was led to believe. Surrounded by mud, blood and horror his mindset begins to shift as he questions everything he was once sure of.
At home in Liverpool, Joe has his own war to win. Judged and imprisoned for his cowardice, he is determined to stand by his convictions, no matter the cost.
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The German Nurse Page 31