Of the 2,200 Channel Islanders who were deported by the Nazis during World War II, most spent the war with little news of Allied progress, and uncertain about when it was all going to end.
It was just one of several psychological burdens they had to endure. Crammed into internment camps hundreds of miles from home, these British citizens spent years in relative isolation, feeling frustrated, anxious and often simply bored.
The best way to stop themselves from becoming depressed was to find something else to do, and they found a solution in recycling the parcels that were periodically delivered to the camps by the Red Cross. Many prisoners became accomplished craftsmen, transforming parts of these parcels, or their contents, into toys, crockery, everyday objects to help their survival, and games. When they were liberated at the war’s end, these items returned with them to the islands. Some found their way into archives and museums; others remained in private homes.
Since 2006, Dr Gilly Carr, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, has been studying this material record. Now she has both co-edited a book on the subject, called Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, and curated an exhibition, which has opened at Jersey Museum and will be open to the public until the end of 2012. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first wave of deportations of Channel Islanders to internment camps in Germany.
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Image: Dr Gilly Carr at the entrance to “Occupied Behind Barbed Wire”, which will be on display in Jersey until the end of 2012. Credit: Gilly Carr
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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