A decent man

The Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was the longest lasting of any in Europe, nearly five years, ending on the very day of the German surrender; and the islands also had a far bigger number of troops relative to the population than any other territory occupied by the Nazis, at times being nearly a quarter of the total. The initial bombardment of Jersey and Guernsey cost 44 lives, equivalent, proportionately, to about 27 000 on the mainland.

A general practitioner with a special interest in obstetrics, John Lewis, who practised on the island throughout, wrote a memoir entitled A Doctor’s Occupation. It is not a literary masterpiece, perhaps, but it is vivid in its description of the daily struggle to survive and of the compromises people were obliged to make. Dr Lewis does not paint himself as a hero; rather he comes across as something more precious in everyday life: a decent man.

The book starts with a memorable paragraph: “When a man is faced, without very much notice, with the decision of whether to stay with his young wife and unborn child, or to leave them and take care of his patients, he is bound to have serious doubts as to the rightness and wisdom of whichever course he chooses to take.” Not every choice, then, is between immaculate good and undiluted evil—which is, of course, why choice is often so painful.

Before the invasion, knowing it to be inevitable, Dr Lewis had taken his pregnant wife to Wales (which is where he was originally from) for safety, but he felt that duty called and returned to Jersey. He didn’t see his wife again for five years; and the Welsh clinic in which his wife was to have had her baby, in which her obstetrician resided, was bombed and destroyed. The obstetrician’s wife and four children were killed.

The book has many other tragic stories, related, however, in the simple fashion of someone who feels deeply but not demonstratively. He tells of three elderly men who killed themselves rather than face the occupation and of a group of elderly prostitutes brought over from France to entertain the troops but who were sent back to France because the troops rejected them and who drowned on their way back, their bodies bobbing on the sea, their peroxided hair spread out on the waves behind them. It is strange how details rather than immense historical events have the greatest power to move us.

In the preface to his memoir, published 37 years after the end of the occupation, Dr Lewis says: “Many years have passed since the occupation of Jersey, and for a very long time after its ending I made a conscious effort to put out of my mind all thought and memory of those events which were associated with five of the most miserable years of my life. I did not wish to recall or speak of them.”

Eventually he did so, of course, for the sake of his family. But here is something interesting and worthy of reflection, I think: his memoir was a consequence of his having had a busy, fruitful, successful, and happy subsequent life, not a precondition of that life.