Interview Part 1- Bob Le Souer, Jersey Resident
In this post is part 1 of the interview conducted in August 2001 as part of the filming of In Toni’s Footsteps. The interviewee is Bob Le Souer, a Jersey resident who lived through the German Occupation. At the time of the invasion he was a young man starting a career in insurance sales. He was heavily involved in the housing and moving of escaped Russian labourers who were brought into the island by Organisation Todt to build the vast network of defensive fortifications that covered the islands.
Part two of this interview will be published shortly.
BOB LE SOUER
Bob: My name is Bob Le Souer, a very Jersey name!
During the Occupation I was very young, I was 19 when the Occupation began and I was working in the local office of an insurance company.
Interviewer: Can you expain a little bit about how business was affected by the Occupation
Bob: Well it had to adapt. People attempted to carry on- there is a kind of deep sense of force of habit and routine when times are very difficult and I’ve seen this in other parts of the world when travelling, when there’s been a crisis of some sort. They pretend that everything is normal, they feel safer trying as far as they can to go along with their usual routine and that happened here (Jersey).
Interviewer: Something we were told in an earlier interview was interesting. The interviewee suggested that this attempt to act normally changed significantly after the deportations of the Islanders began. Was this how you saw it?
Bob: There was a change in attitude after September in 1942. It had been, well one would never say it was a pleasurable Occupation, but it was endurable. Things were getting worse, rations were steadily getting lower, the Russian workers came in and there was great uncertainty as at that time. No-one could predict which way the war was going but certainly after the deportations there was a totally different mindset. From that time on there was an attitude of burning hate and an attitude by everybody to be as awkward as possible from that moment on, which hadn’t existed to such a degree before.
Even on the day the first deportees were leaving on a little boat going out through the harbour mouth, people were grouped up on the hill. The people going out started singing “There’ll always be an England” which was then picked up by the group on the hill. Now that sort of thing hadn’t happened before- this was open defiance. There was a minor riot, young boys were striking German officers no less and were put in prison for it- that sort of thing. That defiance was caused by tremendous anger and afterwards although that anger was perhaps more subdued, it was always there.
Interviewer: The decision to deport people seems to be a very odd one at that point of the war when the islands were so firmly in their control. How did the German administration respond to the acts of defiance?
Bob: They responded in the only way they possibly could. We learned later on that this move had been strongly opposed by the German administration for some time because they knew perfectly well that it was going to make life more difficult for them afterwards. They were not responsible for the decision- the orders had come from Paris and were in fact from the Fuehrer himself. Yes obviously for them it made things much more difficult for them on an individual basis and they didn’t therefore want it.
Interviewer: Please can you now tell us about how you were involved in trying to hide the Russian slave workers who were brought into the island by Organisation Todt?
Bob: Yes, I became involved… it was something that evolved into my life rather than a sudden change or decision.I was working in insurance and used to travel around to houses to collect premiums and doing this I got to know a truly remarkable widow who used to live in the north west of the island. She had a young man living in the house who was introduced as being French. However I knew from the way he spoke French that he did not speak it as a Frenchman would. I said nothing but I suspected.
The next time I called at the house she admitted to me that he was Russian. She had two sons who were both in the armed forces. The elder son who was a graduate of Oxford University… both very bright, both had scholarships to Oxford. The eldest graduated in 1929, enrolled in the Navy and very quickly became an officer. One day she got a Red Cross message- Red Cross messages were 25 words maximum- and this message told her that her eldest son Richard had been lost at sea in the Mediterranean.
Two or three weeks after that a neighbouring farmer came to her door with this Russian… he too was a remarkable man. He was trying to place escaped prisoners with local families. Her words to me that I shall never forget were “I had to do something for another mother’s son”. She, for her pains, finally ended up in a gas chamber at Ravensbrook but that’s another story…
Eventually there came a time when he had to be moved and she was arrested a few days later. By that time I knew of other Russians who were being hidden and somehow was part of this small group helping them. You didn’t know anybody else’s names, there was no organisation- you couldn’t talk about these things, that was far too dangerous and all the prisoners would have to be moved after a time. I mean imagine if in this house you had one hidden, the neighbours would see. They would see this strange person going in and out and would say, “well, who can that be?” So the moment the neighbours began to get curious- well they wouldn’t go running to the Germans- they could just talk loosely so the workers had to be constantly moved.
Interviewer: Can you tell us more about the workers themselves?
Bob: Well they had been brought from Russia in appaling conditions, in cattle trucks across Europe, the journey taking perhaps 2 weeks. In many cases they were simply picked up in the street. I knew a boy of 15 who had been going home from school in Kiev, I think many of them came from the Ukraine, which was at that time part of the Soviet Union. He was on his way home from school wearing his school cap, carrying his school books and with his friends. They were suddenly aware that there were German trucks at the top of the street, and German trucks behind them. Able-bodied men were being thrown into the trucks. Quick thinking men sashed into buildings, possibly got out of the back but these boys were simply picked up, taken straight to the railway station, put in a cattle truck- so many of them that there wasn’t even room for them to sit or squat- and came across Europe. I leave you to imagine the sanitary conditions in those cattle trucks in the height of summer.
Interviewer: What was their main task when they arrived in the Islands?
Bob: Building fortifications for the quasi-civilian German organisation under a Doctor Todt, called Organisation Todt. The Russians were regarded by the Nazis as ‘untermenchun’, meaning ‘low people’. They were immensely racist, as racist or worse than the very worst kind of Afrikaan in South Africa during Apartheid, not only against coloured people but against Slavs for some reason, and particularly if they came from Russia.
Interviewer: Can you now tell me something about their living conditions when they reached the Islands?
Bob: Well they were working very long hours. They were not paid of course. They were not allowed out of their camps. Others groups were- there were a lot of Spanish Republicans. They were paid in the rather worthless Reichmarks but these could be used in the islands, but the Russians were not paid at all. They were also very badly fed.
The badly fed was not actually the German government’s policy. I got to know very well a Spaniard, who was a lawyer in his civilian life in Spain, and because he was educated he was working in an office. He told me that on paper the rations that the Russians were supposed to be getting were really quite good. It was all worked out by a specialist dietitian in Berlin who had calculated the requirements to get a good day’s work out of a man. The trouble was Nazi Germany, like I think all dictatorships, was quite incredibly corrupt. This was a surprise to me. I knew that Nazi Germany was brutal, even before the war. We knew how they were treating Jews. They weren’t sending them to death camps at that point but they were denying them certain ordinary civil rights. People at that point thought “Yes but they get things done” and they’re building autobahns and suchlike“ but in fact it was very corrupt. Dictatorships are not efficient! So what was happening was that these rations were getting piched along the transit route and in the islands by guards who were then selling them on the black market. That’s why they were just getting watery soup, resulting in a high death rate for quite a long time until the German Red Cross intervened and their conditions were improved. At that point some of the more infamous camp commandants in Jersey were replaced. It seems even the most inefficient and brutal of regimes doesn’t want to see its labour just dying off like that!
Interviewer: Was it the conditions that led to many of the workers trying to escape?
Bob: Well, they were obviously unhappy being forced to help out with building fortifications anyway in order to help the German war effort, but I think that the appalling conditions was a very strong reason why many of them sought to escape yes.
Interviewer: With conditions being that bad there must have been an awareness of this amongst the islanders.
Bob: Oh yes, I mean we had very small bread rations and so on ourselves but people would share these when possible. They would go to near the work sites and attempt to throw them the odd piece of bread. My God, if you were caught you were imprisoned immediately for it! A couple I knew, my dentist and his wife, they were passing food to the Russians one day on a building site, got seen arrested and were deported. They spent the rest of the war imprisoned. They were not sent to interment camps but were sentenced and imprisoned and sent to prisons on the continent. Both survived the war, miraculously
Interviewer: Were there any instances where German soldiers were sharing their rations with prisoners?
Bob: No I don’t, it must have happened but I didn’t see it myself. Well one thing, there is a photograph that Michael Ginns (head of the Channel Islands Occupation Society) has showing a group of Russian workers, some of them only boys, and a German soldier had written on the back ”A group of Russian workers. Poor fellows.“, which shows that there was an awareness or maybe sympathy to their plight but I don’t think any soldier would have dared stick their neck out by actively helping them.
Part 2 of this interview is now available to read and continues the look at the lives of the Russian workers and those who helped to rescue and hide them.
Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission
