A painful wartime truth laid bare at last

ALMOST every time I go to the cinema, the film is worse than I expect it to be. But The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society was far better than I thought it would be. This is probably because it dares to deal directly with that great national embarrassment, the German occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945. When the Nazis came to Guernsey, Jersey, Sark and Alderney, we didn’t fight on the beaches. We did surrender. We did collaborate. We even handed over the Jews to be murdered, when we must have known what was their likely fate, which is the most painful and shocking thing of all. I say ‘we’ because I regard the Channel Islanders very much as fellow countrymen. I think that people in, say, Sussex or Yorkshire would have behaved in just the same way under the same conditions. Though there were some courageous and noble acts of defiance and resistance, most people were – with good reason – too afraid of endangering their loved ones to join in. This was all quite forgivable. No honest human thinks anything about this other than ‘there but for the Grace of God go you or I’. They were undefended and alone. Many of the occupiers were friendly and, where possible, kind. Collaboration, often in small ways, was hard to avoid. Well, having admitted all that, and seen many of its aspects thoughtfully portrayed in this interesting film, isn’t it time we stopped feeling so superior to the French? And also time we looked to our crumbling national defences?