AMID the doom and gloom of falling stock prices, rising taxes and a faltering housing market it is all too easy to lose a sense of perspective.
Times are certainly getting harder - although ‘middle-income earners’ scraping by on just £69,000 a year can breathe a little easier today - but, by any valid criteria, this is still a wealthy island. Not the millionaires’ playground some national newspapers will insist on portraying, but a long way from being on its uppers.
Poverty exists - although efforts to eradicate it are proving hard to implement - but the welfare state ensures that squalor, sickness and disease on a Dickensian scale remain a part of history.
Leading relatively pampered lives, it is all the more shocking then to learn more in today’s centre pages of the terrible hardships endured by prisoners in Alderney’s concentration camps.
Places that are familiar to islanders as beautiful bays for swimming linked by quiet lanes and an idyllic town are suddenly painted a dismal grey by wartime barbed wire, concrete fortifications and prefabricated huts.
Inside and outside those ugly buildings a life of untold horror and hardship was lived by thousands of people whose only crime was to have kept a piece of copper, taught a banned language or somehow irritated the Nazi forces.
It is shocking to realise that gates we might saunter past now oblivious to their history were once used as staking posts where emaciated prisoners were left to starve to death.
Worse yet is the mental image of skeletons piled up on the seabed from bodies dumped over the cliffs by SS soldiers.
More than six decades have conspired to dull the memories among younger generations of the atrocities committed within our Bailiwick. The bravery of a handful of survivors and the families of those who were incarcerated has ensured that such crimes against humanity that were committed on our doorstep are remembered and lessons can be learned.
For, as former prisoner Sylwester Kukula reminds us: ‘It was real. It really happened. We were ordinary people. No one should have to go through that again.’
A gateway to our history of horror
AMID the doom and gloom of falling stock prices, rising taxes and a faltering housing market it is all too easy to lose a sense of perspective.
Times are certainly getting harder - although ‘middle-income earners’ scraping by on just £69,000 a year can breathe a little easier today - but, by any valid criteria, this is still a wealthy island. Not the millionaires’ playground some national newspapers will insist on portraying, but a long way from being on its uppers.
Poverty exists - although efforts to eradicate it are proving hard to implement - but the welfare state ensures that squalor, sickness and disease on a Dickensian scale remain a part of history.
Leading relatively pampered lives, it is all the more shocking then to learn more in today’s centre pages of the terrible hardships endured by prisoners in Alderney’s concentration camps.
Places that are familiar to islanders as beautiful bays for swimming linked by quiet lanes and an idyllic town are suddenly painted a dismal grey by wartime barbed wire, concrete fortifications and prefabricated huts.
Inside and outside those ugly buildings a life of untold horror and hardship was lived by thousands of people whose only crime was to have kept a piece of copper, taught a banned language or somehow irritated the Nazi forces.
It is shocking to realise that gates we might saunter past now oblivious to their history were once used as staking posts where emaciated prisoners were left to starve to death.
Worse yet is the mental image of skeletons piled up on the seabed from bodies dumped over the cliffs by SS soldiers.
More than six decades have conspired to dull the memories among younger generations of the atrocities committed within our Bailiwick. The bravery of a handful of survivors and the families of those who were incarcerated has ensured that such crimes against humanity that were committed on our doorstep are remembered and lessons can be learned.
For, as former prisoner Sylwester Kukula reminds us: ‘It was real. It really happened. We were ordinary people. No one should have to go through that again.’
Article posted on 25th September, 2008 - 2.30pm