The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Yours truly,

Micah Daniels

From John Booker to Juliet

16th May, 1946

Dear Miss Ashton,

Amelia told us you are coming to Guernsey to gather stories for your book. I will welcome you with all my heart, but I won’t be able to tell you about what happened to me because I get the shakes when I talk about it. Maybe if I write it down, you won’t need me to say it out loud. It isn’t about Guernsey anyway—I wasn’t here. I was in Neuengamme Concentration Camp in Germany.

You know how I pretended I was Lord Tobias for three years? Peter Jenkins’s daughter, Lisa, was dating German soldiers. Any German soldier, so long as he would give her stockings or lipsticks. This was so until she took up with Sgt. Willy Gurtz. He was a mean little runt. The two of them together benasties the mind. It was Lisa who betrayed me to the German Commandant.

In March of 1944, Lisa was having her hair done in an upsweep at the beauty parlor, where she found an old, pre-war copy of Tatler magazine. There, on page 124, was a colored picture of Lord and Lady Tobias Penn-Piers. They were at a wedding in Sussex—drinking champagne and eating oysters. The words under the picture told all about her gown, her diamonds, her shoes, her face, and his money. The magazine mentioned that they were owners of an estate, called La Fort, on the island of Guernsey.

Well, it was pretty plain—even to Lisa, who’s thick as a post—that Lord Tobias Penn-Piers was not me. She did not wait for her hair to be combed out, but left at once to show the picture to Willy Gurtz, who took it straight to the Commandant.

It made the Germans feel like fools, bowing and scraping all that time to a servant—so they were extra spiteful and sent me to the camp at Neuengamme.

I did not think I would live out the first week. With other prisoners, I was sent out to clear unexploded bombs during air raids. What a choice—to run into a square with the bombs raining down or to be killed by the guards for refusing. I ran and scuttled like a rat and tried to cover myself when I heard bombs whistle past my head and somehow I was alive at the end of it.

That’s what I told myself—Well, you’re still alive. I think all of us said the same each morning when we woke up—Well, I’m still alive. But the truth is, we weren’t. What we were—it wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t alive either. I was a living soul only a few minutes a day, when I was in my bunk. Those times, I tried to think of something happy, something I’d liked—but not something I loved, for that made it worse. Just a small thing, like a school picnic or bicycling downhill—that’s all I could stand.

It felt like thirty years, but it was only one. In April of ’45, the Commandant at Neuengamme picked out those of us who were still fit enough to work and sent us to Belsen. We rode for several days in a big, open truck—no food, no blankets, no water, but we were glad we weren’t walking. The mud-puddles in the road were red.

I imagine you already know of Belsen and what happened there. When we got off the truck, we were handed shovels. We were to dig great pits to bury the dead. They led us through the camp to the spot, and I feared I’d lost my mind because everyone I saw was dead. Even the living looked like corpses, and the corpses were lying where they’d dropped. I didn’t know why they were bothering to bury them. The fact was, the Russians were coming from the east, and the Allies were coming from the west—and those Germans were terrified of what they’d see when they got there.

The crematorium could not burn the bodies fast enough—so after we dug long trenches, we pulled and dragged the bodies to the edges and threw them in. You’ll not believe it, but the SS forced the prisoners’ band to play music as we lugged the corpses—and for that, I hope they burn in hell with polkas blaring. When the trenches were full, the SS poured petrol over the bodies and set fire to them. Afterwards, we were supposed to cover them with dirt— as if you could hide such a thing.

The British got there the next day, and dear God, but we were glad to see them. I was strong enough to walk down the road, so I saw the tanks crash down the gates and I saw the British flag painted on their sides. I turned to a man sitting against a fence nearby and called out “We’re saved! It’s the British!” Then I saw he was dead. He had only missed it by minutes. I sat down in the mud and sobbed as though he’d been my best friend.

When the Tommies came down out of the tanks, they were weeping, too—even the officers. Those good men fed us, gave us blankets, saw us to hospitals. And bless them, they burned Belsen to the ground a month later.

I read in the newspaper that they’ve put up a war refugee camp in its place now. It gives me the shivers to think of new barracks being built there, even for a good purpose. To my mind, that land should be a blank forever.

I’ll write no more of this, and I hope you’ll understand if I do not care to speak of it. As Seneca says, “Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.”

I do recall something you might like to know for your book. It happened in Guernsey, when I was still pretending to be Lord Tobias. Sometimes of an evening Elizabeth and I would walk up to the headlands to watch the bombers flying over—hundreds of them, on their way to bomb London. It was terrible to watch and know where they were headed and what they meant to do. The German radio had told us London was leveled—flattened, with nothing left but rubble and ashes. We didn’t quite believe them, German propaganda being what it was, but still—

We were walking through St. Peter Port on one such night when we passed the McLaren House. That was a fine old house taken over by German officers. A window was open and the wireless was playing a beautiful piece of music. We stopped to listen, thinking it must be a program from Berlin. But, when the music ended, we heard Big Ben strike and a British voice said, “This is the BBC—London.” You can never mistake Big Ben’s sound! London was still there! Still there. Elizabeth and I hugged, and we started waltzing up the road. That was one of the times I could not think about while I was in Neuengamme.

Yours sincerely,

John Booker

From Dawsey to Juliet

16th May, 1946

Dear Juliet,