The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Isola gave me your address because she is sure you would like to see my list for your book.

If you was to take me to Paris today, and set me down in a fine French restaurant—the kind of place what has white lace tablecloths, candles on the walls, and silver covers over all the plates—well, I tell you it would be nothing, nothing compared to my Vega box.

In case you don’t know of it, the Vega was a Red Cross ship that come first to Guernsey on 27 December, 1944. They brought food to us then, and five more times—and it kept us alive until the end of the war.

Yes, I do say it—kept us alive! Food had not been so plentiful for several years by then. Except for the devils in the Black Market, not a spoonful of sugar was left on the Island. All the flour for bread had run out about the first of December of ’44. Them German soldiers was as hungry as we was—with bloated bellies and no body warmth from food.

Well, I was tired to death of boiled potatoes and turnips, and I would have soon turned up my toes and died, when the Vega came into our port.

Mr. Churchill, he wouldn’t let the Red Cross ships bring us any food before then because he said the Germans would just take it, and eat it up themselves. Now that may sound like smart planning to you—to starve the villains out! But to me it said he just didn’t care if we starved along with them.

Well, something shoved his soul up a notch or two, and he decided we could eat. So in December, he says to the Red Cross, “Oh, all right, go ahead and feed them.”

Miss Ashton, there were TWO BOXES of food for every man, woman, and child on Guernsey—all stored up in the Vega’s hold. There was other stuff too: nails, seed for planting, candles, oil to cook with, matches to light a fire, some clothing, and some shoes. Even a few layettes for any new babies around.

There was flour and tobacco—Moses can talk about manna all he wants, but he never seen anything like this! I am going to tell you everything in my box, because I wrote it all down to paste in my memory book.

Six ounces of chocolate

Twenty ounces of biscuits

Four ounces of tea

Twenty ounces of butter

Six ounces of sugar

Thirteen ounces of Spam

Two ounces of tinned milk

Eight ounces of raisins

Fifteen ounces of marmalade

Ten ounces of salmon

Five ounces of sardines

Four ounces of cheese

Six ounces of prunes

One ounce of pepper

One ounce of salt

A tablet of soap

I gave my prunes away—but wasn’t that something? When I die I am going to leave all my money to the Red Cross. I have written to tell them so.

There is something else I should say to you. It may be about those Germans, but honor due is honor due. They unloaded all those boxes of food for us from the Vega, and they didn’t take none, not one box of it, for themselves. Of course, their Commandant had told them, “That food is for the Islanders, it is not yours. Steal one bit and I’ll have you shot.” Then he gave each man unloading the ship a teaspoon, so’s he could scrape up any flour or grain that spilled on the roadway. They could eat that.

In fact, they were a pitiful sight—those soldiers. Stealing from gardens, knocking on doors asking for scraps. One day I saw a soldier catch up a cat, and slam its head against a wall. Then he cut it off, and hid the cat in his jacket. I followed him—till he come to a field. That German skinned that cat and boiled him up in his billy can, and ate it right there.

That was truly, truly a sorrowful sight to see. It made me sick, but underneath my sick, I thought, “There goes Hitler’s Third Reich—dining out,” and then I started laughing, fit to die. I am ashamed of that now, but that is what I did.

That is all I have to say. I wish you well with your book writing.

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.