Now, a new review is aimed at filling in the records.
A British official has said the government will soon look deeper into the concentration camps on the Channel Islands in an effort to clarify the number of lives lost in the camps.
“Some people don’t want to believe anything happened, and some believe thousands and thousands died,” said U.K. Holocaust issues official Lord Eric Pickles. “I don’t think the truth can ever hurt us.”
What is known about the camps has come in part from archaeological digs, but records from the occupation are far-flung.
Gilly Carr, a British archaeologist who wrote the book “Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands,” said some think tens of thousands of people died in the camps. That lack of clarity, though, is.
She created a website to tell islanders’ stories, including that of John Max Finkelstein, a Jersey resident who, along with other Jewish Channel Islands residents, was rounded up and sent to more infamous camps.
Finkelstein spent most of his imprisonment at the Buchenwald camp in Germany, the same camp that famed author Elie Wiesel survived. Finkelstein arrived on Oct. 29, 1943, as prisoner 30364. He would experience “conditions of indescribable horror for about 2½ years in Nazi captivity, according to an account from Carr’s site.
While it is not clear from records whether Finkelstein spent time in one of the camps on the sparsely populated Channel Islands, his story is one of several that catalogue the horrors endured by residents of the islands.
According to Carr’s biography, Finkelstein had moved in 1931 to the islands, which comprise an archipelago of two British Crown dependencies, Jersey and Guernsey.
Nazis invaded the islands about a decade later and started registering Jews, including Finkelstein. In 1943, while he was in his late 50s, Finkelstein was sent to camps in Nazi-occupied mainland Europe. He was imprisoned at Buchenwald in Germany, according to Holocaust survivor records, then ended up at the Theresienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic. When Allied Forces liberated the camp in summer 1945, Finkelstein was roughly 112 pounds, down from about 175 before his imprisonment.
By the time he returned, it had been nearly three years since Finkelstein had seen his home on the island of Jersey.
That island will be part of new research on two Channel Islands death camps and two labor camps — a goal of which was death through work.
Carr disputed the idea that there is little known about camps, saying there is a body of academic research about the imprisonment on British soil. But other researchers maintain that few people know about the camps.
“Despite investigations led by the British Government immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War, knowledge of the history and architecture of these camps remained limited,” according to a March 2020 study published in the Antiquity journal about archaeological research of the former camps.
Pickles said his office will lead the review of accounts “hidden in plain sight” in archives around the world.
The Channel Island prisoners included Jews and European political dissidents, Pickles said, but also Russian prisoners of war. Those records were given to the Russians, and retrieving those documents now may be more difficult because of the war in Ukraine.
Still, he said, it is crucial the board does all it can to shore up the record.
“If we overexaggerate we become guilty of Holocaust distortion; if we underestimate, we also cause a problem,” he said. “Those who want to remember Holocaust through truth have to get it right every day.”
The world knows the truth about the Holocaust because of survivors like Finkelstein.
After he was freed, Finkelstein was flown to Lyon in France, where he recuperated in a hospital for several weeks before he went back to Jersey in January 1946.
He applied for naturalization as a British citizen in 1948 and remained in Jersey, Carr wrote. In the mid-1960s, at age 81, Finkelstein successfully applied for compensation as a survivor of the Nazis.
