As the VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations fill the Channel Islands, and bunting fills the streets and shops, the fate of Guernsey’s deported Jews remains a painful part of British history. Guernsey, Jersey, Sark and Alderney were the only British territories to be occupied by the Nazis.
In Guernsey only one protest, by jurat Sir Abraham Lainé, challenged the absorption of the Nuremberg Race Laws into British daily life.
After the occupation, Guernsey authorities collaborated in hunting down Jews as they implemented the Measures Against the Jews.
In 1942, three women were transported from Guernsey to Auschwitz. Two were Austrians: Theresia (also Theresa or Thérèse on official documents) Steiner and Auguste Spitz, who both worked at Castel Hospital in St Peter Port. The third was an agricultural worker, Marianne Grünfeld from Silesia.
Saint Peter Port, viewed from Elizabeth Tower.Getty Images
My play Theresa, which toured England, France, Germany and Austria until 2004, explores what happened to Steiner and probes the extent of collaboration. Steiner came to England after the Anschluss and worked with a family in Kent. When war was declared her employers, terrified of Luftwaffe bombing, took her with them to the Channel Islands. As the German invasion became imminent, everyone was allowed to evacuate. But Theresia was forced by the Guernsey chief inspector, William Schulpher, to remain. She was arrested and imprisoned. She was betrayed. She was murdered. In 1996, the BBC commissioned me to write a radio version of the play. I rewrote it for broadcast as The Road to Paradise. The script’s factual revelations prompted protests from infuriated Guernseyites. Archives revealed the full extent of the co-operation at government level as well as “horizontal collaboration” from Guernsey women. Were the locals antisemitic? I found casual antisemitism in the 1990s that must surely have been common during the war.
I did try to show the play in Guernsey in the 1990s. I was informed that a licence must be granted. The licence was refused. The reason given was because of its “distasteful language”. I took this to mean that I named the guilty whose reputation was to be protected. The governing bailiff from 1999-2005 was the grandson of wartime bailiff Victor G. Carey, a Pétainist figure. Charles Carey, a different grandson of Victor Carey based in London, told me that “Winston Churchill did not know whether to knight my grandfather or hang him for treason”. He was knighted in 1945.
The Alderney camp featured 'brutality, sadism and murder', Lord Pickles said (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Images
The censorship remained unchallenged until April 28, 2025, when Theresa was finally produced as a semi-staged reading at St James arts centre in St Peter Port. I found it poignant to note that this venue stands opposite the Royal Courts where Carey and his jurats accepted the Nuremberg Laws. The production was organised by an organisation called Jewish Renaissance with St James’ director John Bissell. Finally, the years of silence ended and the three Jewish women’s names were repeated as an onstage epilogue. The morning after the performance I met some Guernsey residents who did want this history known. Birmingham-born Sandra James, a former nurse who had come to postwar Guernsey and served as a politician, showed me previously unseen photos of Theresia.
The entrance to the former German concentration camp S S Lager SyltAlamy Stock Photo
At the Royal Court of Guernsey, where I attended a session discussing the minimum wage, I was introduced to Deputy Carl Meerveld, the grandson of a slave worker.
“My grandfather Jacobus was seized when he was a 17-year-old in Haarlem (in the Netherlands] and [taken to Guernsey] as a forced labourer,” Meerveld told me. He related how a Guernsey woman hid him after he escaped from a search party. Carl told me the woman, his grandmother, later married Jacobus. This happy outcome made me wonder if Theresia’s sex made her more vulnerable to isolation and persecution. I found no evidence of anyone suggesting that the three Jewish women should be sheltered, as Jacobus was.
Before I left the island I asked if the histories of Steiner, Spitz and Grünfeld are taught in school. The answer was no. Theresia Steiner, Auguste Spitz and Marianne Grünfeld need their names spoken out loud along with the one man who was keen to save them – Sir Abraham Lainé.
Theresa is published as part of The Holocaust Trilogy by Julia Pascal (Bloomsbury Publishing)
