'When the tank came we knew we were liberated'

In 1942 a 10-year-old girl and her family were taken by Nazi soldiers from Gorey in Occupied Jersey to a prison camp in Germany. In an interview last month, Gloria Bullen, aged 92, told the BBC how deportation shaped her life.

"German guards came with a local constable, at 11 o'clock at night.

"The constable, the poor old fellow was a bit upset, he said 'I'm sorry but we'll pick you up at eight in the morning to take you to the harbour'.

"We'd heard of people going to Germany but didn't know anything about it, then the constable came and said Dad was English and he had to go."

Gloria said her parents, Elsie and Thomas Webber, were told to pack just one suitcase for the six of them, her mother, father, Gloria and siblings Shirley, Sandra, Benita and Barry.

Hitler had ordered all British national men aged between 16 and 70 years who had not been born in the Channel Islands to be deported to Germany with their families.

The order was a reprisal for Britain's internment of German nationals in Persia, now Iran, in 1941.

On 16 September Gloria's family was taken by boat to St Malo and then by rail through Europe to southern Germany.

They spent a few weeks at an internment camp at Biberach before they were transferred with more than 600 people from the Channel Islands to an 18th century castle in Bad Wurzach on 31 October 1942.

Gloria said: "We were very short of food, very, very often until the Red Cross got hold of it [the situation], and that was the only time we had a bit more food.

"There was a time when each one of us had a parcel or else one time you had one parcel between the whole family, which didn't go very far."

Back home in the Channel Islands, the advancing Allies liberated the French Channel ports and cut off the German food supply chain to the islands, leaving islanders nearly starved.

Gloria said: "Sometimes they used to say to us who'd been deported, we were better off, but I wouldn't like to say that, not being all that way from home."

The German schloss, or castle, was fenced and heavily guarded.

Gloria said: "To start off, you had Hitler Youth and they were nasty but as the war went on, my father said 'they'll be off to Russia soon' and sure enough, they did.

"Then we were left with all the elderly retired soldiers and they used to walk around the camp with a gun on their back, but they needed them as a walking stick, really."

Activities at the camp were limited.

Gloria said: "Once they started school we had from nine until noon and from one until four and that was OK.

"You had the grounds but they were surrounded with barbed wire.

"We were allowed to walk outside and we had a little park where we used to play football, and that was just across the road and that was the only time we went out.

"The Germans would take a group of ten people for a walk on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and there was always a queue at the gate waiting to go out."

Gloria said the villagers of Bad Wurzach remained aloof.

"You never mixed with the people in the village, they weren't allowed to speak to us, they weren't even allowed to look at us, they wouldn't let us speak."

Gloria is still angry that the three years spent interned affected her education.

She said: "When I went back Grouville School I couldn't catch up and I lost three years schooling which is so damn annoying as I was going well with a scholarship.

"I lost all that, that was the biggest upset of my life because I was doing so well at school and I wanted to do well in life."

Gloria's father was on the roof of the schloss keeping watch on Saturday 28 April 1945 when he saw tanks pull into the village.

Gloria recalled: "This French tank came in, now we live in Jersey and what part of France have we got across the road? St Malo, and the tank came in, written 'St Malo' on it, of all things.

"When the tank came, we knew we were on the way home, we knew we were liberated."

The Webber family were flown to Hendon where they stayed with family before they set sail from Southampton to St Helier in August.

Gloria said: "As we were going in the harbour, on the end of the harbour as it goes round like that, there were dozens and dozens of people there and it was all the people that were in the camp with us, all welcoming us back again."

Gloria moved to Cornwall with her husband Norman Bullen in 1954.

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