THERE has been ‘a quite remarkable transformation’ in the way Jersey sees its Occupation history according to the controversial Occupation historian, Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting, from a ‘guns and tin hats’ to ‘a warts and all’ attitude.

In an article for the Guardian, she describes today’s Holocaust Memorial Day as ‘the culmination of a quietly remarkable transformation in Jersey, as it finally comes to terms with its wartime past’.She refers to her own book, A Model Occupation, which she researched ten years ago and which she admits was viewed as ‘muck-raking’ by many Islanders whom she interviewed at the time.

At the time, she says, there were few official memorials to slave labourers or the Jews in any of the Channel Islands.’More than ten years on, Jersey has finally made a clean breast of it,’ she says.For this apparent repentance, she believes her own book ‘played a modest part in the process’, and she compliments the Bailiff, Sir Philip Bailhache, ‘who grasped that the only way the Island would lay this ghost of a scandalous wartime past was through acknowledging a “”warts and all”" history of the Occupation’.The Guardian heads the article ‘One Channel Island at least is owning up to its wartime shame’.