From Brian Ahier.
I WAS interested to see that a former American prisoner of war, Mr Younggren, has visited Jersey to see his old camp at South Hill.

This news item brought back several memories for me because I was one of a small number of uniformed St John Ambulance members who visited the camp every Saturday in early 1945 to deliver donations of food and other items given by local people as gifts to prisoners of war. We also took donated goods to a camp at the top of Pier Road which held a large number of North African prisoners.

I cannot now remember any details about these donations except that they were mainly such things as cabbages, turnips and even apples and pears. These were loaded onto a handcart which we pushed from an address in New Street to a German military office in the Ritz Hotel (now demolished) at the top of St Clement’s Road. I have a clear recollection of taking a list of the items into a large room where numerous German soldiers in uniform were doing clerical work at desks.

I used to wonder, and still do, what they could possibly be doing, for, of course, this was when Jersey was besieged and there was little if any communication between the Germans in Jersey and Germany. After an officer at a desk had looked at the list and examined the contents of our cart we were given a letter in German which authorised us to hand the goods over to the German guard at the prisoner-of-war camps. We then pushed the handcart along Colomberie and up Pier Road.

The North Africans’ camp, although surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, was fairly accessible and we were allowed into a large yard, where some of the North Africans spoke to us in French.

Naturally we were immensely curious to see the Americans at South Hill but their camp was very different indeed. It was built with a double wall of heavy barbed wire.

None of the prisoners could be seen from outside the camp and we were certainly not allowed to enter. German guards would come to the road and take the goods inside. Did the Americans ever receive these things? Did they know that local people had donated them?
50 St Mark’s Road,
Henley,
Oxon.