Frank Le Vilio was sentenced to detention in France just days before D-Day

HE ‘borrowed’ a German motorbike for a ride – and went to Belsen as a result.

This is the tragic story of the young Jerseyman Frank Le Villio, one of only two British people who were sent to Belsen and survived.

The other survivor was also from Jersey – Harold Le Druillenec, the schoolteacher arrested because he had helped a Russian prisoner to escape some 18 months before, and was also in possession of forbidden wireless sets.

His story is comparatively well known: after being repatriated he returned to Jersey, resumed his teaching career and in due course became the head teacher at St John’s School.

Unlike him, Frank Le Villio was so weakened by the unspeakable conditions he endured in prison and concentration camps that he contracted tuberculosis, and died in 1946.

Stan Hockley with the extract on Frank in Joe Mière’s book. Picture by David Ferguson (00706093)

His cousin, retired decorator Stan Hockley, said: ‘Harold Le Druillenec has always been described as the only Briton who survived Belsen and was liberated from there. That mistake has been repeated constantly over the years. I would like to put the record straight. I would like more people to know that there was another Jerseyman who came out of Belsen alive.’

He presumes that the Breton origin of the Le Villio family confused both the Occupation authorities and subsequent historians, who did not realise that he was a Jerseyman – and therefore a British subject. However, he was just as ‘Jersey’ as any other family in the Island who had originated from Brittany, but over a couple of generations had become an intrinsic part of the Island community.

His Jersey birth certificate states that he was born in Le Geyt Road on 11 September 1925. Before moving to Jersey, his grandparents and their young family originated from the small village of Coet-Coet near Vannes, where for at least 300 years the family had lived and worked as ‘laboureurs du terre’.

His mother died when he was very young. His father was a barman and Frank was educated at the Sacré Coeur orphanage, and later at Vauxhall School. There were sisters, one of whom lives in France, and the other in New Zealand.

For a while, the whole family lived in a house in Museum Street, where Mr Hockley remembers ‘mucking about’ with his much older first cousin,

The late curator of the German Underground Hospital, Joe Mière, in his book, Never To Be Forgotten, wrote: ‘As a young lad Frank was always up to tricks, but he was kind and very generous and a good sport. He longed for, but never received, any parental love or guidance.’

And quoted in the JEP in 2002, Ron Tierney, whose brother Joe was had been a school-friend of Frank, described him: ‘He was a harmless, gullible sort of person. There was no malice in him, and everybody at Vauxhall School learnt to ride on his “Matchless” motor-bike’.

He was 15 at the start of the Occupation. He refused to work for the Germans, and in 1944 he ‘liberated’ a motor bike belonging to a German soldier, and went off for a spin.

Conditions inside Belsen where thousands died of malnutrition and disease

Mr Hockley said: ‘It was harmless fun, really, but he was caught, arrested by the German Military Police, charged with “military larceny”, and sentenced to three months imprisonment in France. That was in June 1944, just before the D-Day invasions cut off Jersey from France.’

He was sent initially to the notorious Fresnes prison near Paris, then on to two further prison camps – Belfort, and finally to Neuengamme, before ending up in Belsen.

Following the liberation of the camp and his repatriation to Britain, he was treated for TB, and then went to live in Nottingham with an aunt. Although he must have felt well enough to get work – he was employed as railway porter for a while – his health had deteriorated beyond recovery and he died in September 1946.

He was aged just 21.

Frank Le Villio’s name is commemorated on the memorial to those who were taken from Jersey during the Occupation, and in the Garden of Remembrance at the War Tunnels.

Mr Hockley said: ‘The emphasis these days is on “forgive and forget”. But those who say that – do they have relatives who were tortured and murdered, just for having an illicit ride on a bike?’

THE following, a recording from the BBC archives and kept by Mr Hockley, is a transcription of a broadcast made by the late Harold Le Druillenec in September 1945. In it, he describes his own captivity in Belsen in the last month of the war, immediately before the liberation in April 1945:

‘I do not know if I shall succeed in giving you an idea of what life in Belsen was like in those last five days.

Inmates of Belsen, which became more and more overcrowded as Soviet troops advanced

‘I would like to point out that we suffered from: firstly, starvation – absolute starvation; secondly, complete lack of water for some six days; thirdly, lack of sleep (a few minutes sleep near the burial pits was occasionally possible); fourthly, to be covered with lice, and de-lousing oneself three or four times a day proving absolutely useless. If one sat inside the hut or outside in the yard, one was covered within five or ten minutes.

 ‘Then, the fatalistic attitude among the prisoners towards what the end would certainly be: the crematorium or the pits. Add to this the foul stench and vileness of the place which we saw for the whole of daylight day by day, the blows on the head, the hideous work and in the last three days, the Hungarian guards shooting at us, just as if we were rabbits, from all directions.

‘If you picture all this, the sum total, as it were, hitting a man all at once, then you can get a remote inkling of what life was like in Belsen in those last three days.

‘In the two previous camps there was an attempt made at cleanliness, although the atrocities, or sadism, in the other camps were worse than Belsen.

‘I think I can fairly describe Belsen as probably the foulest and vilest spot that ever soiled the surface of this earth.’  

Stan Hockley with the extract on Frank in Joe Mière’s book.  Picture by David Ferguson (00706093)

Inmates of Belsen, which became more and more overcrowded as Soviet troops advanced

The Occupation ID card of Harold Le Druillenec Picture courtesy of Jersey Archive

Conditions inside Belsen where thousands died of malnutrition and disease