Abstract
The vast majority of the thousands of former labour camps of occupied Europe have long since been erased from the landscape. The visible remnants of the practice of modern slave and forced labour in the Channel Islands amount to very little. Even less has undergone the process of heritagisation. A greater amount yet remains to be uncovered by archaeological excavation, but this has never taken place and, in most cases, is unlikely ever to, due to the presence of residential housing on top of key sites. For the small number of camp sites which are potentially available to be turned into heritage but which have not, whether through accident or deliberate intent, we must ask why this has not happened, and I explore this crucial question in this chapter. I also examine the processes through which the acts of forgetting have taken place over the last 70 years, the reasons for the selective presentation, absence or marginalisation of forced and slave labour in island museums and, finally, suggest potential provocative strategies for change.
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Notes
- 1.
Although such a term implies an eventual trajectory into the heritage state, which is not assured.
- 2.
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.phpURL_ID=34325&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, Accessed 31 July 2011.
- 3.
Email from Gary Font, 15 August 2012.
- 4.
Letter from Bob Le Sueur to author, 25 May 2010.
- 5.
Letter from Bob Le Sueur to author, 8 June 2010.
- 6.
Letter from Bob Le Sueur to author, 25 May 2010.
- 7.
Michael Ginns personal communication, 11 September 2011.
- 8.
Gordon Pringent and Walter Gallichan are perhaps the best-known Jerseymen who found themselves in the same plight as other foreign labourers. Pringent’s testimony can be found at http://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDFs/prigent.pdf. See also Sanders (2005, 201–204).
- 9.
Letter from Bob Le Sueur to author, 18 June 2010.
- 10.
Jersey Heritage reference L/F/64/B/1.
- 11.
Email from Gary Font to author, 11 September 2006.
- 12.
Emails from Jean-Louis Vigla, 18 and 27 October 2006.
- 13.
In September 2011, a case of modern slave labour emerged, where 24 slaves were found living in a caravan in the town of Leighton Buzzard, recruited from homeless shelters and dole queues for labouring jobs (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/11/leighton-buzzard-slaves-released).
- 14.
The author knows of one such case in Jersey, where an OT overseer married a local woman, much to the disapproval of the rest of the family.
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Carr, G. (2014). Labour Camps: Forgotten Sites or Sites of Deliberate Amnesia?. In: Legacies of Occupation. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03407-2_4
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