Leading Occupation historian welcomes news Guernsey is to open up records on Holocaust
A LEADING historian on the Occupation era has described her research work as like a ‘massive jigsaw puzzle’ with the pieces spread across multiple archives in multiple places.
Dr Gilly Carr was speaking after the announcement from the Guernsey, UK and Jersey governments that all their records relating to the Holocaust would be opened.
She said there were particular files in Guernsey’s archive that she would now like to see, but they may not hold many new insights.
‘As a researcher whenever one looks at a file you don’t know what you are going to find and there might be absolutely nothing of any relevance at all for what one is interested in. There might be one piece of paper that has a little bit of relevance.
‘Sometimes the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle might be in London, sometimes in Jersey, there might be more pieces in Guernsey, but the thing is that one has to make sense of the picture as best one can with the puzzle pieces one finds.
‘And sometimes one doesn’t realise what one has come across until you see a particular thing and then suddenly in your head because of all the other things you’ve seen, all of the dots start to join up, all of the planets start to align, and you understand the importance of a bit of paper that somebody, without that knowledge of the bigger picture and multiple archives, would not necessarily recognise.
‘It’s like picking up a single jigsaw piece and knowing whether it’s an important part of the bigger picture or not.
‘Until you know the bigger picture you don’t know how important the jigsaw piece is. It might be that the files that I’ve been waiting to see in Guernsey are of no relevance, but I don’t know that until I read them.
‘I like to look at everything and then make sense of what I find.’
One thing that Dr Carr would very much like to see is better technology to organise the Guernsey archive, with an online search engine similar to that used in Jersey.
It is anticipated this would be expensive, but it would bring the local archive into line with modern standards.
