His heart drummed fast and he wondered if he shouldn’t take one of his pills. She was pulling a face, shaking her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d have heard about a priest.’

That you would, Joe thought, if they’d had a care for him. It hit hard, all the same, that they never spoke of him again.

‘Will you be having your tea?’ she said.

Still, it was good to hear the Irish again.

‘Do you work here now?’ Joe said.

‘That I do.’

Well, a little chip off the Dingle to end his days, a monthly call from Barbara and a letter from Dora once a year.

What more could he want?

Afterword

AFTERWORD

At least 34,000 women were trafficked into prostitution by the Nazis in the Second World War. Some were placed in brothels in the concentration camps, others in military bordellos in occupied Europe, of which there were over 500. Despite evidence of sexual offences against women committed in the brothels, these were not included as a crime against humanity, as defined at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–6.

The victims of sexual enslavement did not speak out after the war. There was little sympathy with, or understanding of, victims of sexual violence, and the women in the military brothels in particular would have been vulnerable to charges of collaboration. Many women suspected of sleeping with the enemy – for whatever reason – were subject to rough justice and humiliation by shaving or tarring and feathering.

There were military brothels in Alderney, Guernsey and Jersey. The main brothel for the Wehrmacht in Jersey was in the Hotel Maison Victor Hugo, which, before the war, had been a hotel renowned for its aromatic gardens and sea views. It burned down in the mid-1980s and apartments have now been built on the site. A second brothel, located first in the Abergeldie Hotel and then the Norman House Hotel, serviced the men from Organisation Todt. Women were included in an early contingent of Russian and Ukrainian OT workers brought to the Channel Islands in 1942, many of whom may have been destined for work in the brothels.

Witness statements collected by the Director of Public Prosecutions sent out after the war to investigate war crimes in Alderney provide rare clues as to the women’s identities and conditions in the brothels. According to British intelligence, they were ‘licensed French women’. This included French colonial women and leaves ambiguous their status – while exonerating their abusers. According to the evidence of Oberleutnant Wilhelm Girrbach, the garrison commander in Alderney, the women were ‘volunteers’ engaged in Paris to clean and serve, but the promise of high wages attracted only ‘criminal elements… streetwalkers’. Their use as coerced prostitutes is in no doubt: they were subjected to punishments, imprisonment, forced medical examinations, were ‘ruthlessly’ dismissed if infected, and were unpaid.