Anywhere upwards of 16,000 forced labourers passed through the Channel Islands under the occupation, 5,000 on Alderney alone. The working and living conditions were inhumane, starvation and brutality was routine, mortality and morbidity high. In Lager Sylt, in particular, they amounted to evidence of war crimes. There had been high-profile convictions in Nuremberg, but prosecution of other war crimes was left to the countries in which they had been perpetrated. The British, however, chose not to prosecute. Maximilian List, wanted as ‘responsible for the brutal treatment meted out to the concentration camp prisoners by the SS guards… [and] for the fact that many of the prisoners died of starvation’, was never prosecuted. He lived out his natural life in Hamburg, dying in the 1980s.

Similarly, there were no prosecutions for collaboration or profiteering, although, as in continental Europe, women were scapegoated and harsh vigilante treatment meted out to those suspected of fraternising with Germans.

I have played with these ideas and events in my novel, including some of the key players in the Channel Islands, British and German, although their personas and circumstances are my invention. The character of Dora was loosely inspired by the story of Marianne Grunfeld, a Jewish refugee, born in Upper Silesia, now Poland, who escaped to London in the 1930s. Blonde, blue-eyed, an agriculturist, she took a job on a Guernsey farm in 1940, a few months before the German occupation. She hid on the farm until she was betrayed to the German authorities and deported to her death, presumably in Auschwitz. I hope I have not betrayed her memory. In my novel, I melded parts of this story with parts of another, that of a (Jewish) survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp who, with her fair ‘Aryan’ looks, had been identified for the Lebensborn programme, which she refused.

The detail of life in the brothel, and the existence of the Revier, or infirmary, is pure imagination. It is reasonable to assume that, where possible, women would have looked for a sympathetic officer to protect them from the worst excesses, much as Marta Hillers recounts in A Woman in Berlin. British intelligence reports that the brothel was scaled down, or closed, after D-Day and thirty women were sent to France for fear of revealing information gleaned from the Germans to the Allies; I have chosen to extend the brothel’s life for the purposes of the novel. The evacuation report of 28 May 1945 referred, however, to thirteen women from Jersey, all displaced persons. Nine of them were French. It does not say what these women were doing in Jersey, or how they arrived there.