The first stolpersteine memorial stone in the second phase of the project to commemorate Islanders persecuted by the Nazis has been installed outside St Helier Town Hall.
The stone was laid in memory of Peter Bruce Johnson who was arrested for sabotage and is assumed to have died in a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1944.
Stolpersteine are cobble stones with an engraved brass cap that are inserted into public pavements and roadways in memory of victims and survivors of Nazism as part of a Europe-wide project.
The second set of stones has been funded by a local benefactor who has chosen to remain anonymous.
A total of 25 stolpersteine are due to be installed as part of the second phase of installations.
Professor Gilly Carr, a renowned Occupation historian, added: “There is about 120,000 of these stones in 31 different countries now, and I think it’s really important for the Channel Islands to be linked as part of that wider European experience of occupation. The Channel Islands share many common histories with these countries.”
She explained that archival records can be used to work out the journey through prisons and camps of each Channel Islander, and has informed her of the journeys of others as islanders were often deported together.
“Very occasionally, rarely, in fact, is someone missing from the archives entirely, and one such person is Peter Bruce Johnson, his story existed only in the memory of former political prisoner Joe Miere, [who] passed away in 2006.”
“No archive can be found for Peter Bruce Johnson in the International Tracing Service, and it’s the first hunch of the historian that, because we can’t find his name, it must have been remembered incorrectly, unfortunately.”
“We may one day discover his real story, or we may find records which come to light, which are still closed in an archive somewhere. Perhaps his relative will come to Jersey, retracing his footsteps and asking questions about him.”
Lord Eric Pickles, who was previously UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and attended the ceremony, said: “All these tiny acts of defiance that we’re commemorating took enormous brethren. We should remember them.”
Peter Johnson
Peter Bruce Johnson’s story is something of a mystery, with knowledge of him based entirely on the oral testimony of former Jersey political prisoner Joe Mière, who knew him.
Mr Mière made it his life’s work to trace the story of all of Jersey’s political prisoners, which he displayed at Jersey’s Underground Hospital (now Jersey War Tunnels), where he was a curator.
He wrote the following about Mr Johnson in his book Never to be Forgotten (2004, 137):
“Peter Bruce Johnson, a deaf mute, was arrested by the German Secret Field Police for acts of sabotage. Deported to the prison at Saint-Lô, France, in 1944 and last seen at the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the Harz Mountains … there has been no trace of him since … [Former political prisoner] Geoffrey Delauney … stated that Peter Bruce Johnson had been in Saint-Lô prison with him and other Jerseymen. Peter Johnson had no family in Jersey but he had lived in Pier Road in St Helier. I knew Peter when he worked at Le Sueur’s coal store in Hilgrove Street. One morning he came into our engineering works which was next door. He had caught his hand in the saw machine he was using to cut up logs. The saw blade took his left thumb right off .”
Mr Mière also noted, in a separate file at Jersey Archives in which he listed information about the Channel Islands’ political prisoners, that Peter Bruce Johnson was 28 years old – presumably at the time of his deportation – and was also at Buchenwald concentration camp, but no evidence of this exists – nor of his presence in Dora-Mittelbau.
Historian Paul Sanders added to this with the observation that, as a deaf-mute, there was a “high probability that he was subject to measures targeting people with a physical or mental impairment, including deportation as an undesirable” . The Nazis enacted an official euthanasia program in 1940 called T4, named post-War after the address in Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin where its headquarters were located, which sent thousands of mostly German men, women and children to the gas chambers for supposed physical and mental handicaps.
The records for the September 1942 and February 1943 mass deportations from the Channel Islands of those born outside the Islands and ‘undesirables’ show that no Australian citizen was deported at this time, nor anybody with a name resembling Johnson. This strand of enquiry can thus be eliminated.
An extensive search of the records of the International Tracing Service revealed nothing for Peter Bruce Johnson. Most of the records for Saint-Lô prison were destroyed when the prison was bombed in 1944. It is worth mentioning that another Australian man, Thomas Patrick Nelson, was deported from Jersey in 1944 and sent to Saint-Lô Prison. He also entered and departed Villeneuve Saint-Georges Prison at precisely the same time as Geoffrey Delauney, indicating that they travelled together. Delauney was liberated from Villeneuve in August 1944, as Nelson must also have been.
If Johnson was indeed incarcerated in Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camp, as some unsubstantiated reports claim, then the chances of having survived that deadly camp are slim.
