The Frank Falla Archive

This incredible digital archive tells the stories of Channel Islanders, who were deported and imprisoned during WW2. Join hosts, Mel and Perry, as they speak to Professor Gilly Carr about developing this special free resource.

The Frank Falla archive is named after Guernseyman Frank Falla, former prisoner and survivor of Frankfurt am Main-Preungesheim and Naumburg (Saale) prisons.

Frank, a journalist, was deported for his role in the underground newsletter GUNS (Guernsey Underground News Service). In the mid-1960s, and in the absence of any official help or interest, Frank took it upon himself to help his fellow former political prisoners in the Channel Islands get compensation for their suffering in Nazi prisons and camps. In 2010, Frank’s daughter gave Professor Gilly Carr her father’s extensive archives – the most important resistance archives to ever come out of the Channel Islands. And it was then that Gilly knew that this digital archive and its wider associated project must one day come about.

Visit the Frank Falla Archive. Find out more about Jersey's Occupation and Liberation Archives here.

Support the work of Jersey Heritage by making a donation.

Professor Carr's book ' A Materiality of Internment' is available through Routledge Press.
For more information visit:
www.routledge.com/9781032259154

More than two thousand people from the British Channel Islands were deported to and interned in Germany during the Second World War, making up as many as 60% of all interned British citizens in occupied territory during this period. This book will be of great value for scholars and museum professionals, as well as postgraduate students in the field of Conflict Archaeology and scholars of the Second World War. Cumulatively, this materiality comprises one of the major surviving assemblages of internees to emerge from the war, comparable in size, quality and importance with that from other theatres of war.

Transcript

The Jersey Heritage Podcast: The Small Island, Big Story Sessions

The Frank Falla Archive with Gilly Carr

Perry (00:00:02):

Welcome to the Jersey Heritage Podcast,

Mel (00:00:05):

The Small Island Big Story Sessions.

Perry (00:00:08):

You are listening to Mel and Perry. In today's episode, we are exploring the fascinating Frank Falla archives. This collection of records originally recorded by Frank tells the story of Channel Islanders who were deported and imprisoned during World War II.

Mel (00:00:23):

Leading this incredible project is Professor Gilly Carr, who specializes in conflict, archeology, and Holocaust heritage. During this conversation, GI will be sharing how her dedicated research has built a much larger picture of the lives of these deportees. Okay, so welcome to the podcast, Jill. Thanks for joining us.

Gilly (00:00:43):

Thank you for having me. So,

Mel (00:00:45):

Let's get stuck in. So who was Frank Falla?

Gilly (00:00:48):

Frank Falla was a journalist, and he was active during the occupation. He wrote for the Guernsey Press, Evening Press as it was then. And during the occupation, many people who decided to resist would use their daytime skills, if you like, at night. So, whereas Frank was a journalist during the day, and he had no choice but to continue to work on the Guernsey press after the Germans occupied and, and started censoring the paper at night, he and his colleagues worked on an underground newspaper together. So they, they used their journalistic skills and their knowledge of, of, of receiving the news and printing it to to spread the news during the occupation. So

Perry (00:01:32):

How did you become aware of Frank Falla and broadly Guernsey and his role in the occupation?

Gilly (00:01:37):

Let me see. My family's from the Channel Islands. My mum's a Guernsey girl, my husband's Guernsey. Although I should say for people in Jersey that my ancestors, when they came were Hugano refugees who came across the Guernsey in the 17th century. And the first one, Jacque Mariet married into the Carr family. So there you are, there's Jersey blood there too. <Laugh>. Anyway yeah, so I, I actually did my PhD on the Roman Occupation of Britain. And within a few years after my PhD, I was, you know, I was aware, this is a very crowded area to do research, and I went to a lecture on World War I archeology by a colleague, Nick Saunders. And it blew me away and made me think that I completely wanted to change my focus as an academic.

Gilly (00:02:28):

And that's pretty rare, because as an academic, normally when you do your masters and PhD in a field, you continue in that field for the rest of your career, for the most part. Some people change a little bit, but mine was a real, you know, 2000 years <laugh> vol fast. So I was so fascinated by that lecture. I spoke to Nick afterwards and said, Hey, you know, this reminds me of all of the things I've seen in the Channel Islands, because, of course, my fa because my family's from the Channel Islands every year of my life since before I was born, you know, we've been visiting relatives in the channel. And so I was very aware of what was in all the occupation museums. But I knew that these hadn't really been written about in terms of the sort of work that I do in terms of work done by academics.

Gilly (00:03:14):

I knew it hadn't been done. So I said to Nick you know, gosh, there's, there's all of this stuff in the Channel Islands. I'd love to do some research on that. And he helped me get funding in 2007 to come across to, to start that research. And I thought, right, I'm an archeologist. Archeologists deal in objects, interpreting objects. So I started off looking at the objects in occupation museums, things made by German soldiers, things made by islanders, things made by people who were deported to civilian internment camps. And I, I began to realize that all of these categories of objects made by different groups of people and slave workers as well. And then I realized that there was sort of a story to tell about those who have collected these things in the last 80 years. And then I realized there was a story to tell about the occupation museums, where they're displayed their objects for the last 80 years, or at least back then.

Gilly (00:04:14):

It was the last 65 years. And then I realized it was these same people who are kind of involved in Liberation Day every, every year, and also involved in putting up memorials for the occupation. And I realized, gosh, there's objects, there's collectors, there's museums, there's memorials, there's liberation day, there's all of these areas that are part of the heritage of the occupation. And I wrote my book called, this was the first book that I wrote about the occupation. It was called Legacies of Occupation, archeology, heritage and Memory in the Channel Islands, something like that. And then I saw that there were, there were things which were not part of Heritage at that point. The labor camps, for example, where the forced enslaved laborers were in the Channel Islands not heritage, no signs. They weren't places you could go and visit as a tourist. And generally back then, especially in Guernsey, nobody spoke about the victims of Nazis.

Gilly (00:05:05):

And really, it was very marginalized Jersey, of course, had started to talk about them thanks to Philip Bash from the 50th anniversary onwards. But that conversation wasn't happening in Guernsey. And it was around 2010 at this point. And I realized victims of narcissism hadn't really been spoken about enough, and the subject of resistance hadn't been spoken about enough. And, you know, 'cause of course, as an academic, I always ask questions wherever I go, probably too many questions for some people's liking. But hey, you know, I'm an academics, what I do, and you know, I I ask questions about resistance or who were the resistance? What kind of resistance took place? And generally the response I got from people in the main was there was no resistance. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And because I think people have a very black and white idea of resistance. They think that it, it's either they have this model in their head of the resistance in France, you know, a movement of people with weapons who attack Germans, who blew up railway lines, who hid in the mountains or hid in the forest.

Gilly (00:06:10):

And, you know, those kinds of models don't apply to the Channel Islands. So people were like, well, there was no resistance because, and I thought, well, what about all these little stories? You know, there's, there's, it's all 101 anecdotes, 1,001 anecdotes, but nothing systematic has ever been done. So I contacted two other, a academics I knew in Europe who had knowledge of the German occupation of the Channel Islands who'd done research in this area. And that was Paul Sanders, who I think will probably be a name, very familiar to people listening. And also Louise Wilmott. So Paul is based in France. He's got an English father and German mother. And Louise Wilmott were, she's retired now, but she was at Manchester Metropolitan University. And we got funding for the three of us to co-write a book called Protest Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands.

Gilly (00:07:05):

And our aim was to go through all of the records, systematically, police records, court records, German records, published diaries, unpublished diaries, memoirs, all will testimony to collect everything, and to begin to, you know, absolutely everything. We, we were gonna leave indeed. We left no stone unturned. We, you know, got access to closed records. We saw things that had not been shown to other people before. We saw things that were in people's people's attics. And we were able to build up this picture and to quantify for the first time, what sort of offenses are being committed how do we characterize those offenses, protest, defiance, resistance, how does this fit with what people are doing on the continent? What, what numbers are we talking about? And we were able to really do a forensic research for the very first time on this subject. And this meant that for the first time, people were actually able, when they talk about resistance in occupied Europe at last, there was a reliable academic source where you could quantify things and say, and this is what happened in the Channel Islands.

Gilly (00:08:18):

Because when you've got 1,001 anecdotes, that's not reliable academically, that's not statistical, it's not quantified, it's not verified, it's not double checked with archival records. Is it, is it a, is it Chinese whispers? It's, you know, it's just unreliable. But we were able to show that around 2% of the population had spent time in prison for offenses against the Germans. And that's similar to occupied France. And it was like, okay, this is very interesting. We're seeing, we're seeing similarities with other countries. And so the Channel Islands are not this strange outlier where nobody committed a resistance and everybody behaved themselves. Oh, you know, and we just proved that wasn't true. So in terms of where Frank Falla fits into that because we were reading everything and it was actually a fantastic experience to work with two other researchers at the same time.

Gilly (00:09:09):

So we'd be sitting, for example, in Jersey archives and you know, we were sort of dividing the task between us. I'd be reading one memoir, Paul another, Louise another, and we'd be like, okay, page 23, there's a reference to someone chalking up V signs. You are writing the chapter on V signs. Make sure you read page 23. We were having these conversations, but also conversations like, huh, are you spotting any, I dunno if it's my imagination, are you spotting a pattern with the kind of people who do this kind of resistance? They all seem to be women, they all, or they all seem to be older men, or they all seem to be children? Are you spotting and be like, yeah, I've spotted that too. And so as researchers, sometimes you get hunches, but you can dismiss it as being, well, it's, you know, no, I, yeah, that's probably my imagination.

Gilly (00:09:58):

But when you've got other people around the table, you can be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a thing. This is a thing. And so, you know, you really, it sort of gives you more, more confidence because these hunches that you've got, if other people have got the same hunches, it means you're onto something. So we were reading everything, and that included the memoir written by Frank Faller, which was called The Silent War. And actually, this is quite an unusual book, because very few people who committed acts of resistance and spent time in prisons wrote and published a memoir about it. Some people publish memoirs after the year 2000, and they were probably less liable because already, you know, nearly 60 years had passed. And that's a long time for memory to fade. And I mean, there's a small number of published memoirs in, in Jersey, for example, of people who might have stolen a German gun and spent, you know, a few months in Jersey jail in 1944 and 1945, these kind of political prisoners of whom Joe Mierre was one.

Gilly (00:11:07):

And there's another name that people in Jersey will know. And Joe Mierre was very much a spokesperson for, for political prisoners as he termed them in Jersey, because there was we, we found in Jersey jail from 1944 onwards, when people could not be deported to the continent because the allies had Reoccupied France, it meant that the people in jail in Jersey and indeed in Guernsey grew and grew and grew rather than people being shifted out and sent to the continent. And because they were all of these kind of resistors together, they, they, they formed a kind of awakened consciousness of we are political prisoners in, in, and that was, that was for Jersey only. But let us go back to Guernsey and Frank Falla, because we were reading everything in the Silent War. Frank Falla talks about this period in the 1960s, and his book was written in 1967.

Gilly (00:12:03):

So again, just sort of 20 years after the war, he talks about there being a possibility of claiming compensation for British victims of Nazism. So the Nazis, or sorry, the, the, so by the sixties, the fifties and the sixties, the West German government was signing compensation agreements with all of the countries that had occupied one country after the other. And the UK was at the back of the queue, not just 'cause they're British after you, after you, no, after you <laugh>. But also because as far as the British government was concerned, Britain had not been occupied. And I know everyone's like what about the Channel Islands? But Mainland Britain was not occupied. And so Britain's attitude was the French come before us in the queue. The Belgians come before us in the queue. The Dutch come before us in the queue. The, the Norwegians come before us in the queue, et cetera, et cetera.

Gilly (00:12:56):

And so while these compensation agreements were being signed, Frank talks about them in his book, and he was like, well, what about the Brits? What about the Brits? And because the Channel Islands have no representation in the Westminster Parliament, he couldn't write to his local mp. So what he did was he wrote to an MP, who had been a prisoner of war during the war and was very much sort of a spokesperson for prisoners of war. Hey, we've got this whole category of people in the Channel Islands who spent time in Nazi prisons, and we deserve compensation. And can people get a move on and make sure the Britain signed this agreement with the Germans, because there's a whole lot of us to be compensated. I mean, Nieve didn't have much power, but he could have words and ears in Parliament, I suppose.

Gilly (00:13:47):

And in any case, the Brits did get round to signing a compensation agreement, not because of Frank Falla nudging, but just got around to it anyway, in 1964. And so the agreement went live, there were adverts in newspapers across the United Kingdom, and Frank Falla got 'em in, in the Channel Islands too, to say, were you a victim of Nazi persecution? This does not include those who were civilian internees. It doesn't include people who were prisoners of war. So prisoners of war are military prisoners, but it must be people who spent time in a concentration camp or comparable institution. That's how it was defined. And you could get compensation for the amount of time you spent in a camp and your degree of permanent disability. And for Frank, it was about acknowledging that there had been resistors.

Gilly (00:14:43):

He had, he saw a lot of Channel Islanders although they were spread between over a hundred different Nazi prisons and camps in Europe, Frank didn't know this. What Frank was aware of is that he had been to Frankfurt and Namba prisons in Germany, which actually happened to be places where there were small clusters of Channel Islanders. And he had witnessed the ill treatment of his friends because Channel Islanders spotted each other in these prisons because they were the only English speakers, and he saw his friends die. Nine friends die in Naumburg Prison, nine Channel Islanders and Frank being a journalist. And this is where, you know, you just, I, I just love Frank for this. As he was a journalist, he knew he needed to record this. So he had at the bottom of his wash case, which he was allowed to have with him in prison, this thin bit of tomato packing paper.

Gilly (00:15:35):

So tomato packing paper is very thin paper. And you know, typical Guernsey man to have tomato packing paper <laugh>, his wash case. But I why he had it, I can't tell you, but because it was very thin, it could be folded up and rolled up very finely. And he had a razor, which was one of those old fashioned ones, of course, where you unscrew the bottom, and it was hollow inside. And he kept the bit of paper inside this razor. Wow. And he would write the names and addresses of his friends as they died, because, you know, I'm sure those men in prison being ill-treated, being staffed, et cetera, they would've been able to say to each other something like, look, if anything happens to me, please make sure you tell my wife. You tell my parents, this is where they live. So Frank was able to record the names and addresses of his friends as they died.

Gilly (00:16:28):

And when he was liberated from Namba Prison by the Americans, this was sort of April, 1945, everyone who had been, whether they'd been evacuated, deported to civilian internment camps, deported to Nazi prisons, nobody could come back to the Channel Islands on May the 10th. <Laugh>, you know, as you probably know, that the Channel Islands were in a terrible state. Everybody was still incredibly hungry. There wasn't enough food in the island. People's houses were where Germans had been. The island just wasn't ready to reabsorb, you know, 17,000 people from Guernsey. And you know, another sort of six, 7,000 from Jersey, the islands weren't ready for that. So people had to hang out. They were repatriated to England, and people had to hang out in England till the summer, till July, August, depending. A lot of people had relatives. So those who had evacuated sort of continued their evacuated life after the end of the war for a few months.

Gilly (00:17:35):

And those who had been deported to civilian internment camps, for the most part, they were deported because they were born outside the Channel Islands. And this often meant that they had family in England. So people returned, hung out with their family in England until they could come back later on. So Frank did this he stayed with his sister for a, for, I think it was his sister's family for a while. And before he could get back to Guernsey and Jersey, he was desperate to let families in the Channel Islands know what had happened to their loved ones. So he wrote this harrowing article to the Jersey Evening Post and the Gues Evening press to say, I was in prison in Naumburg and Frankfurt with these islanders. This is what happened to them. These were the, these were the terrible things that happened to them.

Gilly (00:18:22):

And these articles, I know Frank wrote in his memoir that it was very difficult for him to write these articles because it was very, he had PTSD after what he'd been through. It was very traumatic, re-traumatizing for him to write it. And these articles are really, they're quite graphic. They're quite graphic. I think they probably are much more graphic than we would have in newspaper articles today. And as soon as he got back to the Channel Islands, he went and visited all the families in Guernsey and Jersey, whose loved ones had died, and said, this is what I saw. This is what happened to your loved ones. Wow. And a lot of these families remember Frank going and talking to them. And as far as Frank knew the victims of Nazism, that he was aware of people who fitted his category of being a victim of Nazis, and were those he was in prison with in Naumburg and Frankfurt High profile people like Harold Lanik, who had been in Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, who, like everyone knew about, he also included in his category, the 16 policemen from Guernsey who were deported for having stolen food from, from the Germans to give to starving Islanders.

Gilly (00:19:34):

And those people, by the way, still have not received any kind of apology or had their sentences wiped by the Royal Court in Guernsey. That's still an ongoing case, which is something that does need to be sorted. But that's the topic for another podcast. So Frank had in his mind a number of people who deserved compensation, but he absolutely was not aware of the full extent of people who had been deported. So he agitated when the compensation claims were out there were, you know, please write in to claim compensation, please write a testimony. He waited for the bailiffs of Guernsey and Jersey to say, Hey, everybody, this new scheme has been announced. If you spent time in a Nazi prison, please claim compensation. And nothing happened. And nothing happened. And Frank was astounded that no one was standing up for him and his mates.

Gilly (00:20:24):

So he wrote directly to the foreign office who were administering the compensation claims and said to them, there are people in the Channel Islands who need compensation. This is who they are, please send me forms and I will distribute them. And he did that. And he became the go-between for the Channel Islands, between the Foreign Office and the Channel Islands. And he helped people write their testimony. Because looking at all of the testimonies that I've seen, it's clear that some people were not especially literate or articulate or hit the right points that the compensation claims team needed to hear. And so they would say something like, I was in Com prison, and we all know what that was like. And that would be the end of it. And, you know, it was very important to say, this is the year I was here. This is the treatment that happened to me. And you had to be very articulate and clear about what happened. And a lot of people weren't and didn't get compensation. And so Frank, as someone used to writing with writing skills, once again, he was using his writing skills to help people get compensation.

Perry (00:21:26):

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Mel (00:21:49):

So Julie, we know that you managed to get hold of some documents that Frank's daughter had in her possession. Can you tell us a little bit about how this further helped your research?

Gilly (00:21:59):

In 2010, I put an article in the Guernsey Press to say, are the children of Frank Falla still living in Guernsey? I'd like to be in touch with them. And they got in contact with me, and I said to his daughter, do you have any of your father's papers? Because I thought, you know, he's, he's put, you know, maybe he kept an archive about all these people he helped. And she said, oh, there's stuff in the attic, but you won't be interested. And I said, can you, could I, could I have a look? Would, would you mind getting them out of the attic <laugh>? And then a while later, she called me, Julie, I've got the papers out of the attic. I've looked at them. You're not gonna be interested. Oh next time I'm in Guernsey, would it be okay to have a look? Well, yeah, but I'm wasting your time.

Gilly (00:22:42):

Well, I'd still like to see them <laugh>. So next time I was in Guernsey and I was coming over really regularly in those days with my research prices have gone up a lot since the pandemic. So it's much harder to do now. Yeah. So his daughter gave me these papers and she said, look, you can have them. And I said, well, okay, you know, I will deposit them in, in Guernsey archives when I've finished with them, which I've done. And I realized it was the most important resistance archive that I had ever come out of the Channel Islands. And this is bloody amazing <laugh>. And so what, what we had were, were carbon copies of these compensation testimonies that have been sent to the foreign office. And there's probably, I'm gonna say 20, 30 of them, something like that. So first of all, I thought, okay, the foreign office must have the originals of these letters and these testimonies.

Gilly (00:23:34):

And these testimonies were amazing because never before had we had in people's own words, this is what happened to me in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Those stories were not even with families because the person who suffered and mostly it was men, like 98% of these people deported were male in those days. You didn't, the men didn't talk to women about these things because you wouldn't burden your wife with these stories, and you certainly wouldn't burden your kids with them. You've got to protect the women. That was very much the attitude. So the wives didn't know, the kids didn't know the grandkids would sometimes pick up on something like, oh, grandpa would turn off if ever there was a program on Auschwitz on, or, or Grandpa would particularly watch programs on Auschwitz. And he would cry and he would say, that happened to me. And, you know, and, and these were the kind of anecdotes, but they were tiny and there was nothing you could make of them.

Gilly (00:24:27):

But, you know, this collection was just fabulous. And so, I, I went to the National Archives, which has, has all these government records, and there was a lot of correspondence with the Foreign office. There was the whole history of the compensation claims. There were Frank Falla's letters writing to them saying, Hey, don't forget about Channel Islanders. And it was great. I was able to put together Frank's records and the foreign officer's records because Frank kept copies of everything and I was really beginning to, to get the whole picture. But then I realized that in order to see all of the compensation claims, like all of those from the, from the Channel Islands, the compensation claims, testimonies were closed records, and they were not available at the National Archives. And I eventually found out they were being kept in an archive repository in Milton Keynes. So I, I phoned them up and I got talking to somebody there, and I was like, okay, so do, can you confirm?

Gilly (00:25:23):

Do you have these records? And eventually they confirmed they had them. And I said, well, how many do you have? And they said, look, we've got over 4,000. But they are from people from across the United Kingdom who spent time in concentration camps. And that includes refugees who came to the UK after the war and before 1953, that was the cutoff date. So Jewish refugees from Ukraine, from Poland, who had come to the uk, they were now British citizens and can claim compensation. So there were a lot of records from them. And I said, well, what, what about Channel Islanders? How many do you have? And they said, look, we don't know who's who. We just have these records. And each week I would phone up and say, can I see them? And they'd like, no, they're closed. Can I see them? No, they're closed. And I, I just, I just thought, no, I'm just gonna hassle them every week.

Gilly (00:26:07):

I'm gonna phone them and I'm gonna ask <laugh>. And and I, you know, each week it was the same woman who answered the phone. And after a while we just got chatting as Women do, how are you, how are the kids? You know? And, and after a while she was like, Julie, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there's something you can do if you send us the names of people and their dates of birth and proof that they are over 100 years old or dead, we can release each file to you one at a time. And so it's like, okay, right. Well here's the names of, you know, all the people, people, Frank Falla was aware of their full names, their dates of birth. They are, they are dead. I got EY archives, Jersey archives got involved. They, they could testify. They wrote a letter to say, we testify these people are dead.

Gilly (00:26:54):

We testify these people over 100, sent them in, got back files. Fabulous. But I had to find out who the people were in order to be able to submit names and dates of birth. And that meant starting to look at a lot more records, a lot more deportation records, the political prisoner log in Jersey archives. And I was, you know, and I was doing a lot more deep research that no one had done before. There was a lot of guesswork, dunno if this person was supported or not. Sent off names, got back files. And this went on for about four years. And by then I had got over a hundred files. And after lobbying government, I actually got these files released to the National Archives. So by 2016, these files were now released to the National Archives. But even then they were embargoed until the person was a hundred years old or had died.

Gilly (00:27:53):

So then I had to lobby the national archives to give me files. And this was, you know, coming up to 20 17, 20 18. And I have a in my, in my office here in Cambridge, I have all of the files of Channel Islanders and I am now content that I have 99% of the people. Because after I got the records, the number of people I was discovering sort of got fewer and fewer meaning that I had really got the bulk. And I was beginning to get the tail end of people who were well hidden. And I was in 2015, I got some funding to build the Frank Falla Archive website. And this actually came from a German grant put aside for victims of Nazism. And it's like, okay, well great, they're, they're, they're they've got a grant to help academics who are working on victims of Nazism as a part of continuing this compensation, if you like.

Gilly (00:28:51):

And so each time I found someone's record, I would spend every Sunday writing their story. I'd draw upon every single archive I could find. I was sending researchers out or going myself to prisons and prisons in France and Germany and archives and collecting records manually 'cause they weren't online. And I was building up the story of everyone. And then I started to get contact from families of these people in Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, South Africa, Europe England, saying, you've got my grandpa's story. This is amazing. We never knew this story. Hey, would you like some extra pictures of my grandpa? Wow. Ooh, grandpa had these records. Would you like 'em as well? It all went online. I would say about four fifths of the people on the Frank Falla Archive. I've been contacted by families. And that's great because it's just meant, you know, to be able to really widen out the story and to say what happened to them after the war as well.

Gilly (00:29:49):

And it also, you know, doing this digitally also meant I was able to see pathways and clustering’s of who went where with whom in terms of their prisons and camps. I was able to learn that most people return from these Nazi prisons and camps with tuberculosis. Most people had post-traumatic stress disorder of one sort or another. And that's really not acknowledged. A lot of people struggle for the rest of their lives with their physical health because health, their physical and mental health. Because it became very hard for people to hold down a job when they were plagued by PTSD. But also when you've had tuberculosis in those days, you know, before being able to treat, treat it properly, a lot of people couldn't work and were on the poverty line. Could not pay for medical treatment, had maybe had lungs removed, ribs removed because, you know 'cause tuberculosis attacks the bones it can attack the bones as well as the, the lungs.

Gilly (00:30:49):

And so there were a lot of people who really needed that compensation money in the 1960s. 'cause They'd wrapped up huge debts in medical bills and living in poverty. And the families, often the families actually didn't know that their loved ones got compensation because all it did was diminish the bills, but didn't change their way of life, if you like. So it was, you know, it was, it was transformational for many families because some families had said, you know, my grandpa or my father had PTSD, he had, he had a funny attitude with food. He would eat food that had gone bad and had been thrown in the bin. He would pick up bits of meat from the bin with maggots and he would eat it. And really kind of things that, you know, things that picked up in prison. And often that meant the next generation grew up with eating disorders or disordered eating or, or mental health problems.

Gilly (00:31:46):

Because ancestral trauma, ancestral trauma. But also when you've got a dysfunctional family, you grow up dysfunctional too, because that's your normal. And you know, there were people who one way in which post-traumatic stress disorder can manifest itself is anger outbursts, finding it very hard to demonstrate love because you've seen all of those you love and care about die in horrible ways. And so as a self-protection mechanism, you can't, you, you dare show love. And so a lot of kids who had grown up without love and then formed terrible relationships themselves or incapable of forming loving relationships with other people 'cause they hadn't had it at home. And so their marriages had failed and their children had grown, you know? Yeah. And so you could see how this had affected the generations, and that was so common. And, you know, and I think it was very helpful for me to be able to say, look, this is what happened.

Gilly (00:32:44):

This is the real story of what happened to your, your grandpa, your father in prison or in his camp. Here's his testimony. This is why there are also, this is why you also have problems and why your kids have problems. It's carried down through the generations. And that brought a lot of understanding for families and also a lot of forgiveness that they began to forgive their father or their grandfather for the bad childhood or, or, you know, the anger, the temper, the, the beatings, whatever. I'm not saying that all were like that. There was one guy who was in book involved who came out the most loving father and husband because he realized what he could lose. You know? And it made him value life all the more. So, I mean, it could go different ways. And I'm not saying everyone, it turned everyone into a terrible person.

Gilly (00:33:30):

Not at all. But everyone was left with struggles. Mm. Anyway, I, so I was able to, to build the Frank Falla archive. One of the great things about being able to collect so many people's stories is that where a story was missing, I would be able to build it. Let me give you an example. There are some prisons like Saint-Lô prison in France. A lot of Channel Islanders were there, but the prison was bombed in 1944, 1945. And the records were lost. And so where prison records survive, for example, I went to com and in con archive, they have the prison records ledger after ledger of prison records. And so I've sat in the archives in Comm and seen, you know, and gone through all of these French people, like that's a Channel Island surname. And like, oh yes, they're convicted by the court in Jersey fell the fell commandant FK 515.

Gilly (00:34:27):

That is, you know, that's, that's Jersey. And so you've like, that's the person. And it says, sent to Saint-Lô Prison next. And so, like, okay, they started in com. I have no records from Saint-Lô, but then we have often they went to prisons in Paris, like, Cherche-Midi. Well, that doesn't survive. And the records don't survive either. Ville Prison that doesn't survive either friend prison, that doesn't survive either, but then their next place might survive. And so you could, there'd be gaps in the record, but the prison on one end would say they came from this prison, and the prison the other side, they were sent to that prison. And you would say, okay, we know, we know two ends of the story and we know the dates, and therefore we can say in this two month gap, they were in these two prisons.

Gilly (00:35:21):

So even where those prisons don't survive, the other prisons that survive can help you fill in the gaps. And often what we find is that, let's say there were three people from Jersey who were tried by court martial at the same time by the Germans, very usual example. One of them, one of those three people writes a memoir or wrote a compensation testimony and said, I was in this prison, this prison, this prison. These are the dates, these are the dates. And the other two, we have nothing. But the other two are archival records on the continent allow us to show that they were in particular places, but we don't have their full record. But when they show up three or four prisons down the line, they're still with that other person from Jersey whose full story we know. And we know they were convicted at the same time, and therefore they were probably deported at the same time.

Gilly (00:36:11):

And therefore probably they were together the whole way. And so that one person who, whose story is recorded can speak for the other two. And we know the journey of the other two. And so we were really able to piece together more stories than there were records for. And this was really brilliant. In the case of there was one chat from Guernsey William Quinn, who had such bad post-traumatic stress disorder and had been hit about the head. He had blanked out the whole of his prison stay. He could not remember anything. His memory was otherwise fine, but he just blanked when it came to his experience in Nazi prisons. And Frank Falla visited him repeatedly because he, Frank was writing to the compensation people and saying, look, William Quinn was in prison. We, but he just doesn't know where. And, and compensation people were like, well, we can't give him compensation unless we have proof of the dates and the places.

Gilly (00:37:13):

And you know, Frank really quiz William. And William was like, well, I think it was Austria. I think it was the mountains. I seem to remember being in a cave. You know, and he was just, he just, it turned out that there was another person called Stanley Cordy who was deported from Jersey at the same time as William Quinn. And because of Stanley Cordy story, and he was ending up in Mesher Smitt building tunnels near Kamar in Austria. His story enabled me to fill in the pieces of what happened to William Quinn. And also because of the records that Frank Falla left in his archives. And this was really important for the families in Guernsey and Jersey, I was able to begin to find the bodies of men who had been lost since 1945. That's incredible. So Joseph Tierney, he was, he had been part of a group in Jersey who was also spreading the, the news with Canon <inaudible>.

Gilly (00:38:17):

And a lot of them were deported towards the end of the war. And you'd have thought, okay, if you're deported towards the end of the war, URA is nearly over. You won't have to survive long in a camp. But towards the end of the war was the worst time to be deported because the camp and prison system had become chaotic, overcrowded, complete lack of food, complete growth in things going very badly awful for everyone. And actually, if you were deported in 1944, the chances are you were not gonna survive. And that was the case for most of the people who died from the Channel Islands. They were deported late. And that included Joseph Tierney. And he didn't come back after the war. Frank Falla had seen him in Naumburg prison, and Joseph Tierney was told, we are going to send you your sentences, come to an and we're gonna send you to Laufen civilian internment camp with the other 500 Channel Islanders who were there.

Gilly (00:39:08):

You'll have Red Cross parcels, everything will be peachy. And he didn't, he wasn't sent there at all. He was sent to. Well, he never, he never came home again. And we didn't know what happened to him. His daughter has some records of those who were with him in his final moments who talk about being with him in, they named some towns in the Sudan land. And the Sudan land was a part of Bohemia, part of the Czech what is now the Czech Republic part of Czechoslovakia that the Germans nabbed very early on. There were historically, there was some German speaking people there. And so the Germans took it as their territory and gave all of the names German names, that in the way that they renamed some places in the Channel Islands as German names, they did the same wherever they occupied.

Gilly (00:40:03):

And so these records that I had access to from Joseph Tierney's daughter named places with German names that no longer exist because they're now, they now have their original check names. And so it then be, I couldn't even Google where these places were because they didn't exist. And then comes this major coincidence because my experience is that when you try and find, I mean this, this is gonna sound really a little crazy now, but it's happened so many times and it's happened to my colleagues as well. When you try and find someone who's lost in the system, it's almost as if they want to be found. And these major coincidences start to happen, which enables you to find them. And so, to give you an example, I emailed my only friend in the Czech Republic, Al Jeca. He does the same work as I do, but in the Czech Republic, he's at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. And I said to him, look, this is a really long shot. Do you know of or have access to any records in the archives in Prague, which show a force March with a Brit in that group of prisoners? And he said, Jill, I am working on that very force march right now. No way in front of me. And there is one Brit. I was like, what? <Laugh> mad.

Perry (00:41:26):

It's mad how these things line up.

Gilly (00:41:28):

Mad, mad. And it's absolutely not the first time this has happened. But just to sort of illustrate that sometimes it's almost as if these people wanna be found, found. And he said, Y Julie, these people ended up in a mass grave in the hamlet of sho in the Czech Republic. And so he's in this mass grave. And I was like, well, you, of course, I burst into tears and I flew to Jersey and I met his daughter, met Joseph Tierney's daughter. And I said, look pat I'm gonna come and visit you and I'd like you to have your, you know, I'm gonna start crying telling you the story. I want you to have your children with you. 'cause I've got some news. And I said, I found your dad, and I know where he is. And, you know, and it was all just like, so, so, and the BBC said they wanted to make a documentary to take Pat to go on this journey and retrace her father's footsteps.

Gilly (00:42:25):

And at the same time, I was working on a very similar story from Guernsey. And this is a story of Joseph Gillingham, who had also worked on the underground newspaper with Frank Falla. And Joseph Gillingham had never come home at the end of the war. And Frank Falla had also been in prison with him and I, because of Frank's records, I thought, right, I'm gonna draw a little distribution map of Nambu Prison and what happened to all of the men who were in Nambu Prison with Frank. And they all seemed to stay, they all sent on forced labor, but all on various forced labor details around Naumberg in a 50 kilometer radius. So I emailed all of the archives in Germany in that 50 kilometer radius and said, do you have the records of Joseph Gillingham? Bearing in mind that his daughter in Guernsey, they knew nothing as far as they were.

Gilly (00:43:16):

You know, Paul Saunders had looked for Joseph Gillingham, I'd looked for Joseph Gillingham, we'd found nothing. But thanks to Frank Falla's records, you know, by then the BBC had already said yes, we're going to, we're gonna do a documentary we're going in March, this is 2016. We'll take along the daughter of Joseph Gillingham, the daughter of Joseph Tierney. And I said to the BBC, okay, but we are only gonna find the body of one of them. 'cause I know I found Joseph Tierney and we haven't found Joseph Gillingham. And this was four days before all due to get on the plane. And I got an email from holla archives in Germany saying, oh yes, we've got Joseph GI Gilham in our cemetery. You're kidding me. Insane. Insane. We been looking for him for eight. What the, you know. Yeah. And and I've got burst into tears once again.

Gilly (00:44:09):

And you know I phoned the BBC and said, we're getting on the plane in four days. What are we gonna do? Because you, this, this is crazy because I don't want these women to be having heart attacks on, on the program. This is, it's all going very unethical now what can we do? Yeah. What can we do? And they said, look, we're the women are taking, you know, their children with them, so they're gonna have that backup, that, that emotional support you are going to be there, you know, so we'll, we'll just deal with it. And so we, you, the whole week of filming was spent, everybody crying, me, the daughters, the TV crew. I mean, I just, my pockets were thick with swollen and soggy tissues. We were all crying all the time. It was so emotional. And we were, we were doing, we were retracing the steps of the prison journeys and the camp journeys of these men.

Gilly (00:45:04):

And we went to the Czech Republic and we were able to visit the mass grave where Joseph Tierney is. And we, we left flowers there, but also we went to Hollow where Joseph Gillingham was buried. And the reason why he had a grave was when a prisoner arrived, they would, the Germans would say, give us your name, and they would give their name, and the Germans would write it down as they heard it. So often the spellings are off. But they'd written Joseph in the German way with an effort, the end. And Gillingham, they had put two m's at the end of Gillingham. And therefore when he died, they had what they thought was a German citizen, so he got a grave. Wow. Otherwise he would've been cremated and put in a MAs grave.

Mel (00:45:52):

Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Gilly (00:45:54):

And so we were actually able to take his daughter to visit the grave. And after filming, the two daughters of the two men were both very ill for about six weeks. They just had a nervous collapse. And this was because of the enormity of finding their fathers. It just had a tremendous impact on them. I mean, and a massive impact on me as well. And I think probably one of the best things I've ever done in my life to date was to help these people find their, their fathers. And for both of the women, it turned from referring to these men who they had never known because the men were deported when they were tiny babies. Both of them had referred to these men as Joe or my father. But by the end of the trip, they were able to call them dad because they'd almost got to know their fathers through traveling in their footsteps and going to their graves. That's so special. And it was, it was just transformational for, for both women. But we would not have been able to get there had it not been for Frank Falla's records and his work and the, the domino effect of sending me off on the trail. So he

Mel (00:47:02):

Created the backbone.

Gilly (00:47:03):

Yes. Yes. And he left the Breadcrumb Trail. Frank himself didn't know what happened to the men, but he, he left the breadcrumbs that I could follow. Oh,

Mel (00:47:11):

I'm sure Frank would be so proud of all the work you've done,

Gilly (00:47:15):

Well, I mean, but you know, it's, in a way, it's a team effort. And it's, I'm gonna say something else that sound, that kind of will sound really cheesy, but <laugh>, the, the way I see it is that when you do research about somebody, and you are in a way, you are, you are the only person who has witnessed and by witnessed, I mean kind of archivally witnessed, you haven't been there in the flesh. Mm. But you're following and you are building their story through the archives, which takes months and months and months of collecting records and collecting jigsaw pieces. These people kind of become your friends. Absolutely. And I sort of, I sort of think of them as my dead friends, and often I know their families as well because of, you know, they've got in contact with me. And so it does feel sort of a, a genuine friendship in a way.

Gilly (00:48:06):

And so people say, well, why do you do this work, Gilly? Well, I do it for my friends. I do it for, you know, I do it for them because I carry a responsibility in that I've got the records, I've collected the records, I've done the research. You know, I can't sit on it. And I, this is why I've published it and shared it with families. And over the years, fought for memorial stones and museum exhibitions and things in Guernsey and Jersey because I have a responsibility to tell these stories, to speak on behalf of these people, to say this is what they experienced. And it's important that we know. It's important that we acknowledge that. And that we, we, we acknowledge what they went through. It's not, it's not a story to be silenced and marginalized anymore. These people did the right thing. They stood up to the Germans, you know, since, since when we're standing up to the Nazis not the right thing to do, these people, you know, they should be placed on a higher pedestal than they have been historically. So that's kind of what I've been fighting for. But it's been teamwork.

Perry (00:49:11):

And digitizing this, all this massive archive must have been such a serious piece of work. But it's such an important piece of work to make it accessible to everybody too, and not just in people's lofts and stuff like that. Yes, yes. I mean, how did you go about having all of this digitized and having the website created?

Gilly (00:49:32):

Well, as I said, the website was paid for by a grant from the German government. Everything else has been piecemeal. So either, I mean, there's been bits of funding here and there and other things I've paid for myself or I've simply paid my own airfare to go to Kong, go to the archives, stay in Kong for a few days take photographs, download it, upload it, you know, and I, I, you know, so it's been a, a mixture between me paying for it and getting grants here and there. And it's, it was done over a number of years. And, you know, I still get, I would say about one email a week now. I mean, the, the Frank Falla archive started to go online 2017/ 2018. So here we are now, 2025. You know, I'm often I'll get an email saying, you know, from, from somewhere else in Europe, they, people think that I have, I have records relating to other nationalities, and I don't, I I have always sought for records of Channel Islanders.

Gilly (00:50:30):

And there are some archival records I have from prison archives in other countries where it would be against copyright to put them online. And sometimes I put them online and sometimes I haven't, because I don't think these things should be hidden away. We shouldn't be. In a way it's sort of colluding with what the Nazis did to still continue to hide away these things and to say, no, no, no one's allowed to see them we're disappearing. These prisoners, they didn't exist. You know, no, this, this should be, this should be public records. And I think there is an issue of consent there, but there is, in the GDPR law, there is an exception for records to do with the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. And I think it fits under there. But I think it's, it's right in telling these people's stories, it's important that I show the evidence.

Gilly (00:51:23):

And I'm not just saying this is what happened to Joe Bloggs, but I'm saying, here are the prison records, here are the camp records. You can see for yourself. If you also want to, to, to check my work, please do. If you want to have copies of these for your family, please do. If you are a school kid who wants to see what happened to people who lived on your road here, it all is, if you wanna do a school project, a university project on these people, here are the records. This is open access, this should be public knowledge.

Mel (00:51:52):

So all the records that you've encountered that you've come, that have come into your kind of hands as it were, that that deal with any Channel Islander story are on this website.

Gilly (00:52:03):

Yes.

Mel (00:52:04):

That's amazing.

Perry (00:52:05):

And how has the reception been to the website and has it spurred on a sort of new wave of research or inspired more researchers to look at it yet?

Gilly (00:52:15):

The reception has been 100% positive. Everybody who has seen it has said, brilliant. I'm so glad you've done this. I'm so happy Grandpa would be so happy. One person said that the person who had been deported had done some really bad things in their life, and they thought that he was a bad person and should not be online. And I replied and had a chat with the person, but they didn't continue the correspondence. And I thought, okay, well this was a person who we knew very little about. So their entry was not long at all on the Frank Falla Archive. And really this was about saying this allows people to build up a picture about, about numbers, about statistics, about who went where, but also about the personal stories. Very much. I'm very much about the personal stories. And of course the bad things that that person did in their life are not gonna go on the website.

Gilly (00:53:21):

This was about what happened to them during the occupation in context 'cause of what happened during the, the occupation. So it became a very kind of bounded 1940 to 1945 story. And it's only a sort of short paragraph, you know, that this person, I mean, I can't remember, I can't remember their name offhand and I can't remember their particular crime, but let's say they were caught for black market crimes. It might be, you know, spent time in com prison for three months. That's all we know. And so you know, I'd show the, the political prisoner register. I would show the occupation identity card. I would show the court record and or the con prison record, and that would be it. But I mean Jersey Archives know exactly what I've got online because they've been very generous in allowing me to put some of their records there. Guernsey archives, ditto. There are links from both archives to the Frank Falla archives. So this is all very public. I haven't acted against anyone's wishes. Hmm.

Mel (00:54:17):

Having looked at the website, it is an incredible piece of work that you've put together there, gi 'cause it's so detailed. You have maps, you have stories that are pages long, you have photographs. It's an incredible, it's an incredible piece of work that you've put together, I have to say. It's very impressive. Thank

Gilly (00:54:34):

You. Thank you, thank you. Well, it's, it's very much a labor of love and it's very much

Mel (00:54:39):

Yeah, you can tell, you can feel it from the, from the website that it is.

Gilly (00:54:43):

Good. Good, good. But I mean, you know, some people say that you shouldn't be emotional about your work. You should always be detached and objective. And I think, well, that's rubbish. People are not robots, and it's a good thing. We're not robots. Because if it hadn't been for emotions, I wouldn't have done half the work exactly that I did. I wouldn't have been motivated, you know, people aren't robots. I think that's a silly thing to say. I'm not a scientist. I don't, you know, I'm not standing in a lab shaking a test tube. You know, emotions obviously are irrelevant there, but you know, you're not doing it on behalf of the CO2, you know, <laugh>. No,

Perry (00:55:18):

And that makes, I always think emotions and passion are the driving force behind. Of course. They're, you know, anything like that really. So,

Gilly (00:55:25):

Absolutely.

Perry (00:55:26):

There's a topic I'm quite interested actually, is, is that you mentioned before that you were sort of noticing trends of people that had done certain types of resistance or certain types of people that had been deported. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Gilly (00:55:42):

Right. Well, we, for example, we noted that it was middle-aged women who were helping and sheltering slave workers. So the, the clear example of that is Louisa Gould, who along with her friend and housekeeper and indeed with, with Harold Lanik, was sheltering Russian slave worker. And she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she died. And Harold, as we know, went to Neuengamme and Bergen Belson. So, you know, there were trends like that. There were, there were sort of what we, what we sort of observed were like white collar crimes and blue collar crimes. If we're gonna be very sort of traditional with our nomenclature, it was sort of, if you are a professional person, then you might be illicitly listening to the radio. But if you were a manual laborer, you might have been more inclined to steal a bag of sugar or to thumper German soldier or something like that. But that's a very, a very broad brush kind of thing. And there aren't hard and fast rules, but certainly we observed trends with age and sex and that was interesting to observe

Perry (00:56:55):

My great-great uncle on my dad's side. I think you probably know, well, I'm sure you know of him Frankie Lio.

Gilly (00:57:03):

Oh, yes, definitely.

Perry (00:57:04):

Yes. he was deported for, I think it was stealing a motor a German motorbike at a very young age. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Were there many, like very young people that were, were sort of sent away?

Gilly (00:57:18):

Yes. I mean, that's, that's again, that's an interesting topic because if I can just pause for a second to contrast with Guernsey, with Guernsey, all school age kids evacuated, pretty much all school age kids. But that didn't happen in Jersey to nearly the same extent. And that meant that Jersey had a lot of teenage boys during the occupation in Guernsey did not. And it was the teenage boys, especially the ones whose fathers were away fighting who became a little feral and uncontrolled or uncontrollable, and, you know, and the mothers were out to work to try and earn some money. And so these kids were, and, and remembering that the school leaving age was 14 in those days. Mm-Hmm. So there are a lot of kids with time on their hands who were stealing who, who were getting up to no good, who were stealing German weapons and hiding them in the wardrobe.

Gilly (00:58:09):

Probably not really having a clear plan of what they were gonna do, but just sort of, you know teenage shenanigans. And Frankie was one of those, and he was one of a number of the Jersey 21 actually who, who had kind of built up this life of petty crime. People in their teenage years and early twenties some survived and some didn't. Yeah, I mean, you know, Frankie is an interesting story because a lot of people were under the impression that he was in Bergen-Belsen with Harold Lobeck, and he wasn't. And the, the records prove this because after the war, Harold wrote he collaborated with a radio script writer, and he wrote this play about what happened to him. And he, no, you know, Harold narrated it and he, he talks about this unam unnamed person who was Frankie being with him for some of his journey, but then they go their separate ways.

Gilly (00:59:04):

Obviously they have no choice in the matter. And Frankie was sent to, he went to Neuengamme, as did Harold. But then, well, well, Harold was sent to Bergen Belson. Frankie was sent to Sand Bosel. Sand Bosel was a military prisoner of war camp, but towards the end of the war, a group of men from Neuengamme were sent to Sambo, and Frankie was one of them. And the ultimate proof of this, as well as archival record showing that he was in Sambo, was a piece of film shot by the liberators. And it shows the military prisoners of war because there were Bri, there were lots of British military prisoners of war in sand bustle. And they have with them, there's, there's this group of guys, group of British soldiers who have with them this young chap. And he's wearing a hodgepodge of, you know, Russian cap and a German jacket.

Gilly (00:59:58):

And British trousers clothes have been found for him. And he's captured on film showing these open wounds around his wrists where he's been manacled. And, but he's smiling and smiling at the camera because he's been liberated. And he's, and he says something to the camera, but this is a silent film. And I found someone who could lip read, 'cause I wanted to know what he was saying. And he's just saying something like, Ooh, they're filming a task. Then the cameras pointed towards us. So it wasn't saying anything particularly profound, but the script that the narrators of the film had written were, you know, we have this young chat, and he was deported from Jersey. He lived on this street. It was Frankie Street. This was his journey. He was sent, first of all, to Albany. Well, we didn't know he had been in Albany, first of all.

Gilly (01:00:49):

And actually, I recently came across a record from Albany with the work I've done with the Lord Pickles, Albany Expert Review, looking at those records, and we can see lo and behold, there's Frankie and Albany, and he talks about he'd gone to some other places before he'd caught up with Harold Lex. So it was, you know, all these new things we found out about Frankie because he told the film crew Yeah. What was, what had happened to him, and he'd actually stolen some other things and like somebody's bracelet or something and, you know, all these extra things he'd be getting up to. But when his body was repatriated to Jersey, I, I was there for the church service and then his, his wee burial in Jersey, his was a very, a very sad story, but it's, I felt very glad that I could kind of see the final chapter of the story, but also find out some additional chapters along the way.

Gilly (01:01:41):

Because often you think you know someone's story and you think it's complete, and then you go onto the next project and you're looking at a new set of records and they pop up again and, and it's like, well, we didn't know, you know, and then you can go back to the original and because it's all online, you could just add this extra little chapter and a few extra sentences and, you know, so in a way, the Frank Falla archive is very much a live archive. It's not finished. It's, you know, if ever someone emails me and said, here's a picture of my grandpa, please add it. My grandpa told me this story. Can you add it? I add it. And so it, it's an always growing thing. I mean, that happens less rarely now because I've done so much research. It's, you know, as I say, I think I've collected 99% of it, but I'm always open to another thing popping up.

Mel (01:02:27):

That's incredible.

Perry (01:02:28):

Yeah, it's amazing.

Gilly (01:02:29):

Did, did you know Frankie had been an Albany?

Perry (01:02:31):

I, I didn't, to be honest with you. I mean, I've, I've only sort of heard the story kind of third hand <laugh> through my dad and, and that Oh, that, you know, he was on the news and my dad saying, oh, that was your great Nan's brother, you know, I never met my great nan Well, not not after being a baby or anything like that. Yeah. So, I mean, it was all, it was all quite a distant thing for me, really. Mm-Hmm. But it's really interesting to know that so much more information came about just, just from your efforts basically. And that might have just died, you know, died out and never been discovered if it wasn't for someone actively, you know, looking under every stone. So it's amazing work that you've done and, and everybody's that's been involved is done with things.

Gilly (01:03:18):

And when I began my work in sort of 2006, 2007, everyone said to me, you've left it too late, Julie. It's all been done. History's been written, leave it alone. Stop asking questions. And I thought, that doesn't sit right with me. And, and of course there were a lot more people still alive in 2006, 2007 than there are now. And I think we were, you know, now unfortunately, even the children of those alive during the occupation are towards the end of their lives as well. And so it's, it is usually this first generation who have, you know, have inherited their, their parents' archives. And so I think I was lucky to come along at the right moment where, you know, I, I think maybe if I were to begin the same work now, I dunno if I'd have been able to do so much. Yeah. Especially in terms of collecting oral testimony as well.

Mel (01:04:13):

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for chatting to us today. It's been a fascinating conversation and I look forward to exploring the gallery further.

Gilly (01:04:21):

Great, great. And also you can contact me via the Frank Falla archive website as well, because there's a contact box in there and that comes straight to my email. Brilliant.

Perry (01:04:29):

Thanks very much, Jill.

Mel (01:04:30):

Thanks gi. Okay.

Gilly (01:04:31):

You're welcome. You're welcome.

Mel (01:04:33):

If you would like to dive deeper into this topic, Gilly has published a number of books. Her most recent publication is titled Materiality of Internment. Grab yourselves a copy. If you enjoy today's episode, don't forget to click on the subscribe button for more.