Traitor's Tree, Sark: The Island forgave but it did not forget

Someone on Sark pinned a list to a tree outside the Gallery. It named the islanders who had kept a radio after the Germans ordered every set handed in. Being on that list could mean imprisonment, and it could mean death.

The list reached the German Kommandant. He destroyed it.

Islanders came to call it the Traitor’s Tree, and the traitor they meant was whoever wrote the list.

Why keeping a radio mattered

Radio sets were confiscated across Sark on 12 June 1942. A hundred and fifty seven were handed in.

Some were not. Dame Sibyl Hathaway kept a hidden crystal set. For an island cut off from Britain, a working radio was the difference between knowing how the war was going and being told.

What Operation Basalt cost the people living here

On the night of 3 and 4 October 1942, British commandos landed at the Hog’s Back. On 18 October, Hitler issued the Commando Order, directing that captured British raiders be treated as bandits and killed without trial.

On Sark the raid changed what people could eat. The Sark account records that the relationship between the Germans and the Sarkese cooled considerably as a direct result. The curfew was extended to run from nine at night until seven in the morning. More than thirteen thousand mines were laid on the cliff paths and headlands, on the beaches, and in the cemetery. Rabbits could no longer be hunted. Gorse and blackthorn could no longer be safely gathered for fuel in many places. Limpets, ormers and vraic, the seaweed islanders spread on their fields, became dangerous or impossible to collect. On 23 October every Sark fishing boat was ordered up out of the harbour.

Fifteen months later, on the night of 27 and 28 December 1943, a second British raid came ashore on the same route. Four mines detonated. Corporal Robert Bellamy and Corporal André Dignac were killed. Dignac was later exhumed and repatriated. Bellamy is buried on Sark still, in the military plot opposite St Peter’s Church.

The officers changed, and one was removed

Command of the island changed hands at least five times in under five years. Baron von Aufsess and Prince Oettingen came first. Oberleutnant Herdt followed, then Hauptmann Johann Hinkel, who was killed on Eperquerie Common on 28 March 1943 when he stepped on one of his own side’s sea mines. Herdt returned in July 1943 and was relieved of his duty on 31 December. Hauptmann Magsam signed the surrender in May 1945.

Oettingen, who ran civil administration in Guernsey and who had ordered that Sark residents be given German medical aid after the island’s own doctor left, was removed from his post for speaking out about the deportations of civilians from Guernsey and Sark. His daughter-in-law was imprisoned by Hitler. Von Aufsess’s wife was imprisoned for two years by the Gestapo.

What the island was like by the end of 1943

The Sark Amateur Dramatic Society was performing. Grand Grève Bay had been opened to officers, soldiers and islanders to swim in through the hot summer. Christmas was marked with a dance at the Island Hall to which both Germans and Sarkese were invited. Shortly before Christmas the InselKommandant handed out a German Class prize to the island’s schoolchildren.

The garrison lived among a few hundred people on an island neither side could leave, and the food was running out.

The list was pinned to the tree in this period.

What the same years cost

Sixty-two people were deported from Sark, commemorated now by a plaque at Creux Harbour. Nanette Hamon was four years old when a mine killed her at the top of Mermaid Lane on 2 October 1944. Two German soldiers, J Dekan and A Hoppe, died clearing the mines above Creux Harbour, and were buried in the cemetery with full military honours.

What the record does not say

It does not say who pinned the list to the tree, or why. It does not name the Kommandant who received it, and it does not give his reason for destroying it. He had the names and he did not use them. That is the whole of what is known.

The name the islanders chose is the part that survived.

The Gallery the tree stood outside was built in 1933 by Eric and Lisel Drake for the Sark Art Group, and is now the Post Office and Gallery Stores. The German garrison used it to store ammunition. Paintings by Mervyn Peake, who had lived on Sark and painted it in the 1930s, were stored there too. The Sark record has the tree still standing.

For the wider account, read Sark in the Second World War and the woman who made the Germans come to her. For what is left to see on the ground, there is a walk through what the Occupation left behind.