And yet even after seventy years, the war itself still holds secrets which can challenge our understanding of it and open up new areas of enquiry.
The Hidden is located primarily in the Channel Islands, the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans from to An unexpected visitor in the present forces Dora, a German refugee, and Joe, a young Irish priest, to confront a time they thought buried in the past. As the story of the occupation unravels we see how their lives entwined and mirrored each other. Dora hid her Jewish identity while Joe hid a terrible secret. I wanted to tell a different version of the occupation, less driven by the spirits of British exceptionalism, of Dunkirk and the Blitz, more akin to a European experience.
In the course of this, some historian friends and I had been regularly visiting Berlin. Later, I discovered that 34, women were used as prostitutes in Nazi-run brothels across occupied Europe.
There were five in the Channel Islands, two in Jersey alone. European comfort women? I had no idea. We never heard about it. Little was written about it. Why the silence? Sexual violence was not considered a crime against humanity as defined in , so, unlike other war crimes, the evidence was not collected.
Nor did the women speak out after the war, keeping quiet out of shame or fear or both. Women suspected of sleeping with the enemy β for whatever reason and under whatever circumstances β were subject to brutal vigilante justice on the continent and in the Channel Islands.
