ICE’s Dr Gilly Carr wins University of Cambridge grant

ICE’s Senior Lecturer and Academic Director in Archaeology, Dr Gilly Carr, has been awarded a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant to pay for a research assistant for her digital heritage project currently supported by the German EVZ Foundation. The project, Channel Islander Victims of Nazi Persecution, provides profiles of and maps the c. 100 Nazi prisons and concentration camps to which islanders were deported during WWII for acts of resistance. It also provides the biographies of the more than 200 deported islanders. This is the first time that this material has been brought together, and draws upon archival material in the Channel Islands, the UK, France, Germany, and further afield. It also uses records from the International Tracing Service and archives from victims’ and survivors’ families.  This website will be first used in educational workshops in the Channel Islands in 2017, followed by its use in the exhibition of the same theme that Gilly will be curating at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, in London, in the autumn of 2017.

Gilly hopes that the website will be of great educational value to both schools and the families of deported islanders, as well as for researchers further afield who have an interest in the subject. As the majority of those deported never spoke about the experience to their families, this project returns a missing piece of history to the Channel Islands. Dr Carr’s family is from Guernsey and so this project is very close to her heart. She has recently presented a couple of BBC documentaries on deported islanders who died in prisons and camps, and will be teaching a day school on 25 February called Heroes or Villains? British resisters against Nazism in the Channel Islands.