The Day the Nazis Came Here ─ The Astonishing True Story of a Childhood Journey from the Occupied Channel Islands to the Dark Heart of a German Prison Camp

By the time he was six years old, Stephen had been bombarded by the Luftwaffe and deported from occupied Guernsey, along with his family, to a prison camp in the heart of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. He had seen men die in front of him and walked with Jews straight off the cattle-trucks from Bergen-Belsen. He had nearly drowned, narrowly avoided being savaged by Alsatian guard dogs, been beaten by a pathological member of the elite SS and had his hand broken by a German guard for attempting to feed Russian prisoners. The family kept going through three and a half years of imprisonment, reinforced by their strong sense of survival and their loving support for each other, and were eventually returned to a Guernsey which had been stricken to the core by Nazi occupation. Told through Steven Matthews’ own extraordinary experiences, as well as writing from his mother’s diaries and previously unpublished photos of historical significance, The Day the Nazis Came is an utterly unique memoir. Depicting the world of Nazi prison camps through the eyes of a child—a world in which the real dangers often seemed trivial and every day was a new adventure—it tells not just of the prisoners’ desperate plight, but provides an important and poignant reminder that not every German soldier was cruel and hateful. There were brave heroes there who often risked their own lives to help their prisoners. Above all, it pays tribute to the preciousness of childhood, and shows that human kindness may flower in the unlikeliest of places.

Stephen Matthews, joined the British Colonial Police in Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, and received many awards and commendations for his outstanding work in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s. Since then he has worked for Shell Marketing and has also run his own international management consultancy company. He divides his time between Brittany and China, while working on this and other writing projects.