The combination of back-breaking toil, an extreme shortage of food and wanton physical brutality, forced many Soviet slave workers to escape from their camps. 

Ralph Mollet wrote in ‘Jersey Under the Swastika’: ‘During the daytime they begged and robbed, and at night they attacked the houses in order to steal food and clothing. The inhabitants had to bar and bolt their doors, barricade their windows, and take all their food stuffs and clothing upstairs to their bedrooms. One lady observed that her mother had been in the habit of taking her silver to bed…’ 

Sadly, these robberies occasionally resulted in fatalities. This report comes from the Evening Post newspaper in December 1942: 

‘During the early hours of 1st December 1942, a Mr. E. Le Gresley who, together with his sister, lived at Overdale Stores, St. Peter, heard intruders at work below. On going to investigate, he found two men, stated to be Russians, near his fowlhouse; on closing with the intruders he was attacked and stabbed nine times with a pocket knife and died of his wounds. His sister was also seriously wounded.’

The desperation that drove Russian workers to beg and steal for food, sometimes had the worst possible consequences for the workers themselves. 

Diarist Leslie Sinel reported on 24 March that ‘a farmer at St Ouen’s who found workers trying to get into his house between midnight and 1.30am attached them with a heavy stick and knocked two of them unconscious.’ Both of them were later found to be dead. 

Overdale Stores was demolished in 2008 to make way for a housing development.