​​Pier Road​

​​Crowds gathered on Pier Road to protest the deportations as hundreds were herded onto boats. Patriotic singing erupted and echoed back and forth between those on land and on board. On 29 September, as many as 1,000 people were present. Many were arrested, some of whom were later themselves deported, among them Maurice Hill.

​Maurice recalled:

​‘I was amongst many people who went up to Pier Road so that we could see across to the boat and give them a good farewell. The first deportation wasn’t quite so bad, the second was a little more boisterous and the third one, there were literally hundreds of us up there. The German occupiers didn’t like that very much because we were singing patriotic songs – ‘There Will Always Be an England’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and that sort of thing. And they turned the troops out and they started moving us down Pier Road. Some went to the left, to The Esplanade…and foolishly I joined them.

​The German soldiers moved us all along The Esplanade and turned us into Kensington Place, which is a much narrower street, and they had more control over us there. Half way up there, of course there were a couple of hotels there which were billets for the Germans, and they turned out more troops and they started arresting people... [A] German soldier grabbed hold of me, put a revolver in my back and said, ‘come on’, so I went.

​I was taken to the old Aberfeldie Hotel with another chap…and we were kept there until after curfew and then we were marched down and joined the rest of the group who had been arrested, and we ended up in the local prison, which was in Gloucester Street…

​The next day…we were taken up to the Feldgendarmerie headquarters for interrogation. It was just general questioning. Did we know anybody in the crowd and that sort of thing. Of course, we didn’t. I mean, there were lots of people we knew there, but we weren’t going to tell them that…We were then taken back to prison…

​I was released after three weeks. I thought that was it. Back to work, start all over again, behave myself for the rest of the war, because I was on probation…and then in the February ’43, I had papers to say that I was going to be deported to a camp in Germany.’

​Maurice spent the next two and a half years as an internee in Laufen Castle, Bavaria.