​​When Emile first arrived, he was encamped at West Park Pavilion, known then as Lager Seeckt. He was made to unload timber and bags of cement from barges in St Helier Harbour for six weeks before being moved to Lager Udet forced labour camp in St Brelade.

​Emile was put to work on the anti-tank sea wall at Ouaisné : ‘Our foreman used to say, “We’ve got to have a bunker here.” We used to say, “How long have we got?” “Six [weeks] at the most.” “It’s got to be done and if you do it, I’ll look after you.” We used to say that we don’t get enough to eat. “I can’t do nothing about that, I wish I could, because you’re good boys. Now look, if it’s ready in time, I’ll be on guard and you can sleep a whole day, all of you. I’ll blow the whistle when your soup arrives. As soon as they’ve gone, carry on sleeping”.So, in one way it was good for us, he did what he could for us. He couldn’t give us any bread, because he didn’t have any.’

​The workers’ staple diet was extremely inadequate for hard manual labour. One night Emile told his friend Jerome that the OT cooks in Lager Udet  had left the empty cauldrons outside the canteen. ‘That night, I managed to crawl behind their hut and scrape enough to half fill my cup. Hunger is a terrible thing, and even today I don’t like seeing good food wasted. Anyway, I was able to carry on like that for the next few weeks.’

​Happiness did sometimes arise from the prevailing difficult circumstances of the Occupation. Emile Boydens met and began a relationship with a Jersey woman named Mabel Pinglaux, to whom he was given permission to marry in 1944. Emile survived his ordeal as a forced worker in Jersey and passed away at the age of 95 on 22 January 2015.