Jews appear in the Guernsey record sparsely and early. A man called Abraham, described in 1277 as a London Jew from La Gelnseye, suggests the island had at least passing Jewish presence in the medieval period. In 1482 Edward Brampton, a converted Portuguese Jew who had been knighted for his service to the English crown, was appointed Governor of Guernsey. The community remained tiny over the centuries. By the late 1930s a handful of Jews lived on Guernsey: some longstanding residents, some refugees from the rise of Nazism in central Europe who had landed in Britain and then found themselves on the Channel Islands when the German army arrived in June 1940. Most of the island's population evacuated to England in the days before the occupation. A few stayed. Among those who stayed were Jewish residents who, by the laws Britain had applied to enemy aliens, had no easy way to leave.

The First Order Against the Jews was issued on the Channel Islands on 23 October 1940, two days after the Jersey Evening Post ran an advertisement instructing all Jews to identify themselves. The Nuremberg Race Laws were absorbed into Channel Islands legal codes. The bailiffs of Jersey and Guernsey, the senior local officials, complied. The historian David Fraser has written that the deportations were carried out with the full collaboration of those bailiffs and government authorities. Only Sir Abraham Laine, a Guernsey official, formally protested. The Bailiff of Guernsey, Victor Carey, was knighted after the war. His own grandson would later say that Winston Churchill could not decide whether to hang Carey or knight him, and chose to knight him in order to hush up the level of collaboration. The history of how Guernsey delivered its Jewish residents to the Nazis was concealed for decades.

Therese Steiner was twenty-six years old, born in Austria, a qualified dental nurse who had come to England as a refugee and ended up working at the Castel Hospital in Guernsey when the war stranded her there. After eighteen months she made the mistake of going to the German authorities to ask permission to contact her parents. Auguste Spitz was forty, also Austrian, also trapped on the island. Marianne Grunfeld was twenty-nine, born in what is now Katowice in Poland; she had studied horticulture at the University of Reading before taking a job on a Guernsey farm. The three women were identified as Jewish, ordered to leave the island in April 1942, deported to France, then onward to Auschwitz. All three were murdered there. The other Jews registered on the islands, Elda Brouard, Elisabet Duquemin, her baby Janet, and Henry Duquemin, were sent to civilian internment camps in Germany and France and survived. Annie Wranowsky lived through the war on Sark working as a German language teacher, never identified. Miriam Jay survived in Guernsey unrecognized. Three women did not.

Sir Geoffrey Rowland, Bailiff of Guernsey from 2005 to 2012, has said the island government was powerless to stop the deportations because of the size of the German garrison. Historians have pointed out that not every order was carried out so promptly, that bailiffs in other occupied territories did sometimes obstruct or delay. The full record is now in the open. A plaque on Guernsey carries the names of Therese Steiner, Marianne Grunfeld, and Auguste Spitz. The Jewish community on the Channel Islands as it stands today, around sixty people, was founded in 1962. They have no synagogue. They do have, finally, an honest accounting. Visiting the plaque is the closest thing the islands can now offer the three women whose names are on it. The point of saying the names is that they were people. Therese, twenty-six. Auguste, forty. Marianne, twenty-nine. Murdered.