Le Vernet Internment Camp, France: report (1940)

Report by François Bondy on conditions in Camp du Vernet, Ariége, France, 2 Aug 1940; with the following sub-headings: arrests; the stadium Roland Garros (camp); transports to other camps; Vernet, who is interned and why?; work; discipline; food; hygiene; 'the prison' and visits.

François Bondy was born in 1915, the son of Fritz Bondy, a Prague-born man of letters and of the theatre, who moved to Switzerland with his family on account of his wife's health. François became a journalist, was editor of a Parisian economics periodical in 1934 and member of the editorial team of a French political newspaper in 1935. He was interned in May 1940 in Camp du Vernet along with the author, Arthur Koestler. After his release he studied Germanistik in Paris and sociology in Zürich, where he also worked as an editor for Weltwoche . After the Berlin Congress on 'Cultural Freedom', 1950, in which he took an actve part, Bondy settled in Paris where he was the publisher of the cultural newspaper Preuves . He turned this information sheet into one of France's leading cultural periodicals. By the late 1960s he had become a leading writer on cultural affairs, appearing on radio and television and many leading European newspapers and periodicals.

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Bondy family

Description exists to this archive on the Wiener Library's online catalogue www.wienerlibrary.co.uk.

Copies can be made for personal use. Permission must be sought for publication.

Cohen, Monique-Lise and Malo, Eric Les Camps du Sud-ouest de la France: Exclusion, Internement et D?portation, 1939-1944 , Bibliothheque Historique Privat, 1994.