A transcription of this article follows....

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(Excerpt from Liverpool, Daily Post, Wednesday November 17th, 1943)

 

BRITONS BACK FROM FRANCE

 

“UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS”

 

Homeless, and without relatives, five British internees arrived last night at Leeds after three years in French camps.  Mr. Heliar Vincent, aged 73, his wife, Kate, 65, daughter, 32, sister, Miss Ada Vincent, 71 and a friend of the family, Mrs Doris McCauley, 58, were among the 105 of the 250 British prisoners to be repatriated recently from a camp at Vittel, near the Vosges, where 3,800 people of all nationalities were interned. 

They settled in Bordeaux in 1924.  There were interned by the Vichy French and then by the Germans.  For the first five months they were in the internment camp of Besancon, on the Swiss border, and were housed in the notorious Vauban barracks, which had previously not been occupied for 50 years.  The barracks were overrun with vermin, there was no proper sanitation and their beds were piles of straw on the floor.  “The whole camp conditions there were an unspeakable horror.  There were 42 women in one small dormitory.  The food was scarce, and, at one time, they even had to eke out a miserable existence on scraps of food from tins recovered from a refuse heap.”

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