Tony Blair's holiday camp

Le Vernet, the French town where the Blairs will spend their holiday, has been dubbed Dullsville, but it has a dark secret. David Cesarani reports

Making a fuss over Mr Blair's choice of holiday destination has become an annual sporting event, but the recent exchanges in the press about Le Vernet, near Toulouse in southern France, have missed what is truly controversial about the place.

The camp, known as Vernet or Le Vernet, after two towns in the vicinity, began life in 1939 as one of several established by the French authorities to hold soldiers from the Spanish republican army and the international brigades who fled across the border after the army led by General Franco overwhelmed the democratic republic. One thousand men from the brigades were incarcerated in Le Vernet, including Germans, Austrians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and even a Swiss man.

When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, a new tide of misery poured into the camp. Overnight the German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had found sanctuary in France from Nazi persecution became "enemy aliens". Thousands were rounded up by the police along with anyone who the French security services deemed "subversive". This term covered hundreds of exiled Italian anti-Fascists and German. They were loaded on to trains and sent to internment camps in southern France, including Le Vernet.

Among them was Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born Jewish writer who was arrested because he was a Communist and an anti-Fascist activist. He later wrote about his harrowing experience in a best selling book, Scum of the Earth, published in England in 1941 (see extract below).

While a prisoner in Le Vernet, Koestler found himself among a heartbreaking collection of international brigaders, German Communist apparatchiks, forlorn and stateless Jews, and intellectuals of every hue who happened to have what the French considered the wrong nationality or politics. One of them was the author Gustav Regler, who had known Koestler in Berlin when they were battling with the Nazis.

In his autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, Regler recalled the scene that greeted them. It was "a collection of ramshackle wooden huts at the foot of the Pyrenees, without beds, without light and without heating". For the men who had spent so long in Nazi concentration camps or fighting Fascism it was a terrible blow to be rounded up with hardly a protest from the French or anyone else. "We lay on planks and were forgotten".

By February 1940 the camp population had risen to more than 2,400. The prisoners were routinely robbed and beaten by the French police guards. During the cold and damp of the winter despair set in among the malnourished internees. Every few days in every barrack a prisoner committed suicide, usually the Jewish refugees who had no support networks and feared the worst. According to Regler, "Vernet was an eerie cemetery. The huts stood like great coffins on the plains".

In February 1940 Koestler, who was on his last legs, was freed. Regler also got out. Most of the internees were less fortunate and their prospects darkened after Germany invaded France in June 1940. Under the armistice agreement, the Vichy French regime allowed a commission made up of German army intelligence and the Gestapo into the camps to identify opponents of the Nazi regime. The commission, led by Dr Ernest Kundt, reached Le Vernet in August 1940. As a result, dozens of anti-Fascists and German Communists were handed over to the Gestapo by the French police. They were sent to German concentration camps, where most were murdered or died.

By 1942 the camp held around 4,000, of whom half were Jewish. When the Nazis set into motion their plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, the French camps were among their first targets. The French were only too happy to get rid of these refugees.

Between August and September 1942, about 500 Jews were transferred by the French police from Le Vernet to Drancy, a holding camp on the outskirts of Paris from which larger transports carried Jews to the death camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. None are known to have survived.

The fate of Le Vernet symbolised how, for decades after the war, the French preferred to erase the Vichy years. But survivors of the camp kept its memory alive and in the Eighties, thanks partly to a series of war crimes trials, France began coming to terms with its past. In 1991 Anne Grynberg publishedThe camps of hate, which exposed Le Vernet's history. Today there is a small museum in the town recalling the camp and, some distance away, a memorial to the Jewish deportees. Whether or not it is "Dullsville" seems to have been the extent of interest shown by the British press so far, but there is more to Le Vernet and its surroundings than meets the incurious eye of the roving hack.

For the older Blair children there is plenty of recent history to explore. And for a Prime Minister who presides over a controversial policy towards asylum seekers and refugees, there is plenty to mull over at these tragic places of memory.

David Cesarani is professor of modern Jewish history and director of the AHRB Centre for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton

An extract from Arthur Koestler's wartime memoir

The camp of Le Vernet covers about 50 acres of ground. The first impression was of a mess of barbed wire. It ran all round the camp and across it in various directions, with trenches running parallel.

The hutments were built of wooden planks, covered with a sort of water-proofed paper; each housed 200 men. Furnishings consisted of two lower and two upper platforms of planks, each two yards wide. On each row slept 50 men, feet toward the passage. Each compartment contained five men and was 105 inches wide; thus each man disposed of a space of 21 inches wide to sleep on.

The boards were covered with a thin layer of straw, and there were no windows, only rectangular slabs cut out of the wallplanks, which served as shutters. There was no stove during the winter of 1939, no lighting, and no blankets.

Work lasted in winter from 8am to 11am and from 1pm to 4pm; the working hours were limited by the daylight and by the undernourished state of the men. Sickness rates were always over 25 per cent, although malingering was heavily punished.

Four times a day there were roll-calls, which lasted from half an hour to an hour each in -20deg frost. The slightest offence was reprimanded by a stroke of the fist or the leather crop of the Mobile Guards.

These were the material conditions at Le Vernet. Not only was it notorious for being the worst camp in France, but as regards food, accommodation and hygiene, Vernet was even below the level of Nazi concentration camps.

From 'Scum of the Earth' by Arthur Koestler (Eland)