Troyes Hauts-Clos Prison

Seven islanders (Baker, Brehaut, Featherstone, Howlett, McCallen, Staples and Tardif) were transported from Caen Prison to Troyes on 15 July 1942, and are the first documented prisoners from the Channel Islands to have been incarcerated there. All seven were transferred to Clairvaux Prison three weeks later, on 8 August. Most of the islanders transferred to Troyes came from either Caen Prison or Saint-Lô Prison, although Réné Bessin appears to have been transported directly to Troyes in November 1943 and and served his entire sentence there. Bessin and several other Channel Islanders left testimonials:

While I was there I received not more than two Red Cross messages from my wife and family… Also when I was in prison I was denied any medical attention but when I had dental trouble the Germans did allow me to visit a dentist in Troyes and they made me pay for the treatment. I was never visited by anyone from a neutral country. The Germans returned me to Guernsey on May 9, 1944 and I had only the clothes I stood up in, for the remainder of of my personal and family belongings had been confiscated. — Réné Bessin, 27 October 1964

A Russian, two Frenchmen, an Algerian and I were marched to the harbour and locked in the donkey-engine room of a small ship and taken to St. Malo, then on to Hauts-Clos Penitentiere, Troyes, where, for ten months, we were kept with several thousand prisoners on a very restricted amount of food. From Troyes, chained hand and foot to an Algerian for 17 hours, about 300 of us were marched through the streets to the station and taken to Dijon, where we were interned in an old underground fort for seven months. — Ernest Le Prevost, letter to the Foreign Secretary, 8 July 1965

The general conditions were disgusting, food was nothing else but vegetables boiled, one sort a day, bread about 80 grammes a day… Beds bug-infested & damp. I nearly lost my life at Troyes with hemorrhage of the bowels, being left for two weeks without attention, afterwards taken to hospital at Troyes for several weeks under guard all the time. Also left with chronic bronchitis. I should like to state that I was always under strict supervision, when being moved from one prison to another was handcuffed and chained by the legs. — William Windebank, 3 April 1965.

It appears that most of the islanders were in Troyes for only a few months, although Ernest Le Prevost was incarcerated there from June 1943 for ten months. This was probably the longest sentence served by an islander in Troyes. Most of the prisoners transferred from Troyes to Clairvaux Prison and Chalons-sur-Marne Prison. George Morcel and William Windebank were the last islanders to leave Troyes Prison when they transferred out on 15 March 1944 to Fort de Villeneuve.

On 24 August 1944, the retreating 51st SS Panzer Brigade entered the nearby town of Buchéres and shot 67 of its civilian inhabitants, including women and young children. Troyes was liberated by US Army troops under General Patton on the following day. The collaborationist government official Rene Bousquet, who had played an instrumental role in the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup in Paris in which over 13,000 Jews were arrested and deported to their deaths in concentration camps, was formally accused of crimes against humanity fifty years later. Bousquet was shot and killed in his apartment in Paris in 1993 before the trial could begin.