It was Jean Lefébure, the depositary of the second copy, who provided the family and historical context which enabled him to bring the missing piece back to the Belgian archives. On the death of his father, a civil servant at the Ministry of Colonies, his mother, knowing her son’s interest in old documents, gave him a folder she had received from her husband.
Without really realizing the importance of the document: “my areas of interest had nothing to do with the history of the Congo, so I quite stupidly classified the contents of the folder with other documents that I had without touching them any more”.
My father had the audacity and the courage to win
The treaty could have slept for a long time in one of Jean Lefébure’s piles of documents if he hadn’t watched the television news. When he found the document, he then remembered that his mother had told him how her husband had found himself in possession of this folder of documents: “At the start of the 1940 war, my father was twenty-seven and was a civil servant in the Ministry of Colonies. A German officer came to mark with a chalk cross boxes and furniture that he wanted to see leave the building. Before the arrival of the removal trucks, my father was able to erase certain crosses, replacing them on other boxes, he had the audacity and the courage to take these historical documents from the Nazi occupiers for the History of the Belgium and the Congo”.