The best Christmas gift the French retiree received Thierry Sudan was a beeswax candle “from the hives of [su] father”, a German soldier of the Second Guerra world whose identity he learned in the 2000s.
For most of his life, this 80-year-old man did not know that his father was a german soldier with whom his mother fell in love during the Nazi occupation of Francea “shameful” secret that he took to the grave.
Like him, some 100,000 children were born from French mothers and German fathers during the occupation of France between 1940 and 1944, according to the French historian Fabrice Virgili.
Despite the fact that the Franco-German reconciliation was sealed in 1963 with the Elysee Treatywhich on Sunday the presidents Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz will commemorate in Paris, Soudan learned his story much later.
It was in adulthood that this man, whose passion for bees unites him with the father he never knew, began to reconstruct the story of his birth, on October 19, 1942.
During the guerra, his mother worked in the cafe in his parents’ village, in Angerville, regarding 70 kilometers south of Paris. German soldiers used to go, and the 17-year-old fell in love with one of them.
When she got pregnant, her family felt very ashamed. She was sent to Paris and she did not return to town until the end of the guerraBut her return with a young son was too much, even for her father.
The man left the family home and divorced his mother. “I had the feeling of being the ugly duckling [durante toda la infancia]like it doesn’t belong to my family,” Soudan confesses.
“Everybody knew”
After years of asking, in the early 2000s, a local elder finally revealed to him that his father was a German soldier named Ludwig Christ.
“Everybody knew it and nobody ever said anything,” says this retired former businessman, who receives AFP at his home on the island of Oléron (west).
“It was like getting hit on the head,” he adds.
Soudan then contacted the German embassy which announced his father’s death in 1999.
“I might have known him” if I had known before, laments the man, who did his French military service in Germany as a young man.
But in 2019 a Franco-German association called “Hearts Without Borders”, which helps investigate cases like Soudan’s, managed to find his father’s grave in the German city of Munich (south).
And they left a note asking the relatives of the deceased to contact them regarding “a family matter.”
One day, Thierry Sudan Thus, he received a call that changed his life: “They spoke to me in French, but I did not understand anything,” he recalls.
On the other end of the phone, her half-sister Waltraut and half-brother Manfred were calling from Bavaria. “He was very emotional,” he confesses, with a lump in his throat, the retiree.
The three met for the first time on the Isle of Oléron. Waltraut Maurer brought with him a photo of a child that he found in a family album. On the back was Thierry’s name, written by his father.
“Love story”
The liberation of france It was accompanied by humiliation once morest French women who had children with Germans, accused of collaborating with the enemy and having their heads shaved as happened to Soudan’s mother.
Unraveling her parents’ story has been both painful and heartwarming, she says.
“I found out that it was the village barber who shaved my mother.”
But he also keeps happy memories of his parents.
“My mother’s little sister told me that she had seen them several times walking hand in hand through the town,” he recalls. “It was a love story, not a rape.”
Waltraut Maurer assures the AFP that his brother was immediately familiar to him.
“He has our father’s hands and eyes and he is a beekeeper in his spare time, just like him,” explains the stepsister, who for this reason gave him a beeswax candle for Christmas.
Maurer is learning French and often talks on the phone with his stepbrother.
Soudan says he has found a “wonderful, warm family” and is now processing the nationality german to get a little closer to his roots. (AFP)
