Story on his family past

In 2000, you learn the death of your father, with whom you no longer had a relationship. A only daughter, you must take care of her apartment. Can you tell us?

Cascade revelations are waiting for me. My father still lived in the modest apartment of 35 m2

from the Paris region where his mother had collected him when he had been expelled from his own accommodation. He had lived there for over twenty years, including fourteen with my grandmother. So it is not only the intimacy of my father that I discovered, but also that of my grandparents.

My grandmother’s room had been left as it was since the death of it. Nine years later, he continued to maintain it devoutly, airing, changing the sheets. He lived in the old living room, transformed into a tramp lair. He had to evolve in three square meters around the sofa, in his imaginary lives, his dreamed lives. It was sad.

Why were you no longer in relation to him?

My father was a psychologically harmful person. Both by his absence, and when he was there, by his violence. He could put himself in black anger for a detail. He never really took care of me. After the separation of my parents when I was a child, he tried to manipulate me.

We could never distinguish the true from the false in his stories, which plunged me into disturbing strangeness. This does not prevent love, but I was afraid. Every ten years, I tried to get back in touch with him, with the hope that a father-daughter relationship could be born, but each time it was a failure.

About fifteen years ago, you tried to reconnect by presenting your 5 -year -old son.

How did it go?

It was my grandmother’s desire on her hospital bed before her death. For his part, my son was starting to tell his friends that his grandfather was dead … I felt forced to present them so that my son enrolled in his genealogy. My delusional father, I did not wish to give a sequel, but something extraordinary happened. Until then, my son was quite cold, distant, with his own father. I had explained to him, with words that he could understand, that I did not see my father because he was mean with me.

But perhaps I had instilled in him, in spite of myself, the idea that all the dads were mean. That day, my 5-year-old boy made the difference between a father like mine, mad, and his, attentive, protective, tender, who took care of his education. There was this incredible scene, where he climbed on his father’s lap, came to curl up in his arms like a little koala and fell asleep on his chest … It had never happened.

You made another discovery in this apartment, at the origin of your book …

Alas! At the bottom of a drawer, I came across two photos. On the first, my grandfather is in fencing outfit, with a Nazi armband. On the second, he posed in a sports team, on his knees, with a swastika on the plastron surrounded by a bay crown. It was the symbol of the police of the public order of the Third Reich, as I learned during my two years of investigation which started in Czech Republic, where my grandfather Joseph came from.

Weren’t you aware of this past?

For the whole family, my grandfather was a Czech, forcibly enlisted in the Wehrmacht, the German army, in 1938, at the time of the annexation of the southern, which had hitherto part of Czechoslovakia. He had deserted the army when he was in Normandy. There he had worked for the Americans, as a mechanic, and met my grandmother.

The latter had hidden him because he was both sought after and sentenced to death by the Germans for desertion, and later in absentia by the Soviets. He was a hero who had raised himself against Nazism and Stalinism! An elegant man, who imposed it. Who took me delicately in his arms to carry me in my child bed and with whom I spent a great vacation.

No one suspected anything?

When I call my uncle, my father’s brother, he falls from the clouds. However, many details should have drawn our attention … Why was my grandfather spoke German and not Czech? I also remember anti -Semitic remarks.

At that time, I hurry that this hidden, so heavy, so shameful story had to weigh on my father … I decide to discover the truth: I contact people, launches research tracks in the Czech, French, French, French archives German … and I take notes, as you go.

What do you discover?

My paternal family comes from Zabreh, a city of the southern belonging to Czechoslovakia but populated by Germans. When Hitler was in power, many of them joined movements favorable to the 3rd Reich, asking for their attachment to Germany. A few months before the annexation of the region, my grandfather joined Berlin, where he became a police officer.

He was ahead of the call! And I discovered that he had joined the National Socialist Party from 1940 to 1942. On the other hand, it is impossible to know if he participated in the Shoah by balls (massive shootings of which The Jews of Eastern Europe were victims, editor’s note) but we know today that the German police often supplied to the SS or the Gestapo … At the end of the war, he was sent to Normandy.

And Springora was not his real name …

No, his real name was Springer. He abandoned him at the Liberation, and falsified in Springora, in order to give him a Czech consonance. Arrested by the Americans, he worked for them a few months as a mechanic and undoubtedly also a bit as a spy, his mastery of the German allowing him to inform the allied troops on the positions of the enemy. In exchange, he was able to obtain political refugee status. And that’s how he invented a false identity and a false journey.

Has your father discovered this secret?

As a teenager, he had to understand that his father was a former Nazi. But it was unspeakable: we were in the middle of the Eichmann trial (The craftsman of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, judged in 1961, editor’s note) . For the first time, victims spoke, the media echoes themselves. I think he knew that his name was falsified – he told me when I was a child that we were of a noble family with a castle in the carpaths.

He could have disowned his father, confront him with his lies, but children often respect the silence imposed by the parents. It takes two generations for speech to be released; It is not trivial that it is me who lifts the secret.

Does that shed light on the enigma that was your father?

I am convinced. I had never understood this incapacity at home to be a father with me. Nor his madness, his misanthropy, his mythomania – he has filled the void, shame and unsaid by his inventions. He lived in terrible solitude, a hatred of himself.

You found a printing plate representing a concentration camp which belonged to your father, not to your grandfather. How to explain this?

A very interesting text by Tobie Nathan on the radicalized boys who left to make jihad helped me to understand. As a psychologist and representative of ethnopsychiatry, he became interested in the issues of exile, uprooted people and in search of benchmarks, identity. Most are of North African origin and Muslim culture, but there are also Normans, Bretons.

And the common point between these young people is that they all have a break in parentage or a family secret linked to their origin. They needed at some point to reconstitute an identity by kissing an ideology. Just as my father kissed his father’s racing ideas by engaging in the OAS, by collecting Nazi objects.

Why did you shoot a book?

Having made this story a literary project helped me. It was to do a work of collective memory while bringing to light a secret that weighed on my family, my father, myself, and who could have continued.

By reading this book, my son can now be part of his own story. He also bears the name of my companion, which is a Jewish surname! As a symbolic repair of history …