Shaped by the Past - II

Before and during WW II, by Christian

Between 1922 and 1925 Michel Henry traveled to Belgian Congo to establish railroads there. While he was gone, the rest of the family went back to Versailles, France, and stayed with the grand parents.

Michel-Henry in Congo

Staying with the grand-parents in Versailles (my dad in the center)

After the Congo episode, the whole family returned to North Africa, this time in Sfax, Tunisia, where Michel Henry worked for the Public Works from 1925 to 1935. Hélène was giving piano lessons and started another theater company. Things were not going well in the relationship. 

When my Dad turned nine, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Belgium. He took the boat with some friends from Tunisia to Marseilles, France. In Marseilles he took a taxi and visited this huge Mediterranean city by himself, went to the Church of La Bonne Mère, overlooking Marseilles’ harbor and headed to the train station that would bring him a 1,000 km up north. This son of the sun would spend at least one year there and certainly some pretty lonely vacations under the low, cloudy skies of Belgium.   

My father's boarding school in Passy-Froyennes, Belgium

Around 1935, Grandma, also called "la belle Hélène," left the family with a good friend of Grandpa’s to Iran. My grandfather traveled to Iran in 1935 to try to get her back, without success. Still, he stayed there until the end of WWII. We do not know exactly what he did during WWII in Iran; officially he was on call at the French consulate in Tehran. He was a fine tennis player, fluent in English, and was somehow affiliated with the British army Intelligence in Iran. During his time in Iran, Michel Henry was also intimately associated with a woman who was the wife of the consul or the ambassador of Sweden in Tehran at some point. My brothers have pictures of Grandpa with this lady and four children who, we are not sure, but may well be our uncles and aunts too?

Michel-Henry

Michel Henry and Hélène’s four children had been dispersed somehow during this difficult episode. My father was in Tunisia. One of my aunts, Colette, 17, who was very sick, was staying with relatives in Versailles, France.

After the war broke out, Hélène decided to leave Iran and her companion to help my aunt Colette. Since it was forbidden to carry foreign currencies in Iran, plus the fact that she couldn’t cross Turkey, allied to the Nazis, to go to France, she took a bag of precious stones and made her way through India. She sold the stones one by one to pay for her trip and went from monastery to monastery back to France. When Grandma arrived in Versailles, Colette had already left for Morocco to enter the Franciscan Missionary of Mary order. But the boat she was in had been diverted to Algeria. Colette was only seventeen and without money. Somehow, she still managed to arrive safe and sound in Morocco. (She celebrated the 70th anniversary of her vows in 2012. She still lives and works as a nun in Morocco).

Sister Colette

Hélène spent the rest of the war in Versailles and died of cancer in 1945. She never met my Mom.

At the end of the war, Michel Henry left Iran and went back to France, before going on to Morocco. He sent his medal of the resistance back to the General De Gaulle because he didn’t agree with him on some obscures points.
 

The family belongings and furniture that were in storage in Tunisia had been bombed by the French or the Americans, so the family had absolutely nothing left after the war.

Now what about my Dad and the war? After his High School graduation in Tunisia, my Dad, Pierre Ghislain, came back to France, where he enlisted at eighteen in the French army in 1935. He signed up for three years in the military. It wasn’t his best decision, because the war broke out before his time was up. 

My Dad as a soldier

He was sent back to Morocco, where the soldiers were given fake jobs by the French colonial administration, so they would not be considered soldiers for the French government in France, and couldn’t be sent back to the official army under German occupation.  They were getting ready for the right time to come back and liberate France. That’s when my Dad went to war with his Moroccan troops, also called the colonial army. The Moroccans were mostly wild and fierce Arab fighters who enrolled because they liked war. They were fed, clothed, and lured by the promise of rape and looting.

Pierre Ghislain landed first in Sicily in 1944, and then again in France on the Cavalaire beach, the French Riviera. He didn’t get far crossing the beach before he was shot in the arm by the Nazis Stukas. 

Nazi stukas

Luckily, he was rescued and helped by a great French doctor who took good care of him. The good doctor hid my Dad in his own house, risking his and his family’s lives, until the Germans were definitely gone. Later on, he was wounded again while detonating wells used by the Germans as weapons caches. I remember he was still extracting pieces of metal from his face when we were teenagers. For his acts of bravery, he received several medals, and something like a $2 yearly allowance (!). He crossed France with his troops and arrived in Alsace after the end of the Colmar Pocket battle, in February 1945. This battle caused close to 60,000 casualties, 8,000 for the US troops, 15,000 for the French, and over 30,000 for the Germans. It was the last pocket the allies wanted to clean up before they would invade Germany. That’s when he met my Mom. 

My Mom's village in Alsace: Eguisheim

When the Nazis invaded France, my uncle Charles, because he was a seminarian in France with the Franciscans, ended up in Germany doing at least two years of forced labor in a factory with other seminarians; one of them became a Bishop of Morocco. Charles was ordained at the end of the war and sent back to Morocco, where he died in 1997 in a hospital run by Spanish Nuns in Tangiers. He was reading Quo Vadis when death took him. He still had the book wide open and just closed his eyes. 

My uncle Father Charles de Jésus