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.
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| Michel-Henry in Congo |
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| My uncle Father Charles de Jésus |
