when you arrive Sorj Chalandon (1952) to Barcelona with a blue folder. Let the journalist open it. Inside, his “strange father”, his “first traitor”, his “racist and deeply anti-Semitic”, numerous deserters and The dark past of World War IIHE “He died bedridden in a psychiatric hospitalHe entered in 2014, four months after a crisis in his home city, Lyon. “I am not the son of an SS man. I am a child of war madness. I do not judge the young man lost during the war, but the lying father who lied to me and my family and destroyed us. “He’s uncooperative, he’s the bastard who left us with no memory, nothing.” he cries in a measured but determined voice. famous French reporter and writerHe speaks without pause for long minutes, making the interlocutor faint with every description of his and his father’s story. The same thing he said is intertwined with that of here. The trial of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie in 1987 In Lyon, which he prepared for ‘Liberation’ ‘A bastard son’ (Seix Barral / 1984 Editions), Goncourt finalist.
His last sentence before he died was “De Gaulle is not here, what a fool.” Two psychiatrists told him this. This does not appear in the book. It happened after I finished,” recalls Chalandon, a hard-working reporter. Sabra and Shatila massacre Until the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. In 1987, his father asked him to disrupt Barbie’s trial. Head of the Gestapo in occupied France, nickname ‘Butcher of Lyon’.
“So the image of my father as a French resistance fighter who wanted to see how the Nazi who killed and tortured his close friend and Resistance leader Jean Moulin would be tried was still in my mind. Until I was 16, I believed everything he told me: If he were the head of French Intelligence or if he had formed a band and left there Edith Piaf he fell in love with her. “Everything was fake.”Médicis and the winner of the French Academy Award for Great Novel.
“I believed him when he told me in 1963 that the Algerian Liberation Army wanted to kill de Gaulle and that they needed a child for that. That should have been me. He pierced me with a gun for weeks. I believed him because I loved him. AND I would kill de Gaulle just so my father would look at me”, complains about his collaborator ‘Le Canard enchaîné’.
HE Nazi Klaus Barbie He died in prison in 1991 at the age of 77, after being sentenced to life imprisonment for sending thousands of people to extermination camps. 44 Jewish children from Izieu colony to Auschwitz. He was not satisfied with his father’s actions during the trial. “She smiled when Barbie spoke and shrugged when the resisters spoke. Then we never talked about the war again until the year she died,” Chalandon continues. “He sent me to Lyon and told me ‘his’ truth. me: o It was the SS who fought in Russia and were one of the last defenders of Hitler’s bunker in BerlinIn May 1945. Because it doesn’t matter if I’m leftist He was the son of an SS and he wanted me to know that. “And I believed him: I went from being the son of a resistance fighter to the son of an SS.”
But, The reality was very different. Chalandon didn’t discover it until 2020, thanks to a file his brother sent him. These were evidence that he had left the French prison in 1946, where he had been held since May 1945, so he could not be defending Hitler’s bunker. “He lied to me again on his deathbed.”
Everything that happens at Barbie’s trial in ‘The Bastard Son’ The grim testimony of survivors, is true, just like his father’s help. However, in the book, he uses novelistic devices that go back to 1987, when the file denying him was discovered. In this way, he would be able to confront his father in fiction.
“For four years He wore five different jerseys. He enlisted in the French army and escaped when he lost. He was a collaborator with Pétain, who was inducted into the Tricolor Legion. He deserted when Hitler dissolved it and the legionnaires went to fight in Russia. He was arrested by the German Army and in 1943 joined the NSKK, a group responsible for transport to Poland. He escaped again and, disguised as a German soldier and armed, surrendered to the French resistance with his arms raised. He remained with them until he escaped again to search for the Germans in Belgium, but before that he was detained by the Americans, who did not believe him when he said he wanted to continue fighting against the Nazis. They handed him over to the French, and they imprisoned him for a year.” After leaving, he tried to rebuild his life in Tunisia, where he met the journalist’s mother. He told her he was a secret agent.
This book goes beyond his father. “It’s about France and the complexity of war. No one knows what to do in war until they’re in it. I think my father was like a child fascinated by the bright uniforms of the victors and fascinated by Germany.” He adds, but it is not explained how an 18-year-old worker with no culture or job can speak German without an accent. According to that, The war was not responsible for his psychotic behavior. “He was like that before. When he was 14, my grandfather got him a job at the Post Office. But the letters did not reach their recipients, so he threw them into the mountains. When the gendarmerie caught him, he said some Apache Indians had attacked him.”
When I told him twice that my mother was in danger because of my father, the doctor implied that I was one of the children who wanted to inherit their father by having him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Today, psychiatrists call him “Perverted, polymorphic, autistic…” but he does not know for sure which psychosis he has. He is still surprised that he was never diagnosed. Key point: He convinced his former family doctor that he was also a doctor and that De Gaulle wanted him to infiltrate the German Army. “When I warned him twice that my mother was in danger because of my father, the doctor implied that I was one of the children who wanted to inherit their father by having him committed to a psychiatric hospital.” To this he adds His mother “never accepted that he was crazy, nor was he aware that he was ill” or how badly off he and his brother were as children.
My grandfather said to me: ‘Your father was not on the right side in the war. I saw him dressed like a German. ‘You are the son of a bastard’
The only person who expressed doubts was his grandfather; In 1966, Chalandon told him as a child: “Your father was not on the right side during the war. I saw him dressed as a German. You are the son of a bastard.” After this, their father told them that they were not his real grandparents, but some Jews he had hidden, and forbade them to see them again. She left home when she was 16. “I ran away. But I left my brother and my father called him ‘girl’.”
Regardless, Chalandon assures that he writes “not to cover wounds or wounds, but to share them” with those who have experienced similar cases.