Borms, a family between collaboration and resistance.

Conference-debate (in French) with guest Anne Duchaine. 

A talk led by Aline Cordonnier.

Within the Borms family, two figures stand out, seemingly at odds with each other: August, a Flemish nationalist, close to the Nazis, collaborator during both world wars, arrested in 1945 and executed in April 1946, and his niece, Regina, a resistance fighter with the Armed Partisans, arrested in Liège in 1944 and deported “Nacht und Nebel” to the Gommern and Ravensbrück concentration camps.

Anne Duchaine, author of 'Borms, une famille entre collaboration et résistance', is the daughter of Regina Borms and Jacques Duchaine, both members of the Armed Partisans. Interested by her mother's connection with her paternal uncle, August Borms, she looked into this controversial figure, and gained access to his repressive files, enabling her to understand his involvement in the inner circles of National Socialism.

At the same time, realizing that she had only a fragmentary knowledge of her parents' resistance activities, she became a meticulous explorer of World War II archives and assiduously frequented the reading rooms of CegeSoma, CArCoB and Dacob.

Anne Duchaine retraces this family saga and then plunges us into the post-war years, particularly those of disillusionment in the face of the recomposition of geopolitical alliances. She examines the construction of identity in the face of a parent wounded by her executioners and, beyond her own family history, a reflection on many other similar stories, questions the meaning of the word “resist”, as well as the themes of commitment and the transmission of memory.

Who exactly was August Borms, and what were the links between his life and that of his niece? What prompted Regina Borms, born in East Flanders and a committed Communist, to join the Resistance and, once deported, to stand up to the Nazis? What is our subjective relationship with history? How and what can we pass all this on? How can we guarantee a living memory that can inform and help us understand the present?

Our guest will answer these questions and present the results of her research on Wednesday 23 April. The debate will be moderated by Aline Cordonnier. This event will take place in the CegeSoma conference room as part of the Public History Meetings, in partnership with the association ' Friends of CegeSoma'.

Anne Duchaine graduated from UCL and began her career in psychiatry before becoming a researcher in the sociology of work. She has published work and articles in the Courrier hebdomadaire du CRISP, La Revue nouvelle and L'Observatoire. In 2019, she spoke as part of the Transmemo research project on children of resistance fighters and children of collaborators, then for the TV documentary “Les enfants de résistants - Belgique 1940- 1945” (Children of resistance fighters - Belgium 1940-1945). 

Aline Cordonnier is a cognitive psychologist by training and a post-doctoral researcher at UCLouvain, where she studies the complex interaction between individual and collective memory. Her current work aims to understand how personal and historical memories of controversial pasts are transmitted from one generation to the next within families, contributing to our understanding of how shared narratives shape family identity and cultural continuity.