La valise oubliée (The Forgotten Suitcase)

Coming after the "children of the collaboration", made very fashionable by the Flemish television documentary series, the "war children» " seem at first sight quite similar, yet are quite different.  Because if the former had to grow up within family circles that were politically tainted, made up of "New Order" supporters (or former ones), it is not necessarily the same for war children. Indeed, a war, or rather a more or less well regulated military occupation inevitably entails relationships between occupiers and occupied. These are not all conflictual so that the "living with the enemy" sometimes leads to rapprochements which go well beyond the strictly formal, administrative or material necessities. And human nature being what it is, more than once children were born from such relationships, that were not always appropriate, especially in these times of changing geostrategic and geopolitical conditions. Sometimes for the better, more often for the worse - but not always - these “war children” were confronted with the strange world of adults, in the Belgium of the forties, fifties, sixties - and even long after that. Belgium, a country of great silences, half-truths, little secrets ... Or of sudden revelations, of the urge and desire to know "where we come from and what we are" ?

It is this story, in all its human density, with its light and shade, that historian Gerlinda Swillen (1942) tracks down, also basing her historical approach on multiple testimonies, and enriching it with numerous visual documents.

A book and a document on a topic so far little investigated and that every "honest man" should have in his library... if he is passionate about the history of the last world conflict in Belgium.