“I lived for a long time under the unmoving gaze of a few photographs discreetly placed on my father’s desk. In those images, my grandfather Pierre appeared like a secret hero, frozen in an aura of mystery, closer to a myth than a man of flesh. All I knew of him were the fragments of a broken legend: soldier, resistant, deported, then swallowed by Nazi fury, dead for France. His silences, like those of my family, had carved out a strange void, an absence accepted without words, but never soothed. To Pierre’s absence was joined that of my father Claude, more insidious, absorbed throughout his life by a quest for resilience, a prisoner of endless mourning.

In 2012, after his passing, I opened our family archives as one might open a crypt. It was not only yellowed papers or forgotten faces, but fragments of my own DNA, bleeding echoes that I bore unknowingly. I found my grandfather, Captain Roger Pierre Mercier, known as “Maxime,” torn from life on September 2, 1944, in the Hartheim killing center. Alongside him, in my research, emerged the shadows and lights of my grandmother Fernande, her sister Madeleine, my aunt Michèle, only eight years old, and my father Claude, a little boy of five left before an abyss.

When my father entrusted me, during his lifetime, with his manuscript entitled Maxime, I did not know it was a passing of the torch. I did not know that, through this gesture, he was delivering to me the last thread binding the living to the lost. This manuscript was his life’s work, the trace of a painful obsession: to rebuild, stone by stone, the path back to his own father. This legacy, as searing as it was invaluable, appeared to me as an unfinished act of reparation that I, in turn, had to pursue.

Plunging into those pages, rereading the letters, contemplating the carefully recorded photographs was to summon a silent assembly. I came to know those who had marked my lineage: a soldier, a child, a grieving woman, a wounded sister. I rediscovered my aunt, I understood my grandmother, I finally entered my father’s silence. Through them, I grasped the anguish of waiting, the tearing away, the weight of uncertainty that corrodes an entire lifetime, the imagining of the intolerable––the prisons, the tortures, the nights without horizon.

So I invoke them. I call upon my dead as one calls upon extinguished stars, so that their light may still cross the night. I do not seek only the truth of facts, but the reconciliation of souls. For only luminous memories, torn from darkness, can offer survivors the strength to live without hatred, despite the hells they endured.

To this intimate quest is bound the collective story. I traced my grandfather’s path, from the mountains of the Puy de Dôme to the military prison of Clermont-Ferrand, from the Compiègne camp to the wagon that carried him toward death. Each place is a scar, but also a standing witness. In their stones, their bars, their silence, I heard the muffled voices and the pulsations of life which, against all odds, persisted at the heart of barbarity.

My work is a fragile bridge, stretched between generations. It is an attempt to free my family from its ghosts and offer them a symbolic place of gathering, far from the absences that tore them apart. By recounting these broken yet never extinguished lives, I pay tribute to what within us endures, intact despite the storms: our unbroken share of humanity.”