Internal memory

From the abyss of the Shoah, the story of Pierre Seel and his truth

Memory is alive only when it is whole, when many fragments restore its fullness and value. Even in the Shoah that the world remembers every 27 January. Among these fragments there is also the life of Pierre Seel, born in 1923, not even twenty years old in the years of the Nazi abyss. Born and raised in Alsace, France, he soon became aware of his homosexuality, a dimension that was frightening in those years, often confined to the secret of furtive glances and the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Pierre was registered without his knowledge by the French police: black and white in files found by the Gestapo after the Nazi invasion.

Arrested, interrogated and tortured, the doors of the Schirmeck concentration camp were opened to Pierre. With a pink triangle on the chest. They were atrocious months, of violence and depersonalization. Months that marked Pierre's life forever. It was he himself who told them ...

“One day the loudspeakers ordered us to present ourselves immediately for roll call. Two SS men brought a young man to the center of the square. Horrified, I recognized Jo, the boy I loved, just eighteen. I hadn't met him at the camp yet. Did he come before or after me? I was frozen with terror. I had prayed that he wasn't on their lists. And he instead he was there in front of my helpless eyes, filled with tears. The loudspeakers were playing very loud classical music as the SS tore off his clothes leaving him naked and shoved a bucket over his head. Then they set their ferocious German Shepherds on him: the dogs bit him in the groin and between the thighs, and they tore him right there in front of us. His cries of pain were distorted and amplified by the bucket on his head. I felt my stiffened body waver, tears ran down me uncontrollably, I prayed for his death to be a quick death. For fifty years that scene has passed and repeated continuously in my mind: the barbaric murder of my love ... ».

Pierre was one of the few survivors of the concentration camps. After the war, he did not have the courage to say anything, neither about the deportation nor about his way of being and loving. Out of shame, he preferred to pretend: he married, had three children and continued to keep everything inside. The turning point came in 1982, when the bishop of Strasbourg, Msgr. Léon-Arthur Elchinger, during a press conference declared that he considered homosexuality a disease. For Pierre those words were a stab. He could no longer be silent: he decided to write an open letter, telling his whole story about him.

Thus the Church and the French public opinion were confronted for the first time with a silent and forgotten drama, with a taboo that was too annoying.

At that time also Pierre's legal battle to obtain the recognition of deportee status due to his homosexuality began.

It wasn't easy, but he succeeded. It was 2001 when the President of the Republic Jacques Chirac publicly recognized that tragedy. Pierre died four years later in 2005. Today he lives on in the pages of his autobiography of him: Me, Pierre Seel. Homosexual deported.

Rare intensity, the strength of memory. Finally whole!

Matteo Spicuglia

NP Gennaio 2022