In a fortnight, it was decided that 15 million people would be systematically expelled from their country.
Posted by Michel Morvan on
Unfortunately, forced population migrations are not specific to the period we are living in. We can probably even say that it is a constant of History . Some of them have even been on a much larger scale than those we know today.
Thus, in 1945, during the Potsdam Conference held near Berlin from July 17 to August 2, the leaders of the USSR ( Joseph Stalin), the United States (Harry Truman) and the United Kingdom (Winston Churchill then Clement Attlee) decided to expel the German populations of Eastern Europe to Germany and Austria. In total, nearly 15 million people were displaced against their will in just over 5 years .
Almost 25 percent of Germany's population currently consists of these displaced persons or their descendants.
Beyond these impressive figures, each time, unique human stories have taken place.
It is one of these stories, her own story, that Waldtraut Helene Treilles shares in La vie caméléon - Mémoires sans nostalgie d'une Allemande exilée (1926-1954) . This irreplaceable document restores in a concrete and detailed way, in a living, concrete and expressive language, a vanished universe, whose echoes help us to think about the present .
