A man without a story

He is a Wehrmacht soldier, then a military deserter then participates in the French resistance in order to be eventually forced to live in communist Czechoslovakia and make his living as a typographer. Vladimír Moravec never has the chance to get to know two of his three children…

Marie lives in Brno. From her childhood she remembers an omnipresent suspicion and the imprisonment under the open sky, from which only the symbiotic relationship with her father could pull her out.

Wladimir lives in Hanover, he is 74 years old and still working. He devotes his free time to family and dog shows. His life remains affected by childhood without a father, spent in the chaos of Germany ruined by World War II.

Marie and Wladimir do not know each other, they do not even know about their presence. However, they are family. The person who connects them is a man named Vladimír Moravec…

I met this man on January 1, 2001 when I studied in the Czech Republic. While I did not have the opportunity to speak French for four months, Vladimir did not speak French for almost fifty years. And yet it was French where he told me a story a few months before he died. A story tragically intimate, metaphorically reflecting European history. (Thomas Mauceri)