KEY POINTS:
PARIS - This is the story of two Frenchmen called Robert Nant. The younger Nant, 61, was born in Buchenwald concentration camp in March 1945 shortly before his mother's death. He was probably conceived in a fleeting moment of passion between two French resistance agents on the run from the Nazis in June 1944.
The older Nant, 81, is a retired commercial traveller and decorated Resistance hero. He remembers clearly a night spent with a Resistance courier in Villefranche-sur-Saone in 1944.
The two men have never met. Their story is also one of tragic, missed opportunity. They almost met in 1975.
The younger Nant sent a letter to the older Nant at his home in Chambery from a hotel in Strasbourg. The Resistance hero went looking for the man that he suspected might be his son. He arrived too late. The younger Nant telephoned a few days later but the older man's first wife suppressed news of the call for several years.
Finally last year, divorced, remarried, and haunted by this missed opportunity, Robert Nant senior hired a private detective to search for his "son". The detective found the younger Nant working as a cleaner in Nancy in eastern France. Both men requested permission for a DNA test, which can only be ordered by a court under French laws. The court ordered the test last week. The results are expected early next month.
In late June 1944, while the battle of Normandy was raging on the other side of France, Robert Nant senior escaped from the pro-Nazi French "milice" in Lyons, dressed as a German soldier. A few days later he was hidden in an attic in Villefranche with a young woman.
Nant junior was brought up in a violent and dysfunctional adoptive family near Lyons. It was only when he was 18, in 1963, that he discovered he had been born in a concentration camp for German and foreign opponents of Nazism. According to the camp records, his mother - whose name is unknown - registered him at birth as "Robert Nant". The young woman is believed to have died a few weeks later, just before the camp was liberated by the allies.
In October 1975, the younger Nant read an article about the wartime activities of Nant senior, who had managed to steal the records of the milice in 1943. "I always wanted a son. This is a wonderful thing that has happened, even if it is happening very late in my life."
- INDEPENDENT
