Subtitled Love, War & A Ruined House in France, Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s book unravels the mystery behind a very personal story – that of her grandparents Anna and Armand.
Mouillot, a guest at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, grew up in North Carolina in a loving family and enjoyed a strong bond with her grandmother. Yet the World War II experiences of Anna and Armand, who narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied France and lost family members in the Holocaust, cast a shadow over the family to such an extent that her childhood was plagued by fear and nightmares.
Miranda Richmond Mouillot. Photo: Tristan Zilberman
“The war was just there: it was a member of our family,” she writes, explaining how she always left her shoes by the door in case they had to flee in the middle of the night.
Also just there was the enigma of the relationship between her grandparents, who had separated in the early 1950s after a brief marriage and not spoken for 50 years. Anna, a physician, apparently just packed her bags and walked out on her interpreter husband, taking her two children with her and never looking back.
The young Miranda’s curiosity grows when she is sent to live with prickly, pedantic Armand while attending boarding school in Geneva, where he works with the United Nations. When he takes her to visit an old crumbling stone house in the French village of Alba – a building which, strangely, Anna and Armand still jointly own – she feels an immediate sense of homecoming that proves the catalyst for her mission to find out what happened to her grandparents.
If the slow pace at which the mystery unravels is occasionally frustrating for the reader, it merely echoes the painstaking process of Mouillot’s investigation. Neither of her stubborn grandparents will openly discuss their war experience or each other – in fact, her grandfather becomes openly hostile whenever Anna’s name is mentioned – so she is forced to try to piece together their story through archival documents, enigmatic comments and letters, old photos and other clues.
How did Anna and Armand meet and how did their experiences in the war shape them? Did they ever love each other? If they did, why this crushing silence that has lasted decades?
Eventually, Mouillot is drawn back to the old stone house in France, where her own love story begins amid the crumbling structure and a seemingly fruitless mission that borders on obsession.
Most of us have a yearning to know where we came from, even if the truth may lead to dark places. The warmth with which Mouillot shares her experiences ensures the reader travels with her until the end in this heartbreaking insight into the lasting effects of the Holocaust.
A Fifty-Year Silence, by Miranda Richmond Mouillot, is published by Text Publishing, $32.99.
