The war had taken so much from all of us. I had spent the last five years believing that it was parents like Frédéric and me who had lost the most. What could be worse than knowing your child had died on a battlefield, defending France in vain, while you were hundreds of kilometers away, unable to protect him? But I realized now that perhaps it was even more terrible to be in the shoes of someone like Josiane’s mother, forced to give up your child, not knowing whether she had survived, unaware of who she had become.
