Jean-Thierry Cheyroux, 56, doesn’t remember his mother’s face or the name of the road he lived on as a child, but when he sees the volcanoes from the aircraft window, for the first time in decades he feels at home. The last time he made this journey was in 1967; he was seven years old and flying in the opposite direction – from Réunion Island, where he was born, to France, where he now lives, reports The Guardian.
“I remember being on that plane as a child, and being so scared that I was crying. The stewardess had to take me to see the cockpit to calm me down,” he recalls now in a park in the capital, Saint-Denis, less than an hour’s drive from his childhood home.
His older sister, Jessie Moenner, sitting next to him, adds: “He was crying and screaming because he wanted to jump off the plane. He didn’t want to go to France.”
Cheyroux and his two sisters were among more than 2,000 children removed from the tropical island between 1963 and 1982 as part of a French government programme to repopulate increasingly deserted areas of rural postwar France. Cheyroux now believes he was forcibly taken from his mother, Marie-Thérèse Abrousse, who had three children out of wedlock and was trying to raise them alone in the impoverished neighbourhood of Coeur-Saignant.
“She cleaned houses for white people on the island,” Moenner recalls. “She had dark skin and almond eyes. She was very secretive. She was a woman who had suffered a lot.”
The people of Réunion are descendants of slaves brought there by French colonisers to work on sugar plantations. The island is a departement, essentially an overseas territory of France. In the 1960s, the MP for Réunion, Michel Debré, set up a scheme to move children from the island to mainland France. His government promised islanders that their children would be sent to the best schools and be adopted by loving, rich French parents who could provide for them in a way that most creole people could not. Residents of Réunion spoke of the red government trucks that would roam the streets after school picking up children; and parents being forced to initial or fingerprint papers that they couldn’t read.
Cheyroux’s return to the island last week and his search for answers coincided with the first meeting of a committee appointed by the French government to document the stories of Réunion’s lost generation, almost 15 years after the scandal was brought to light by Jean-Jacques Martial, who tried to sue the French government for €1bn in 2002 for “kidnapping and sequestration of minors, roundup and deportation”.
In February, after years of hard-fought campaigns by dozens of displaced children, who want a formal apology from the French government and compensation for children like Cheyroux and Moenner, a fact-finding committee was appointed to investigate the issue. But for Cheyroux, the committee can do little to make up for the trauma of being taken away from Réunion.
“For years, I wanted to suppress this part of my identity,” he says. “I felt guilt; I felt abandoned. I wanted to leave the past behind, and look to the future, to focus on my career. Funnily enough, after I came back, I met old friends who remembered playing with me as a child, but I didn’t remember them. It was as if I left that little boy behind when I went to France.”
The death of Cheyroux’s adoptive mother a year and a half ago triggered a new sense of longing for his lost childhood. After he came to Réunion, he launched an appeal on local TV and in newspapers urging anyone who knew him as a child to come forward, hoping to find traces of his past.