‘Something happened to them’
MUMMIFIED BODIES FOUND IN SWISS GLACIER
The mystery has haunted a sleepy village in the Swiss Alps for 75 years: What happened to Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin, who left home on Aug. 15, 1942, possibly to milk their cows, and were never seen again?
An answer may have surfaced last week, when a ski resort worker came across two mummified bodies, buried in ice and dressed in well- preserved clothes from the Second World War era, near the three- kilometre- long Tsanfleuron glacier in the western Alps.
Although DNA tests were being conducted to verify the identities of the bodies, Marceline Udry- Dumoulin, 79, one of the couple’s two surviving children, expressed certainty that her parents had at last been found.
“You can’t understand the relief this means for me,” she said in a phone interview. “I didn’t know my parents; I was four years old. But to know where they were was always a question in my mind.”
All she remembers of the day her parents disappeared, she said, was her aunt weeping at the bottom of the stairs in their house. “She took me in her arms and held me tight and she was crying,” Udry- Dumoulin recalled.
After two months, the children — five boys and two girls — were divided among families in the neighbourhood.
The eldest brother, then 13, went to work for a baker; a second brother went to work for a shoemaker and later became a priest, spending decades in Madagascar; two became stone masons; and a fifth worked as a restaurant chef. All five sons have died.
Udry- Dumoulin lived with her aunt, and when she married she moved to another village about 40 minutes away. The siblings were never close, she said. “They were busy with their own lives.”
Each Aug. 15, to mark the disappearance, some of the siblings would climb the glacier to pray, she recalled. “For us, our parents were always beside us when we were up there,” she said.
Udry-Dumoulin, who has had a heart attack and a stroke, said she was no longer able to climb all the way up the glacier.
But now, she said with a laugh, her parents have descended from the glacier, via a police helicopter. “I’m impatient to see them even if they are mummified and black after the 75 years they slept together in the glacier,” she said.
In a phone interview, Stéphane Vouardoux, a spokesman for the police in the Canton of Valais, where the couple disappeared in 1942, said that DNA testing was underway on the bodies and on objects found near them.
“We still do not know for sure if these are the Dumoulins, and we have doubts, though the circumstantial evidence suggests that could be the case,” he said, noting that 280 people from the area had disappeared since 1926 without a trace after vanishing in mountains, lakes or glaciers.
The discovery of the bodies was a matter of chance. Vouardoux said that a worker for Glacier 3000, which runs cable cars and ski lifts, was walking in the picturesque mountainous area off piste, near a ski lift about 2,600 metres above a ski resort, Les Diablerets, when he spotted two black rocks he had not noticed before.
When the worker got closer, he suddenly saw the bodies, Vouardoux said. After several forensic police specialists were dispatched to the scene, he said, they broke through the ice and discovered a book, a backpack and a watch.
Bernhard Tschannen, the chief executive of Glacier 3000, said the discovery appeared to have been made possible by the effects of global warming, which he said was causing the glacier to lose up to half- a- metre per year. “They were lying together, half in the glacier and half exposed,” he said, adding, “We believe they were walking between Valais and Bern and fell in a crevasse.”
Vouardoux said that the Dumoulins — a shoemaker and teacher — had apparently vanished while travelling to a chalet in Bern, although family lore has it that they had gone to milk cows. Their disappearance had troubled their hometown, the village of Savièse, for three-quarters of a century.
“Something happened to them,” Vouardoux said. “We don’t know what that is. This mystery has haunted the village, and this may finally bring a much-needed sense of closure for the village and the family.”
Search parties combed the area for two months, to no avail. “We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping,” Udry- Dumoulin told a Swiss newspaper. “We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day.”
Local legend has it that the glacier at Les Diablerets is inhabited by devils and that has spooked l ocal residents for years. But Vouardoux stressed that residents of Savièse, a village of some 7,000 people, were known more for their appreciation of wine, their fondness for theatre and their tenacity.