First, there are two striking photos. Two black and white photos taken in 1983 by a local journalist. On the first, we see a bearded, shaggy man, in underwear, held by a gendarme. “He had a somewhat Christ-like appearance,” the journalist remembers. In the second photo, a woman in her sixties appears with a haggard look, flanked by two gendarmes. A brother and a sister, Hubert and Esther Albouy. On this day in October 1983, both of them had just been evicted by the GIGN in a house in Saint-Flour (Cantal), where they had lived as a recluse for thirty-eight years. Alongside the body of a second brother, dead for three years.
The case will then be highly publicized. The press will tell the story of Esther Albouy, a young woman shorn at the Liberation, suspected of having had relations with Germans but also of having played, thanks to her position as a PTT employee, the role of a spy, by listening to conversations between resistance fighters. At the time, the media relayed a thesis: it was because Esther Albouy had been shaved that her family, ashamed, then kidnapped her.
Neither “collaborator”, nor spy
This fascinating counter-investigation by Emmanuel Blanchard, with the help of historian Grégoire Kauffmann, tells an incredible story. It first allows you to immerse yourself in the heart of Saint-Flour during the war then during the Liberation with very inglorious episodes of purges directed against women. Then the documentary recounts how, for decades, Esther and her two brothers lived, recluse, in their house even as Carmelites, from a neighboring convent, called in vain for their evacuation in the face of a situation that had become dangerous and untenable.
But the film also and above all reveals the true story of Esther Albouy, a woman very quickly weakened by a serious mental illness, which visibly affected all the members of her family. The poignant story of a woman, neither “collaborator” nor spy. Just sick and vulnerable.
