Pierre Seel
Pierre Seel (born 16 August 1923 - died 25 November 2005 in Toulouse), is the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during WWII due to his homosexuality.
Biography
In 1939, when he was 17, Pierre Seel had his watch stolen in a park notorious as a cruising ground for men in Mulhouse. Reporting the theft to the police meant that, unbeknowst to him, his name was added to the list of homosexuals held by the police station (homosexuality had been re-criminalised by the Vichy goverment). A few months after the German invasion, Seel was arrested, torture and raped repeatedly during two weeks before being sent to the Struthof concentration camp (the only one on the French Territory) May 1941:
One day, loud speakers summoned us all immediately to the camp's assembly ground. [...] This was a much harder trial, a death sentence. At the center of the square we were ordered to form, two SS men dragged a young man. Horrified, I recognized my sweet 18 year old friend, Jo [...] I was transfixed with fright. The loudspeakers played noisy military music as the SS men stripped him naked, and violently jammed a metal bucket over his head. They unleashed on Jo the camp's ferocious guard-dogs, German Shepherds, who began to rip at his flesh -- first his genitals, and his thighs, and then they devoured Jo before our eyes. His screams of pain were amplified and distorted by the bucket over his head. Frozen in place and trembling, wide-eyed at seeing so much horror, I had tears running down my cheeks. I prayed that he would rapidly lose consciousness....(translation from the French edition of Seel's book)
In November 1941, Pierre Seel is set free but was forced to join the German army and sent to the Russian front. At the end of the war, like most deported people, he found it impossible to speak of his ordeal and became suicidal. He decided to get married and had three children.
In 1982, following his anger at homophobic declarations by the then bishop of Strabourg, Monseigneur Elchinger, he decided to speak about what he went through. In 1994, he published the book "Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel" (I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual). This and his relentless action supported by a few militants very slowly brought about the late recognition of homosexual deportation in France. Lionel Jospin, the then Premier Ministre, mentioned it in 2001. In 2003, Seel finally received official recognition as a victim of the Holocaust by the International Organization for Migration's program for aiding Nazi victims. In April 2005, the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, during the Journée nationale du souvenir des victimes et des héros de la déportation (French equivalent of Holocaust Memorial Day), said: "In German, but also on the French territory, men and women whose personal life set aside, I am thinking of homosexuals, were hunted, arrested and deported."
The late revelation of Pierre Seel's homosexuality had led to a break up with his family and divorce from his wife which left him pennyless.
Pierre Seel story also appeared in the film documentary on homosexual deportation, Paragraph 175.
Pierre Seel is buried in Bram, in the Aude département.
Bibliography
- Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel, Éditions Calmann-Lévy (1994), ISBN 2-7021-2277-9
- I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, Basic Books (August 1, 1995), ISBN 0465045006, 208 pages
Links (in French)
- Triangles roses
- Pierre Seel, Interview.
- Extracts from the book