Update: 6:22am – Marcelin Dumoulin who was 40 and Francine Dumoulin who was 37 had gone to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in the Valais canton on August 15, 1942. The couple who had seven children never returned home after the excursion.
A shrinking glacier in the Swiss Alps has revealed the frozen bodies belived to be of a couple who went missing 75 years ago, Swiss media said on Tuesday.
Marcelin Dumoulin who was 40 and Francine Dumoulin who was 37 had gone to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in the Valais canton on August 15, 1942. The couple who had seven children never returned home after the excursion.
“We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping. We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day,” their youngest daughter Marceline Udry-Dumoulin told the Lausanne daily Le Matin. “I can say that after 75 years of waiting this news gives me a deep sense of calm,” added the 79-year-old. “It was the first time my mother went with him on such an excursion.
She was always pregnant and couldn’t climb in the difficult conditions of a glacier,” she said. “After a while, we children were separated and placed in families. I was lucky to stay with my aunt,” she said. “We all lived in the region but became strangers.”
The Valais cantonal police said that two bodies bearing identity papers had been discovered last week by a worker on Tsanfleuron glacier near a ski lift above Les Diablerets resort at an altitude of 2,615 metres. The local police added that DNA test would establish if the bodies are of the couple who went missing.
“The bodies were lying near each other. It was a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two,” Bernhard Tschannen, director of Glacier 3000, told the paper.
The officer also added that the bodies were perfectly preserved in the glacier and that their belongings were intact. “We think they may have fallen into a crevasse where they stayed for decades. As the glacier receded, it gave up their bodies,” he told the daily Tribune de Geneve.
“For the funeral, I won’t wear black. I think that white would be more appropriate. It represents hope, which I never lost,” the youngest daughter added.
-Indian Express
