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Discovering A Hidden Past
episode • Insight • news and current affairs • 51m
episode • Insight • news and current affairs • 51m
Jacquie Blatchford first suspected her mother had a dark past as a five-year-old, when her school friends asked why her elder half-brother Michael had a different surname.
"I asked mum, but it was all hush-hush," Jacquie told Insight.
Over the years she began to suspect her mother, who lived as a recluse, harboured troubling secrets.
Jacquie and Michael grew up in Perth without cousins, aunts, uncles or other relatives. They didn't know anything about their maternal grandparents. Their mother didn't have many friends and she never wanted strangers in the house.
"All we knew was that she was French and that she came to Australia in 1950 with Michael in tow, who had no passport or birth certificate," Jacquie said. "If you asked her why, she would always just say, 'that's my business and I don't want to discuss it'. That's the same answer I got always."
Jacquie always believed her mother was running from something. She also asked her father about her mother's past "hundreds of times over the years", but believes he knew no more than she did.
"Mum wasn't a happy person. She was very mysterious, she had a secret and she hid it very well. I think she spent so many years looking over her shoulder that it just became a habit in the end. I think she felt haunted, afraid and guilty.
"We're not orphans but I always felt there was something missing. She was my mother but I still don't really know who she was."
Jacquie Blatchford and her mother Micheline in Perth in the 1950s. Source: Supplied
It was then that Jacquie and Michael decided to find out about her past.
Jacquie Blatchford (left) and Michael Damnjanovic as children. Source: Supplied
'They never spoke to her again'
Enlisting the help of professionals behind SBS show , Jacquie has discovered things about her mother she has found difficult to process and forgive.
Micheline was a member of the French fascist political party PPF, which supported the Germans during the Second World War.
"My mother was the most reclusive, demure person you would meet, but we learned that she was outspoken for the Germans and that she spoke up in PPF meetings," Jacquie said.
Michael Damnjanovic (left) and his half-sister Jacquie Blatchford were desperate to find out about their mother's past after she died. Source: Supplied
"She got married across the road from where they lived. His family was there, but my grandparents didn't go, and they never spoke to her again."
In the later stage of the war, with the Allies heading towards victory, some German collaborators like Micheline were in grave danger. Thousands were executed and imprisoned, while women had their heads shaved and were marched through the streets. Known to authorities, Micheline was on the run.
She fled to Italy, desperate to hide her identity.
It was there that she had an affair with a British soldier and gave birth to Michael before taking on a second husband, a Russian, and changing her and Michael's surnames plus her date of birth.
"As far as the authorities were concerned, she just disappeared off the face of the earth," Jacquie said.
In 1948 Micheline married for the third time, to a Yugoslav man she met at a displaced person's camp in Italy. She left for Australia with Michael the following year, her third husband following her later. Together, they settled down and had a daughter, Jacquie.
"She never divorced so she was a trigamist," Jacquie said.
Micheline holding her daughter Jacquie as a baby. Source: Supplied
'Like a character in a movie'
Micheline would never again return to Europe or speak to her family.
Jacquie says it's hard to picture the woman her mother once was.
"The fact that she was actually this sort of rebel was astounding to me. I was shocked by all the things that she did. That outspoken and rebellious person wasn't the woman I knew, she's a total stranger to me, like a character in a movie."
But she now understands why her mother lived like a scared recluse.
"It now makes sense why she was running. She was a young woman who was influenced by an older group of charismatic activists. She had a target on her back and did everything she could to survive with a baby on her hip. She was a survivor. But what happened had frightened her so much that she became a model citizen. She was even afraid of getting a parking ticket."
While filming the show, Jacquie also learned that her mother had a half-sister, Michael learned the identity of his father, and together they were able to visit their grandmother's grave in Paris.
"It was very sad and a shame because I've been to Paris many times when my grandmother was still alive and she was still living in the house that my mother grew up in. It would've been so easy for me to knock on her door.
"And to hold that information about Michael's identity from him I think was unforgivable."
But what Jacquie finds harder is that her mother was unable to forgive herself.
"That's what I find sad; that she lived with that all her life."
While Jacquie has found some of the details of her mother's life confronting, she's still glad to have found out. And she doesn't feel like she's betrayed her mother in any way.
"All of this is for me and Michael. It's not hurting her reputation because anybody that she knew here or friends, which she didn't have many of, would be dead.
"It's been a gift to know all these things that I've always wanted to know. It's certainly settled something in my soul."
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