I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual by Pierre Seel

He was then sent to the city jail before being transferred on to the Schirmeck-Vorbrück camp, about 30 km west of Strasbourg. He was tortured and raped with a piece of wood. He completed vocational training in accounting, decoration and sales and found a sales assistant job at a neighbouring shop. The German invasion curtailed Seel's hopes of studying textiles in Lille. Reporting the theft to the police meant that, unknown to him, his name was added to a list of homosexuals held by the police (homosexuality had not been illegal in France since 1791 the Vichy Regime did not, contrary to legend, recriminalize homosexuality, but in August 1942 it did outlaw sexual relations between an adult and a minor under twenty-one, and it also persecuted homosexuals, despite there being no laws criminalizing homosexuality). While he was there, his watch was stolen, a gift that his godmother had given to him at his recent communion. In 1939, he was in a public garden (le Square Steinbach) notorious as a ' cruising' ground for men. He found it difficult to come to terms with and accept his homosexuality, and described himself as short tempered. He suspected that his homosexuality was due to the repressive Catholic morals of his family which forbade him to show interest in girls his age during his early teens. By his late teens, Pierre Seel was part of the Mulhouse ( Alsace) gay and Zazou subcultures. His mother, Emma Jeanne, once director of a department store, joined the family business when she married. His father ran a successful patisserie-confiserie shop on Mulhouse's main street (at 46 rue du Sauvage). At the age of eleven, he discovered that his younger sister, Josephine (Fifine to him), was in fact his cousin, adopted by his father when her mother died. Pierre was the fifth and last son of an affluent Catholic Alsatian family, and he was born at the family castle of Fillate in Haguenau. Pierre Seel (16 August 1923 – 25 November 2005) was a gay Holocaust survivor who was conscripted into the German Army and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.

I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual by Pierre Seel