Connect with us

Europe

Swiss glacier reveals couple lost in 1942

A shrinking glacier in Switzerland has revealed two frozen bodies believed to be of a couple who went missing 75 years ago, Swiss media report.

Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin disappeared after going to tend to their cows in the Alps in 1942.

The couple had seven children.

Their youngest daughter, 79, said the news brought her a “deep sense of calm” and she wanted to give them the funeral they deserved.

“We spent our whole lives looking for them,” Marceline Udry-Dumoulin told Lausanne daily Le Matin.

A DNA test has yet to be carried out.

Local police said the bodies were discovered last week on Tsanfleuron glacier, above the Les Diablerets resort, by a worker from ski-lift company, Glacier 3000.

Director Bernhard Tschannen said his employee found some backpacks, tin bowls and a glass bottle, as well as male and female shoes, and part of a body under the ice.

He said that it was likely the couple had fallen into a crevice and the way they were dressed implied that they could have been there for 70 or 80 years.

“The bodies were lying near each other. It was a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two,” he told Le Matin.

Ms Udry-Dumoulin said her mother, a teacher, never usually went on such walks with her husband, a shoemaker, because she spent much of her adult life pregnant and it was difficult terrain.

She said her and her siblings were placed with different families, and lost contact over the years.

She told Le Matin that she wanted to hold a long-awaited funeral, but would not wear black.

“I think that white would be more appropriate. It represents hope, which I never lost,” she said.

Continue Reading