The door to a safe.
(Illustration) -
Rob Pongsajapan / Flickr
Philippe Esvelin, an inhabitant of Fréjus, discovered in a safe precious objects and documents belonging to a family from Orne, in Normandy.
The call for witnesses he launched on January 10 was conclusive: he was able to deliver the treasure to its owners this Friday, reports France Bleu.
The Varois had bought the furniture from a second-hand dealer in Caen seventeen years ago.
However, he did not have access to a small closed compartment, which he only managed to open recently after finding a key corresponding to the lock.
A letter from a prisoner of war to his mother
The locker contained military medals from the First World War, administrative documents, telegrams and wills.
It mainly contained a letter from a man announcing to his mother that he had been released from a German prison camp by American troops.
Touched by this find, Philippe Esvelin decided to find the former holders of the safe.
His social media call was widely circulated and identified them in less than 24 hours.
They are Christian and Ludovic Hervault, the son and grandson of the prisoner of war.
An unknown treasure
The first one remembers the famous family safe very well: "We walked past four to five times a day", he told our colleagues.
The retiree installed in Sévigny, near Argentan, did not suspect that important documents were hidden there.
He made a point of welcoming Philippe Esvelin to his home to share these “pieces of family history that were missing”.
He therefore traveled more than 1,000 km by car to take the documents to Normandy.
Moved, Christian Hervault was able to read the words of his father who died several years ago and thank the collector.
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