Enfants maudits

When Daniel Rouxel was a small boy growing up in the Breton village of Megrit in the early 1950s, he remembers the mayor making him stand up in front of the parishioners outside church one Sunday.

"Which one of you knows the difference between a swallow and a Boche?" the mayor asked.

The author hopes to encourage people to trace their fathers

"I'll tell you. When the swallow makes its babies here in France, it takes them with it when it leaves. But the Boche - he leaves his behind."

Rouxel was, not surprisingly, mortified. He was the baby the Boche had left behind.

"After that, I wept and wept," he says today. "I was so ashamed that I ran and hid under a bridge for the whole night. I even thought of doing away with myself."

Rouxel's account appears in a book just published in France - coincidentally or not, just before the 60th anniversary of the liberation. It finally addresses one of the country's last remaining wartime taboos.

"Enfants maudits" - or "Accursed Children" - collects in print, for the first time, memories of the tens of thousands of so-called "Bastards of the Boche", the illegitimate offspring of liaisons between French women and occupying German troops.

Picaper says the aim of the book is to encourage more of the 200,000 to emerge from the shadows, and in each copy is included a form which can be sent to the Wehrmacht archives.