Swiss glacier yields bodies of couple missing for 75 years

The frozen bodies of a Swiss couple who went missing 75 years ago in the Alps have been found on a shrinking glacier, Swiss media said on Tuesday.

Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin, the parents of seven children, had gone to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in the Valais canton on August 15th, 1942.

"We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping. We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day," their youngest daughter Marceline Udry-Dumoulin told the Lausanne daily Le Matin.

“I can say that after 75 years of waiting this news gives me a deep sense of calm,” added the 79-year-old.

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In an overnight statement, Valais cantonal police said that two bodies bearing identity papers had been discovered last week by a worker on Tsanfleuron glacier near a ski lift above Les Diablerets resort at an altitude of 2,615m. DNA testing would be carried out to confirm the identities of the couple.

Perfectly preserved

"The bodies were lying near each other. It was a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two," Bernhard Tschannen, director of Glacier 3000, told the paper. "They were perfectly preserved in the glacier and their belongings were intact."

"We think they may have fallen into a crevasse where they stayed for decades. As the glacier receded, it gave up their bodies," he told the daily Tribune de Geneve.

Five sons, two daughters

Marcelin Dumoulin (40) was a shoemaker and Francine (37) was a teacher. They left five sons and two daughters. "It was the first time my mother went with him on such an excursion. She was always pregnant and couldn't climb in the difficult conditions of a glacier," Ms Udry-Dumoulin said.

After two months, the children were divided among families in the neighbourhood. The eldest brother, then 13, went to work for a baker; a second brother went to work for a shoemaker and later became a priest, spending decades in Madagascar; two became stone masons; and a fifth worked as a restaurant chef. All five sons have died.

Ms Udry-Dumoulin lived with her aunt, and when she married she moved to another village about 40 minutes away. The siblings were never close, she said. “They were busy with their own lives,” she said. Each August 15th, to mark the disappearance, some of the siblings would climb the glacier to pray, she recalled.

“For us, our parents were always beside us when we were up there,” she said. Ms Udry-Dumoulin, who has had a heart attack and a stroke, said she was no longer able to climb all the way up the glacier. But now, she said with a laugh, her parents have descended from the glacier, via a police helicopter. “I’m impatient to see them even if they are mummified and black after the 75 years they slept together in the glacier,” she said

“For the funeral, I won’t wear black. I think that white would be more appropriate. It represents hope, which I never lost.”

The police said that bodies continued to be discovered as glaciers recede. Last year, the body of a German skier who disappeared in 1964 was found in the area. In 2015, the remains of two Japanese climbers who disappeared during a snowstorm in 1970 were discovered in the Valais area, near the Matterhorn glacier. And in 2012, three brothers who had been missing since 1926 were found by British climbers on the Aletsch glacier.

Reuters and NYT