The Ultimate Sacrifice
by Claude-Michel Schonberg




I well remember that autumn afternoon in Paris. Between two chords of the keyboard, I broke for coffee and thumbed through a magazine someone had left on the piano.

I had no idea how important this simple action would be for me. There was no way I could predict the impact of this photograph.

The silence of this woman stunned by her grief was a shout of pain louder than any of the earth's laments. The child's tears were the final condemnation of all wars which shatter people who love each other.

The little Vietnamese girl was about to board a plane from Ho Chi Minh City Airport for the United States of America where her father, an ex-GI she had never seen, was waiting for her. Her mother was leaving her there and would never see her again.

Behind this particular picture lay a background of years of enquiries and bureaucratic formalitites, in order to find the ex-soldier from the other side of the world, with whom the woman had shared a brief moment of her life.

She knew, as only a mother could, that beyond this departure gate there was both a new life for her daughter and no life at all for her, and that she had willed it.

I was so appalled by the image of this deliberate ripping apart that I had to sit down and catch my breath. I suffered for the mother as though I might see my own little boy leaving me forever and I suffered for the child as though in my early youth I had been forcibly removed from my parents. Was that not the most moving, the most staggering example of "The Ultimate Sacrifice:, as undergone by Cio-Cio San in "Madame Butterfly", giving her life for her child?

This photograph was, for Alain and I, the start of everything......


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