This week, the Belgian Maurice Doclot passed away in his sleep, at the venerable age of 106. Who was he ? This former WWII soldier is one of 96 survivors of a terrible execution that should have happened if a great Chinese heroine, Qian Xiuling, had not put her connections with German officers to risk! In China, this great lady is the star of a television series. The opportunity here to recall this poignant story.
In June 2019, Maurice Doclot, in the rest home of Ecaussinnes (a small town in the south of Belgium) where he lived, received Chinese television. Maurice Doclot was among the 96 Belgian hostages arrested by the SS in June 1944 in retaliation for the death of three German officers killed by local resistance fighters.
Maurice Doclot was promised certain death. But the intervention of Mrs. Qian Xiuling de Perlinghi, wife of a local doctor, made it possible to commute the death penalty for Maurice and the 95 other hostages serving labor in German camps.
So it was a Chinese woman who had found love in Ecaussinnes, who will play on her relations with the German officers and save Maurice Doclot and his companions from misfortune !
This story, little known in Europe, was the subject of a television series in China in the early 2000s. A very successful successful TV series produced by Hunan TV:
« 盖世太保枪口下的中国女人 » or, in English, »The Chinese Woman at the Gun of the Gestapo ».
The granddaughter of this Chinese heroine, from the Perlinghi familly, had come, in 2019, to meet Maurice Doclot. She had told her side of the story on Chinese television. Some details of the interpretation of the facts are still being discussed.
But everyone agrees that Qian Xiuling de Perlinghi has a place among the great women in the long history between Europe and China.
