This Saturday, June 6, Bernadette Chirac died at the age of 93. In 1979, she and her husband took in Anh Dao Traxel, a young 21-year-old Vietnamese woman, considered their daughter of the heart.
We know the tragic fate of Laurence and the grief of her sister Claude. But before that, when they were still children, they shared their life with a third sister. In 1979, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris at the time, was at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. He wishes to welcome into his home a person from a group of boat people (a term which designates three successive waves of immigration, notably from Vietnam). Among the many refugees present in the Paris airport, Jacques Chirac spots a young woman aged 21: Anh Dao Traxel.
“As he is big, he saw me from afar, I was in a little corner crying,” she said in the show “Private Life Public Life,” in 2006. “He comes towards me. He talked a lot, but I didn’t know what he was saying. I didn’t understand at all. But somewhere, through her looks, I felt something that protected me.” She will meet Bernadette Chirac, who died this Saturday June 6 at the age of 93, two days later. “She cried. And I, immediately, I was crying too, she hugged me,” Anh Dao Traxel said about their meeting. “So I say to myself: really, after two days, I really found a mother, a father and I was not mistaken. I immediately feel like I’m a second family.” The couple quickly take care of this young woman who has gone through many ordeals to get here.
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At the heart of the Vietnam War
Anh Dao Traxel, born Dng Anh Dao, was born on August 22, 1957 south of Saigon. Coming from a bourgeois family, she spent the first years of her childhood happily. At the time, while Vietnam was divided in two, his father, who was a school principal, collaborated with the Americans. But on April 30, 1975, the life of young Anh Dao Traxel was turned upside down when communist troops from North Vietnam, supported by Mao Tsé-Tung’s China, invaded the presidential palace in Saigon. The soldiers get rid of every trace of the Americans and Anh Dao’s father is sent to a reeducation camp. “We completely transformed my father, he was destroyed,” she said on Thierry Ardisson’s show “Everybody Talks About It,” in 2006. “He was a really skinny old man and was losing his memory, he no longer recognized anyone. It was terrible.”
Her family then falls into poverty and the 18-year-old girl tries to help her clan by going to sell things she has made at the market or at the bus station. His family even transformed their house into a bistro for a time. One day, Anh Dao hears about the boat people fleeing Vietnam. She then saves enough money to buy her ticket for the boat. On the boat, around ten meters long and six meters wide, she found herself crammed in with 325 passengers. They then stopover on the island of Pulau Bidong and wait to be sent to another country. Anh Dao chose France, she is patient and hopeful, despite the difficult living conditions on the island. There is no security, no food, no shelter, the young woman must fend for herself. This is where the boat Ile de Lumière arrives, chartered at the end of the 1970s by Bernard Kouchner, who came to the aid of tens of thousands of boat people fleeing Vietnam. On July 18, 1979, Anh Dao Traxel finally left for Paris.
A life of service to others
Taken in by Bernadette and Jacques Chirac, she learned French thanks to them and also had the opportunity to go to school. She is pampered by the couple who take care of her as well as their two other daughters. “My mother gave me affection straight away. She said: “You will be happy with my daughters. You will be like my third daughter,” she confided to “Vie Privé Vie Publique” about Bernadette Chirac. She will be hosted by the Chirac couple for two years alongside their daughters, Laurence and Claude. Quickly, she found herself propelled into active and associative life. She became a civil servant at the Ministry of Tourism, but also president of the European Star of Civil and Military Dedication association, an organization which helps the families of civil servants and soldiers.
She is also godmother of the Le Relais des Rêves association, an organization which supports seriously ill children, but also of the Étincelles Languedoc-Roussillon association, which helps women suffering from cancer. She is also honorary president of the Aurélie association, the angel of battered women. In 2006 she published her first autobiography, The Girl of Heart (Ed. Flammarion) then another in 2014, Chirac, an unusual family (Ed. Hugo Doc). Anh Dao Traxel had the honor of receiving the medal of Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2009 as well as that of Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2013. However, if she always considered the Chirac clan as her family, certain tensions emerged. In 2014, she confirmed that she no longer had any exchanges with the Chirac family. She will reconnect with Claude, during the funeral of Jacques Chirac in 2019, who invited her to the event.
