From Atheism to Faith in God. Part 1: Family Background

My testimony: From convinced Atheism to joyful fellowship with God
Part 1: my family background

As I look back at my life, how I became a Christian and where I am now, I see very clearly that I did not seek God but that God did seek me.
Please allow me to share with you, in the next days and weeks, how I perceive that God led me to this wonderful journey.

I would like to begin with my family background.

I did not grow up in a Christian family.
My father, Georges, was a Jew from Tunisia, born in 1932. He grew up in Tunis, the capital, speaking mostly French and Arabic. During the second World War, in November 1942 the Nazis occupied Tunisia. They began to implement their repressive laws against the Jews. For instance, in each class only one Jew could go to the next level. The others had to repeat the class. Since my father was the second in his class, he had to repeat the class. That was a ‘minor hindrance’. The Nazis began quickly to prepare for what they were calling the ‘final solution’, the extermination of the Jews. They began to make lists of the Jews in Tunisia and started sending them by boat to one of their concentration camps in Europe. Yet, they did not have enough time to implement all of this wickedness, thanks to the precious help of the Allied forces who defeated them in the Tunisia campaign in May 1943.
His mother, my paternal grandmother, came from a wealthy family. She was sent to a school that was then considered the best for girls in Tunis. In this school, which was Catholic, she secretly converted to Christianity. When this became public, this conversion created many tensions with her family. At one point, she was married by force to my grand-father, whom she never much loved. My grandfather was a simple man, a member of the Jewish community, with not much schooling. He dearly loved her, although she did not reciprocate this love. My grandmother struggled psychologically most of her life. Was it because of the negative attitude of the Jewish community? Was it because of the forced marriage? Was it because of the lack of wisdom or counseling on the Catholic side? Was it because she moved from being the darling of her father to the black sheep of the Jewish community? I will probably never know clearly. What I do know is that for my father and his brother, faith in God did not seem balanced or appealing at all. Through his life, my father would often have to care for his mother, with the challenges of psychiatric hospitals and the use of medications.
Being a good student, my father came to France to study Medicine in Paris. After his studies, Tunisia became independent from France in 1956. The Jewish community then had the choice to either forfeit the French nationality and stay in Tunisia, or to leave Tunisia for France and forfeit all their properties in the country. They chose in almost unanimity to leave for France, accepting the challenge to start again with almost nothing. They probably felt more safe in secular France than in the predominantly Muslim Tunisia.

My mother, Annette, was born in Paris in May 1940. A few months after her birth, her family fled on the roads as the Nazis seized Paris. Her father fled and at one point fought with the allied forces. In the process, he abandoned his wife for another woman. My grandmother died in poverty and despair after the war in 1946. My mother and her two brothers were then taken with the new couple of her father and step-mother. This woman never had much love for these added children, perceived as demanding and lacking gratitude. On their side, my mother and her brothers learned to face together a world they clearly perceived as aggressive, with the fundamental help of their loving maternal grandmother.
As my mother grew up, she had a very negative view and experience of the Catholic faith, seen as oppressive and full of incomprehensible rules. In these days, mass was in latin, and frequent confession was a requirement. If her confessed sins were considered important, the priest would repeat to the father and she would get a beating; and if it was considered too small she was further interrogated. Like many kids in these days, my mother learned hypocrisy and how to lie in confession, sharing sins neither too big nor too small, so that the priest would let her alone.
In her family, as in many French families in these days, antisemitism was widespread. In these days, antisemitism was ripe in most of Europe, not only in Germany. As a teenager, one time at school my mother repeated to a friend something she had heard many times at home: “I hate the Jews, I cannot smell them.” To her surprise, her friend responded: “Annette, I am a Jew”. Then, my mother was shocked by the stupidity of what she had just shared and apologized. She told me: “I never felt more foolish than at this moment, in my whole life.” In the next years, she did her best to get rid of this stupid antisemitism. A good student, she entered in 1960 the paid training of Bull, the first computing company in France. She then became an engineer in computing, starting with punched cards and machine language, and accompanying the evolution of programming and computers through her professional career. For her first paid vacations, to show to a Jewish friend at work that she was no more antisemitic, she went to Israel. During this trip, she met another participant of this tour, a young Jewish man, my father. On the borders of the Dead Sea he protected her from a pushy Israeli soldier, and a few months later they married and started their life together in a suburb of Paris.
They both had challenging family background, my father caring for his parents and my mother caring for her grandmother, so that when they married they were practically already a family of 5.
They both had in common negative experiences of the faith in God, or what they perceived as faith in God, and were convinced atheists.

My parents, Georges and Annette, had three children: my sister Cécile, me and my brother François. As our parents, we started as clearly atheists. Growing up, I was certainly the most convinced atheist of my siblings.
How would I move from being a convinced atheists to now a Christian missionary? It is something I can today laugh about with my mother, although it is still mysterious and surprising to her.
For this transformation to happen, God had to bring me closer to him one step at a time, as I will share in the coming posts.