Obituary
of Christian de Saint Hubert:
*** Christian de Saint Hubert was born
in Tientsin, north China,
in April 1927. His father Georges and mother Lucie
were born in Belgium.
His father served in the Belgian Army during World War I, married soon
after the war and then moved to China.
In China,
he worked first as an engineer in a Belgian railway company but later
managed a Belgian bank. Christian spent the first 19 years of his life
in China, including
three years (1943-45) in a Japanese concentration camp at Weihsien (now
Weifang). For years afterward, he needed medical help because of spine
problems resulting from time in the camp. (Coincidentally, his future
wife, Sonia de Souza Bandeira, spent the first
ten months after Pearl Harbor in unpleasant
custody in Japan as a consequence
of being the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat resident there; these
foreign diplomats were exchanged at Laurenco
Marques in 1942 for Japanese diplomats interned abroad. Sr. de Souza
Bandeira then was posted to Miami, FL,
as Vice-Consul.) Christian studied law and political science at the
universities of Brussels and Geneva, from which he graduated in 1952 and
1953, respectively, with a Ph.D. in law and an M.A. in political science.
(His parents remained in China
until the victory of the Communists, when they returned to Belgium.)
extract
from "Warship International" issue No.2, 1994 |
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