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For the past few years, I have been conducting biographical interviews with left-wing activists in Algeria. This research isn’t over yet, but in the process, it has led to unexpected findings. As these men and women tell you about their activist lives, they also tell you about their lives. Listening to one life after another, I finally realized that one day, I would have to write something about 1962.One of these interviews took place at the Ijtihad bookstore, in Algiers. I was interviewing a man who was told me about how he became an activist. He began his story with his own experience of Independence, in 1962: like many others, his family had migrated to Algiers during the war, fleeing the intense violence in the countryside; but because of the increasing violence of the city caused by the OAS (the Secret Army Organization, a pro-French Algeria terrorist organization), the family sought refuge back in their home village in Kabylia. Along with other village boys and girls, he reminisced, they had undertaken various tasks during the transitional period that ran from the cease-fire in March to Independence in July, as well as during the summer of 1962. They had visited the surrounding areas to record the numbers of dead, survivors, destroyed houses, as well as the needs in food in each village in order to organize support. They also took part in reburial ceremonies for the mujahidin, the combatants killed during the war: from the cease-fire onwards, relatives had gone in search of their bodies, and whenever they were able to find them, endeavored to bring back their remains in order to bury them in their village cemetery. The youth, lined up in scout outfits, attended such reburial ceremonies, sang nationalist anthems [anashid], and played a quasi-official role in ceremonies that were only just being invented, thus representing the absent (or the not-yet-present) authorities of the Algerian state.This quest for bodies came as a surprise for me: despite the fact that I work in a research center where such subjects are regularly discussed, that I have read Ismail Kadare’s The General of the Dead Army many years ago ((Kadare, Ismaïl. The General of the Dead Army. W. H. Allen, 1971.)), I had yet never given any serious thought to what became of the the bodies of those killed during the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). While listening to this man, I was astonished to realize that I didn’t in fact know where my Uncle-the-Martyr was buried. That same day, I walked to the bookshop next the general post office, in the center of Algiers, where I found a copy of Les Chercheurs d’Os (The Bone Seekers) by Tahar Djaout ((Djaout, Tahar. The Bone Seekers. Translation by Marjolin de Jager. Dialogos, 2018.)). The novel was written in 1984: set in 1962, the story centers on a young man sent by his family in search of the remains of his mujahid brother.The phenomenon was likely enormous: with so many deaths (and it matters little that we don’t know exactly just how many died in the war), the fragmentary information that circulated, and the fact that soldiers were buried, often by their comrades, in the conditions created by a revolutionary war, tens or hundreds of thousands of families were likely concerned. How the dead were buried, by whom, as well as the rituals invented by the combatants in the maquis varied considerably from one place to another. However, most of these ritual had taken place in the absence of any relatives, and often in the presence of fellow combatants or local villagers only. In La Grotte éclatée, Yamina Méchakra portrayed a nurse-combatant confronted to the death of a very young man: When he had ceased to live, I placed my hand on his chest and recited “Le Cœur d’Hialmar” as I used to do with my friends from the orphanage, in a corner of the courtyard we used as a theater.Later Kouider and I will drag him to the pit that serves as an collective grave. A crow will accompany us.No one will ever know that this young man, who left at the dawn of his youth died without a tomb; the soil he fought for refused him in the end.Neither his mother nor his wife know that he is dead; neither his mother nor his wife imagine that his body aroused the appetites of wild animals.For a long time, they will wait for news and fear for him at night.They will pray on Fridays.They will visit the village sorceress for him.She will tell them that he has risen through the ranks and is well.They will come back pleased and give a little more to beggars on the day of the market. They will promise a seven night and seven day-long celebration when he returns.They will continue to see him in their dreams and will try to interpret those dreams every morning. They will talk about him through the nights.His wife had already promised to give his name to the child she is expecting.On the edge of the collective grave, I began reciting the verses I knew, then stopped, chasing after the old memory of a mimed burial in which my soul was recommended to the poet.Méchakra, Yamina, La Grotte éclatée, SNED, 1979.This monologue sums up everything: the heightened pain of dying away from the intimacy of home, as well as the lasting pain caused to the family by the absence of any mourning ritual to connect the living and the dead. Faced with the separation between combatants and their families, comrades or local villagers invented rituals and remained alone in remembering where the dead had been buried.Alger républicain, September 8th, 1962. The search for bodies and reburials likely began even before the end of the war but were constrained in number by violence and forced displacements of populations. However, the ceasefire of March 1962, and the relative freedom of movement it allowed for accelerated the phenomenon and set thousands of families in motion. The stories of these quests often remain within the families themselves. But in 1962, they left traces in the nascent press. The recirculation of Alger Républicain in July and the publication of Al Chaâb, the National Liberation Front’s daily newspaper, beginning September 18th, led to the development of missing persons columns. Initially, people who were sought for had gone missing recently, often during the transitional period, the final weeks of the war, or even during the summer of 1962. In a few words, a missing person notice outlined an itinerary that would help identify the person: date of birth, date of desertion from the French army, or date at which the person joined the resistance, and date the latest news was received. Reading such brief notices, one cannot help imagining the stories behind them: how had those who deserted the French army at the last minute to join the Algerian combatants — and who had gone missing since — been received by the combatants who had joined the National Liberation Army years before?Gradually, those who had disappeared much earlier were also sought for. Their stories retrace, without naming them explicitly, episodes of the war such as the Battle of Algiers:Zergoug Dahmane, born in 1937 in Algiers, has not been heard of since April 4th, 1957, when he was arrested by the paratroopers. Anyone likely to provide any information about him is requested to write to his mother – Mme Zergoug Dahlia – 54, boulevard de Verdun – HBM – Bt. 13 – Algiers. Al Chaâb, n° 15, 15 October 1962.Al Chaâb newspaper, 26 September 1962, n° 7.The subjects of these notices were mainly men who had joined the resistance forces, more rarely women. Sometimes notices also referred to missing civilians. Set between the weather column and Mohammed Zinet’s crossword puzzles, photographs accompanying the notices revealed the faces of a generation devastated by war. The notices suggested efforts made by the families to elaborate a story of their lost one, in an attempt to grasp them narratively, if not physically. From one newspaper issue to another, they became more standardized and patterns emerged such as the “request to brothers in arms” to provide information:M. Beraouane Mahieddine, born on 21 April 1925, has not been heard of since 1955, when he joined the resistance.He is said to have been M. Krim Belkacem’s secretary before becoming the commanding officer of the region of Bou Saâda – Sidi-Ali Bounab – L’Ouarsenis – Palestro and the Tizi-Ouzou area.Brothers in arms able to provide any information are requested to contact his father: M. Berazouane Rabah – 9, impasse du Tigue (Casbah) – Algiers.Al Chaâb, n° 8, 27 September 1962.Even without direct news, families had already gathered snippets of information referred to in the conditional tense in these notices, so as to urge comrades to share everything else they might know. Such parents in search for their missing children appear in other sources: Youcef Ould-Lahoucine, having been wounded in the maquis was treated in Tunisia before joining the National Liberation Front health service set up by Dr Mohamed Seghir Nekkache. At the beginning of 1962, he received the visit of one such a mother who had come a long way seeking information about her missing son. Ould-Lahoucine had taken the time to tell her about her son’s shahada, the Muslim creed, which he claimed to have witnessed her son pronounce before dying. As no standard documents yet existed, he had provided her with a provisional certificate confirming she was the mother of a shahid [a martyr], and a small amount of money, thus adding material support to the moral comfort that the ritual had been respected. ((Ould-Lahoucine, Youcef. Parcours d’un militant de la Wilaya I. Khenchela dans le mouvement national. Algiers: Chihab éditions, 2015, p. 92–93.)) The National Liberation Army was different from European armies during “their” great twentieth-century wars. In Algeria, there was hardly ever a military administration capable of informing soldiers’ families. Erich Maria Remarque’s characters returning from the front at the end of World War One were not usually responsible for informing the parents of their comrades that their child had been killed. ((Erich Maria Remarque. The Road Back. Little, Brown and Company. 1931.)) In Algeria however, many men and women — some of them very young — had decided to “take to the maquis” or, in Arabic “go to the mountain”, sometimes against their families’ approval. There were no forms detailing next of kin or emergency contact, as we would say today. Seldom was al-nidham, the organization (the FLN) able to inform the parents of their death. While some of them were positioned in their home regions, making contact with their families possible, others fought far from home, increasing the risk of dying into oblivion, and for the family the risk that “their” combatant might disappear without a trace. In 1962, families still hoped that their missing relatives were still alive. More rarely, death had already been established with certainty, and in these cases, they sought the comfort of mourning in the presence of a body, or praying on a tomb. In the case of a man whose death is certain:Pray may the brothers in arms who knew him or saw him fall will provide information and if possible to indicate the location where he is buried.Al Chaâb, n° 13, 3 October 1962.Al Chaâb newspaper, 28 September 1962, n° 9 My work on the biography of Ali Boumendjel, who was assassinated during the “Battle of Algiers”, revealed how the story of his life and martyrdom had gradually been pieced together as his family met those who had known him intimately, more distantly, or had only heard of what had happened. ((Rahal, Malika. Ali Boumendjel. Une affaire française, une histoire algérienne. Belles Lettres, 2010 and Barzakh, 2011.)) Over 40 years after the events, the story the family recounted was a sedimentation of these fragile tidbits which had solidified into certainties over the years. Sometimes it was possible to identify which comrade had added which detail (however false) to the story, and at which point in time this detail had been added, but not always.What the classified notices in the press reveal is the multiplicity of quests and the profusion of stories, some of which were sketched out during wartime but only fleshed out after the ceasefire, when news and people circulated more freely.A letter published by Al Chaâb at the end of September provides an interesting point of view on this flow of information. This reader, one E. Mansour writing from Greater Kabylia, was upset as he described the atmosphere of expectation and uncertainty:So many mothers and fathers wait in vain for the return of a combatant son! The child awaits  his father, the wife her husband; both wait for those fortunate and happy to return home after so many years of armed resistance to try and learn from them the fate of the missing, of their loved ones.So many vague answers, innuendos and lies have been given to them!… To the point of creating for the martyrs’ families a toxic atmosphere of hope and uncertainty, a real moral torture! …Al Chaâb, 30 September–1 October 1962, n° 11.He then condemn those who cause this moral torture by describing the discussions between parents and comrades returning from the war:It is a guilty conscience that leads one to say: “So-and-so is dead but his parents must not know” … It is also a case of guilty conscience to answer a father asking for news of his son by saying: “Your son was seen in Tunisia, or Morocco, or even Europe”, when he is in fact resting in peace, in a land he loved so much…If, for this kind of answer, the truth remains painful and difficult to speak, it is because it hides many things, and particularly the hideous ghost of the 1958 purges, the so-called “conspiracy”.What I learned from the Boumendjel case is that reluctance to speak or distortion of the truth were caused by the circumstances of the interaction rather than the political circumstances. How was one to “speak the truth” about the experience of war when returning from the maquis feeling lucky to have survived? Here, Erich Maria Remarque is useful in reminding us of the glass wall that separates comrade-combatants from civilians, and their guilt (or astonishment) of having survived. Some may have wished to lessen the sorrow of parents by telling them a story that would bring them some comfort, by emphasizing the heroism of the deceased, glossing over the ugliness of the conflicts between Algerians, or altogether denying death and inventing the certainty of survival.Beyond Yamina Méchakra’s “village sorceress”, who offered a life which no longer existed, were there any religious and magical practices linked to the quest for the missing, as there were in other wars? Charlatans promising the earth in return for money? Who were the Algerian counterparts of the Europeans who held séances to communicate with the dead after the catastrophe of World War One? This mourning, made impossible by disappearance, lasts until the present, as the emails I sometimes receive from strangers show. They are still seeking for their missing and hope for help. A colleague and friend I was discussing the topic with in 2015 told me a personal story. In 1990–1991, when he was 11 or 12, he visited his family’s village between Guenzet and Ighil Ali. He took part in an unpromising search: the emigrant brother of a man who had died in the War for Independence had travelled from France to search for his brother’s remains. At first, the village elders had indicated a tree at the foot of which workers were instructed to dig. Then they dug at the foot of many other trees, in vain. Then, it was suggested the brother should talk to Ammi Hammou, another elder who was there when the mujahid had been killed in 1956. Ammi Hammou described the event and located the place very precisely. This time, the brother dug the ground himself, while the village children watched. He dug and dug with a pickaxe. Then the pickaxe hit something hard and came out with a piece of bone, a femur.The man began to cry and scream. He shouted out in tears: “Iroumyen [the French] shot you and I killed you a second time, I am sorry, brother”.For us, it was terrible to see this old man of 70 cry and shout like that, and we cried with him. Then, we dug and found the man’s remains, his clothes and shoes. I remember his flask. I was eleven or twelve. It was the first time I ever saw a dead person. We helped him search and we gathered the bones. I remember, we picked up his teeth. We put everything in a white bag. When we took it away, we sang the national anthem. And then he was buried again in the martyrs’ area of the village cemetery with the mayor and everything. ((Personal communication, 29 September, 2015, from notes.))The uncertain tone used in newspaper notices from 1962 sometimes disappears from family stories, as the tidbits of stories they glean rightly or wrongly become certainties. But other uncertainties remain. Families whose relatives’ bodies have not been gathered and buried in martyrs’ cemeteries continue to seek for both body and knowledge. Some of them remain, to this day, bone seekers.