Gisela and Michelle were drugged and robbed on holiday: ‘Everything is gone’
It should have been a lovely holiday for Gisela Rosenberg and her partner Michel Weiss from Best. Michel was ill and this was to be their last long trip. Take a carefree trip to France with your camper. It wasn’t without its worries. The couple were drunk in their camper. When they woke up, all their belongings had been stolen. “When I didn’t hear from them, I immediately felt bad,” says daughter Wendley. “I immediately started looking for my parents.”
Michel suffers from kidney failure and will soon start dialysis. This means he has to go to the hospital every day. That’s why he and his wife Gisela decided to go on holiday together one last time. The couple were already on their way when they stopped at a gas station parking lot near Montélimar on Friday evening.
On Friday evening, they called their daughter Wendley just to chat. But when Wendley didn’t hear from her parents all day Saturday, she had a bad feeling in her gut. “I call my parents about ten times a day, and I couldn’t get through to them anymore,” she says. “I knew straight away something was wrong.”
Wendely went to the police, but they couldn’t do anything for her. “They could only confirm that my father’s last phone call to me was on Friday night.” Reason enough for Wendely to get into a car with her family and head to France. Looking for her parents. She had tracked Michelle’s phone, so she knew which way to go.
“A Dutch couple saw my parents’ buggy near Saint Tropez.”
Wendely put out a Facebook appeal about the disappearance. At several gas stations along the way, she asked if anyone had seen her parents. She even stopped at a gas station and heard from an employee that she had seen the couple with the cart.
“Your mom was standing with coffee and your dad with sandwiches,” the girl said. So the search continued. Then Wendley received a message on Facebook. “A Dutch couple saw my parents’ van near Saint-Tropez.” Wendley and her family drove straight in that direction.
Once in St. Tropez, she heard her parents’ story. “They said they were sitting in their van in a gas station parking lot,” says Wendley, from France, with her parents present. “The van door was closed, and suddenly a strange smell came in.” “A very strange smell of gas,” her father, Michel, shouts in the background. “If you smell it, it will go away.”
“It was my parents’ last long vacation.”
The smell of the gas that had been injected into the van turned out to be intoxicating. Gisela and Michelle were immediately stunned. When they woke up, the van door had been blown open and all their belongings were gone. “The phones, the passports, my father’s glasses, the driver’s licenses. Everything was taken,” says Windley. “My father wasn’t even allowed to make phone calls at the gas station.”
Eventually, Gisela and Michel were able to file a report in France with all their hands and feet. French police noted that such things happen quite often. “They even advised us not to drive through Marseille, because there are a lot of robberies there.”
According to Wendely, the only “luck” was that not too much of the gas smell was injected into the cart. “My father is very sick. This could have been very dangerous for him.” Wendely’s parents and a few other relatives are still in France. “We need some time to recover. My parents are in a terrible shock. I think we will be driving home in two days,” Wendely concludes. “This was my father’s last long trip.”