Louis Schittly, the son and grandson of Alsatian farmers, left a small seminary to study medicine and other gospels: Giono's pacifism, Camus' humanism, Kessel's spirit of adventure...
After the hangover of the failed revolution of 1968, a Red Cross mission to Biafra opens his eyes to the world. There he discovers the horrors of global realpolitik and helps rescue thousands of children.
His meeting with an unknown French doctor, Bernard Kouchner, marks the beginning of forty years of uncompromising friendship – and the founding blocks of Médecins sans Frontières.
Schittly heads off to Vietnam during the American war, where he accepts to smuggle medicines to "the other side of the bamboo curtain".
A few years later, he opens the first humanitarian mission in Afghanistan during the Soviet war and, more recently, a mission in the Sudan.
Louis Schittly tells his adventures as a man with no strings attached, and restores humanitarian aid – devalued by charity business and political ambiguities – to its original nobility: that of one hand reaching out to another.
