I never told anyone what actually happened in this room. For sixty years I carried the weight of having been touched, opened, emptied by hands that did not ask for permission. Doctor’s hands, hands that should have saved lives, but who, in this winter of 1943, was only used to control, measure and decide who deserved to be born and who had to die before even breathing.

I was 19 and pregnant when I was taken away. I was not taken in a hospital. I was taken to a place where women were treated like breeding cattle, where childbirth was not an act of life but a state policy. Where our cries were muffled by orders in German and our bodies became one property of the Rich.

But what they got me did that night has no name in the French language, but it exists in the Nazi archives and it exists in my living and sharp memory like the first day. My name is Mae Vrain. I was born in 1924 in a small wine village near of Reince in the heart of the occupied zone French. I grew up believing that Life was made of predictable cycles.

Harvest, party, wedding, child. But the war respects no cycle. She breaks everything. And when you’re a woman young and pregnant in controlled territory by the Nazis, your body stops you belong. It becomes a field of battle where others decide who lives. who dies and what happens between them two extremes.

Before continuing, I have to tell you something. This story is not easy to hear, but it is necessary. But because what is to me arrived arrived to hundreds other women and most of them they never had a voice. If you listen to this now, hence whatever you are, know that every word here bears the weight of a truth which has almost being buried.

Leave your trace, comment where you are looking from because stories like this only survive when someone care enough to remember it. I have grew up in a simple house. My father was a blacksmith. My mother took care of a small vegetable garden and sold homemade bread home on Thursdays at the village market. We had little, but we had the peace.

I went to mass on Sunday. I helped with household chores. I was playing with the neighborhood children. My more main concern was to choose what dress wore to the summer ball. Everything it ended in June 1940. I remember the day when the Germans arrived. It was a clear, warm morning, full of light.

I was in the process to hang laundry on the line when I heard the noise, a roar distant, metallic, which grew until it swallows up all other sounds. My mother ran out of the house, holding a wet cloth. She looked at me with wide eyes and said only one word:

“Run!”

But there was nowhere to run. The tanks entered by road main like a gray tide and noisy. Soldiers marched from the side, rifles on the shoulder. Impassive face. The swastika flag was raised at the town hall that afternoon. And it is thus, without gunshot, without resistance that my village has ceased to be French. The first months, Ané, we tried to live as if nothing happened changed. But everything had changed.

There had curfews, rationing food, prohibitions, lists of names. People were disappearing at dawn. Entire families were taken away. Nobody knew where. Nobody asked too many questions strong. I was 18 when I met Henry. He worked as aid to Syria from the neighboring village. He was shy, serious, with hands calluses and kind eyes.

We we met one Sunday after the mass. He offered me an apple which he had kept in his pocket. I smiled. He smiled back. And this is how it all started. We found ourselves in secret, always far from the eyes of German soldiers. We walked the along the banks of the river. We let’s talk about the future, the end of the war, of the life we wanted to have when this was all over.

I wanted to marry him, have children, grow old alongside him in a house with a garden. Henry said he would take me to Paris when the war would be finished, he would show me the efffel tower, cafes, bookstores. I believed it, I had to believe it. In March Henry is missing. They knocked on the door to his house at dawn.

He was taken with other young people from the region. They said they would go to work in German factories. Compulsory work, service for Reich. I never saw him again. Two weeks later, I realized that my periods were late. I felt nausea, dizziness.My mother noticed before I tell him. She didn’t say anything.

She gave me just hugged and cried. I was pregnant, alone, without Henri, with no future, in the middle of an occupied zone. And that’s where everything got worse because the Nazi regime did not see women pregnant like mothers. He saw them like resources. Resources that could be measured, controlled, used.

Especially if the father was French and the young and healthy mother health. He wanted babies. He wanted to control births. He wanted to decide who was born, how and for whom. Women like me, pregnant and vulnerable, we were perfect targets. I was summoned in May. A paper arrived at the door of the house. Mandatory medical order. Reproductive health examination.

Presence mandatory on the date indicated. My mother read the letter and turned pale. She knew. She had already heard the rumors and stories of women pregnant women taken to hospitals soldiers, German doctors performing invasive examinations, women who returned would change or who did not return. I tried to flee.

I thought about hiding at a house tent in the countryside, but the summons was clear. If I didn’t introduce myself no, my family would be punished. She could lose the house, she could be imprisoned or worse. So, I went there. On the indicated day, I put on my most beautiful dress, I tied my hair and walked to the building mentioned in the summons.

It was an old hospital municipal requisitioned by the German authorities. The facade was gray, without plates, without flowers. Only a Nazi flag flew the entrance. When I entered, the smell of disinfectant hit me like a blow point of a white corridor, light cold, heavy silence. There was other women waiting, all pregnant, all young, all with the same blank look of those who knew that something terrible is about point of happening.

A nurse German called me. She didn’t smile not. She beckoned me to follow her in a narrow corridor, lit by bare bulbs buzzing above our heads. My legs were trembling, my stomach was heavy. I had seven months pregnant and every step I take hurt. She led me into a small room white without window with a table metal in the center, a cold table covered with a fine sheet.

There were instruments lined up on a tray, pliers, syringes, objects whose I didn’t know the name, but whose the sight alone made my blood run cold. The nurse told me to undress completely. I hesitated. She repeated the order more dryly. I obeyed. I I am undressed, trembling, ashamed, exposed under this harsh light which left nothing in the shadows.

She gave me done lying on the table. The metal was cold against my skin. My arms naked, my bare legs, my round belly and vulnerable. I stared at the white ceiling trying to breathe calmly, but my heart was beating so hard that I had felt like he was going to explode. That’s when the doctor came in. A tall man, around fifty, in impeccable white blouse.

Her hair were gray, painted back in m his round glasses, reflect your light and did not look at me in the eyes not once. He got approached the table, put on gloves in rubber and began to examine me without a word, without explanation. His hands touched my stomach, pressed, measured. He was talking to the nurse German, noting numbers, observations. I didn’t understand anything.

I was just a body, an object, a thing to evaluate. Then he came down lower. I felt his gloved fingers touch me where no one had the chance right to touch without my consent. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, held back my tears, but my body tense in spite of myself. He ignored my pain.

He continued methodically, coldly, as if I were an animal laboratory. When he finished, he stood up, took off his gloves and write something down in a file. He said something to the nurse, she nodded, then he left without a look, without a word. The nurse told me waited for my clothes and told me I could leave, that I would receive a new summons soon.

I got myself joked, trembling. My hands don’t obeyed me more. My whole body was numb. I got out of this room staggering, legs limp, empty head. Outside, it was still light. The The sun was shining, the birds were singing. But for me, something came from die. I returned home in silence. My mother saw my face and had nothing asked.

She just hugged me arms and I cried. I cried likeI had never cried in my life. Two weeks later and a new summons arrived. This time this was not for an exam, it was for an induced birth. They had decided that my baby should be born at 8 month. not eventually, not naturally, but according to their calendar, according to their needs, according to their programs.

In the Nazi archives found after the war, it was discovered that hundreds of pregnant French women had been subjected to forced childbirth between 1942 and 1944. German doctors sought to control births in occupied territories. They wanted observe, measure, experiment. Some women given birth under forced sedation.

Others were kept awake so that doctors can study their reaction. Some babies were removed immediately from their mother. Others were left but monitor, measure, record in secret medical files. Nothing none of this was medical. It was political, ideological, a way of dehumanize, control, dominate. I went back to the hospital on a Tuesday morning of June 1943.

This time, I was not alone. There had six other wives, all pregnant, all summoned. We have made to wait in a common room, sitting on wooden benches without speak. Some cried softly, others were staring at the ground, their hands placed on their stomach as if to protect the child that she was wearing.

One by one, our names were called. One by one we disappeared behind this metal door. And one by one we understood that we had no power, no voice, no choice. When my turn is came, I was taken to a room delivery room, a real room with a gynecological table, calipers, blinding lamps. Two nurses Germans were present and the same doctor as the first time, the one with round glasses, the one who never looked in the eyes.

He told me ordered to lie down, to place my feet in the stirrups, not to move. Then he started, he injected something in my arm, a liquid cold that spread through my veins like ice cream. I felt my body relax in spite of myself. My muscles are relaxed, my vision became blurred, but I remained conscious, fully conscious.

I felt everything, the pain, the pressure, the hands that searched inside me and it’s the voices that were talking above my head in this language that I didn’t understand. Contractions started suddenly, caused by a product chemical injected directly into my uterus. The pain was unbearable as if my body was being torn apart the interior.

I screamed, screamed, begged stop, but no one listened to me. The nurses maintained my legs. The doctor continued his work coldly, methodically, as if my screams didn’t exist. I don’t know how long it’s been lasted. An hour, two hours, maybe more. Time no longer existed. There is no only had pain. A pain that swallowed up everything, which erased everything.

which emptied me of myself. And then suddenly I felt something tear. A different cry, not mine. A weak, sharp, fragile cry, my baby. My son had just been born, but I didn’t see it. It was taken away from me immediately. A nurse took him out of the room before I even can touch it, before I can see his face.

I tried to straighten up, scream, but my body doesn’t answered more. I was exhausted, empty. When I woke up, I was in another room, a small bedroom on the white wall with a narrow bed and a grilled window. It was night or maybe day, I didn’t know anymore. My body hurt everywhere, my stomach was empty, my breasts were swollen, painful.

My son, where was my son ? I tried to get up, but my legs didn’t carry me. I called. Nobody came. I cried long until my tears dry up, until my voice become rook, but until I understand that no one would come. The hours passed slowly unbearable. I stared at the ceiling, recounting the cracks in the paint and curdling. My mind refused to accept what had just happened.

My body, bore the whole ordeal. Each movement reminded me of the violence of this birth. Every breath I take reminded of the void they had left in me. The silence of this room was different from anything I had known. A silence full of everything I couldn’t scream. Full of unanswered questions, lots of the unbearable absence of a baby that I had carried 8 months and I had couldn’t even see.

The next morning, a French nurse came in, notone German, one French. She had the tired face, the sad eyes, the hunched shoulders of someone who carried an invisible weight. She brought me water and a piece of dry bread. I him asked where my baby was. She has looked away. She whispered that I shouldn’t have asked any questions, it was better that way, that I had to rest and obey. His voice trembled.

She was afraid. But I couldn’t accept not knowing. I insisted. I begged. I grabbed him by the sleeve of her blouse. I saw his eyes sure and finally, after a long silence during which she looked towards the door, she gave way, she leaned towards me, lowered her voice and told me my son had been taken away in another wing of the hospital, a wing reserved for newborns program that babies born in this system were to monitor, measured every day, weighed, examined like specimens.

that some were returned to their mother after a few weeks, others don’t. It depended on the results, measurements, criteria which she herself did not understand. She told me something else too, something something she shouldn’t have said, that some babies disappeared completely from the registers, which we said that they were dead but there was no never had a body.

Rumors were circulating about secret adoptions. French babies sent to Germany to be raised in families of babies whose identity was erased. When she finished, she had the tears our eyes. She shook my hand once quickly then she is part. I spent 12 days in this room, 12 days to wait, to hope, begging for my child to be brought back to me.

Every morning I heard cries of babies somewhere in the building, distant, muffled tears. I asked if one of them was my son, if I would recognize him by his voice, if I I’ll see him again one day. I got up sometimes and I would go to the door. I pressed my ear against the wood cold and I listened for hours. Then the crying stopped and the silence returned.

One night I heard screams different, heartbreaking screams coming from a neighboring room. It was the sound of childbirth, raw pain, uncontrollable. The screams lasted for hours and then are stopped abruptly. The silence that What followed was worse. The next day I saw nurses go out with rolled up sheets, stained with blood, then an overwhelmed cart, covered with a white sheet.

I didn’t see what he was underneath, but I knew. The 13th day, I was taken back to a room examination. The same doctor, the same gloves, the same blank look. He told me examined again, to verify that my body healed properly, note observations in his file. Then he told me I could leave, leave go home without my baby. I have shouted.

I said I won’t leave without my son, that it was my child, that I had the right to see him, to hold on, to bring him back with me. He didn’t tell me didn’t even look. He simply did sign to the nurses. They have me grabbed me by the arms, dragged me out from the room, pushed me towards the exit. I was struggling, screaming, but I was weak, exhausted, broken.

They threw me out like trash. I I collapsed on the steps of the hospital. The sun was shining, the people passed, life continued. But me, I was dead. My son had been to me stolen. My body had been violated, my humanity had been denied. I came home staggering home. My mother saw me arrive from afar.

She ran towards me, supported me, brought me home. She didn’t ask me anything. She knew. She put me to bed, gave me water, stroked my hair and she cried with me. For weeks, I waited. I was hoping that someone would would bring back my baby, who would be beaten the door, which I would be told was a mistake, that I could take it back, but no one came.

3 months more late, I received an official paper, a death certificate. My son was dead at the age of 6 weeks. cause of death, respiratory failure, no other explanation, no details, just a stamp, signature and date. I don’t I never saw him grow up. I don’t have it never held in my arms. I don’t have never heard his voice.

In all, I I don’t even know the color of his eyes. It was stolen from me and told to get away to keep silent, to continue, to forget. But how can you forget something the same? After the war I tried to rebuild my life. I left my hometown. I settled at Lyon where no one knew me. I have changed his name, found a job in a textile factory.

I got married with a good man who did not pose any questions about my past. We hadtwo children, a girl and a boy. I loved them with all my heart, but every time I looked at my son, I saw the other, the one they had for me stolen, the one of which I would not know never the face. For sixty years, I didn’t say anything, not a word, not even to my husband, not even my children.

I I carried this secret like a wound open that no one should see. A wound that never healed, that still bleeding, even after all these years. But in 2003, something changed. A specialized French historian in Nazi crimes in occupied zones published a book a book on forced medical experiments carried out by German doctors on pregnant French women between 1942 and 1944.

He was looking for witnesses, survivors, women who would agree to talk, to tell, to break the silence. My son, the one I had after the war, showed me the article in the newspaper. He didn’t know nothing but he saw something in my eyes, something that changed when I read these words. She was not alone. I contacted the historian.

He was called Antoine Mercier, a man patient, a respectful man who didn’t judge, who listened. He gave me meet in a small café in Lyon. We sat near the window. He put a recorder on the table. He asked me if I was ready. I said yes and for the first times in sixty years I have spoken. I have told everything from the beginning, from the summons, from this first room white, from gloved hands, since the cries, since the birth forced, since the theft of my son, since the death certificate.

Antoine listened without interrupting me. Her eyes filled with tears, but he continued to record, to note, to preserve. When I finished, he thanked me. He told me that my testimony was essential, that dozens of others women had experienced the same thing, that their stories needed to be told, but that the truth must survive.

Thanks to this book published in 2005, the world discovered the existence of this program. We found archives Nazis, lists of names, reports medical, photos, evidence. Of hundreds of French women had been subjected to childbirth forced. Many babies had died in the weeks following their birth.

Others had been placed in German homes, adopted by Nazi families. Some do not have never knew they were French, that they had been stolen. The book has caused a scandal. Associations of victims were created, trials were been brought. But most of responsible doctors were dead, not found or protected. Justice never really came, but the truth, she came out of the shadows.

In 2010, I was invited to testify at of a commemorative ceremony in Paris in tribute to women victims of violence medical during occupation. I was six years old. My hands were shaking, my voice too. But I got on this stage in front of hundreds of people, in front of cameras, in front of history. And I talked, I talked about my son that night when he was torn from me, from his 60 years of silence, of this pain which never fades.

When I finished, the room was silent, then someone got up, then another, then the whole room. He applauded, cried, thanked me, but I didn’t want of applause. I just wanted my son to be recognized, that its existence be recognized, that he is not just a number in a Nazi file. After this ceremony, I received hundreds of letters, women, men, young people, old people.

Everyone told me thank you. Thanks for speaking up. Thank you for breaking the silence. Thank you for having shown that memory is stronger than oblivion. Some letters came other survivors. Women who, like me, had been forced to give birth under Nazi control, who had lost their children, who had carried this secret all their lives.

She told me that she was no longer alone, that my voice gave them permission to to talk, to cry, to heal perhaps. One letter in particular stood out to me. She came from a sixty year old man. He said he was adopted in Germany after the war. that he was coming to discover thanks to the archives that he was born in France in a hospital German soldier, that his mother biological had been a young French, that he was looking for information, which he wanted to understand, find.

I replied: “We we exchanged letters for month. Then we met at Paris in a small park near the scene. His name was Klaus. He had the light eyes, gray hair, a face soft. He showed me a photo of himself baby. A photo taken in a hospital German inmy heart stopped. It wasn’t my son. The dates did not match not. But it could have been him.

Klaus hugged me and we cried together. Two strangers linked by the same story, with the same violence, by the same flight. I died in 2017. I was 93 years old. My body ended up give in, worn out by time, by pain, by the weight of all these years. But my voice, it is not dead. She is remained in the archives, in the books, in documentaries, in memories.

I had agreed to participate in a long filmed interview, a documentary history on women victims of Nazi medicine in the occupied zone. I was 86 years old. I was sitting in my living room surrounded by family photos, memories, of life and for more than 3 hours, I told everything without filter, without shame, without fear because I knew it was my last chance, my last opportunity to tell the truth, to leave a trace, to ensure that my son, even if he had only lived six weeks, do not be forgotten.

This documentary was released in 2012. It was broadcast in several countries. Of thousands of people have seen it or schools used it as a tool educational. Historians have cited it in their research. And me, an old woman woman who had spent her life in silence, I became a symbol, a living testimony, proof that horror is not always spectacular, that it can be cold, methodical, bureaucratic, that it can hide behind white coats and medical speeches, which she can stealing lives without making a sound.

In my later years, I often thought of all those women who have no never spoken, who died in silence, who took away their stories in the grave. How many were there? Of hundreds, thousands perhaps? How many babies stolen? How many seas broken? How many lives destroyed by this cold and implacable machine which was the Nazi regime? I also think of these doctors, of these men in white coats who touched without consent, who caused our deliveries, which took away from our children, who notice everything in their files.

Some were tried after the war, others continued their careers quietly, did you have families, honors, peaceful retirements. Did they think of us sometimes? Do they have had any regrets? Do they only realized what they actually had? Where were we for them? Just some numbers, bodies, experiences? I will never know.

But I know one thing, they didn’t destroy us, not completely. We survived, we we spoke, we resisted our way by refusing to forget, by refusing to disappear, refusing that our children die twice. Today, when I look back, I see two lives. The one from before, the ten-year-old girl who dreamed of love and family, and that according to the broken woman who had to learning to live with a gaping hole in the heart.

These two lives did not never joined. They coexisted. One visible, smiling, functional. The other hidden, painful, forever in mourning. But both were true. Both were a month old. My son would have been sixty today. I wonder what he would have looked like. If he would have had the Henry’s eyes, if he would have loved them books like me, if he would have been a father, grandfather, so if he would have experienced a beautiful life.

A life that I never could give him a life that was stolen from him before it even begins. But I want to believe that it exists somewhere, not in paradise. I don’t know if I believe, but in memory, in words, in this testimony that I leave behind me, in every person who will hear this story and say more never. This is why I spoke, not for me, but for him, for everyone women who have not had this luck, for all the stolen children, so that the story, even the most dark, be told.

Because silence is the victory of executioners and I refuse to offer them this victory. My voice has survived. My son also in every word, in every sentence, in every heart that still beats for this memory. So, I ask you this question to you who are listening to me today. To you who live in a world where medicine saves lives, where mothers choose, where children are born free.

What would you do if tomorrow all this will be taken away from you? If your body no longer belonged to you, if were your choices dictated by others? If your child was taken from you, what would you do? Would you resist? Would you speak? Where would you hide like so many others out of fear, out of shame, by exhaustion? I don’t judge anyone.

Everyone survives as best they can, but me, I chose to speak, even at sixty too late, even with a voicetrembling, even if no one listened to me, because the truth, even painful, is better than silence. Always. The story of Mava Trin is not not just its history. Sam the story of hundreds of women French women whose bodies have become battlefields during occupation.

Women affected without consent, forced to give birth according to a Nazi calendar, emptied of their humanity by medical hands who should have care but who chose to control. Women whose babies have been torn off, measured, studied then erased as if he had never existed. For years, Mae wore this weight in silence and she wasn’t alone.

Thousands more have made same. They have lived, aged, are died without ever having told because that the shame was too heavy, because that no one wanted to listen to, because that the world preferred to forget. But today, thanks to testimonies like Mae’s, we know know that behind every war when there is invisible violence, violence that does not make the headlines newspapers, violence happening in clean rooms under cold lights in the name of science, order, progress, violence who break not with weapons, but with rubber gloves and medical records. And this violence,

no one commemorates them, no one erects monuments to them. They die in silence, carried away by those who have suffered. Unless we choose to remember, unless we choose to testify, unless we choose to say “This happened and it should not never happen again.” If this story touched you, if she touched you upset, if she made you think about what it means to be human in a world that can at any time decide that you are no longer, then do not leave this testimony disappear.

Support this work of memory. Every look, every share, every word is an act of resistance against oblivion. Mae died in 2017 at 93 years old, but before leaving, she did something extraordinary. She chose to speak. She chose to break sixty years of silence. She made her pain a testimony, of his shame a weapon against oblivion, of his broken life a legacy of truth.

Today, thanks to his voice, thanks to her words, she continues to live. Her son taken away at 6 weeks old never had a burial, but he something more powerful. Han, he has a memory. He has thousands of people who know it existed, that he was loved, that he was stolen and that his mother never forgot him. So, ask yourself this question if it was your mother, your grandmother, your sister, your daughter, if it were you, would you like the world to remember ? Would you like someone to say your name, tell your story, refuse to let your pain be erased by time? The answer is yes. And that’s why this channel exists. To give a voice to those who do not have more. To preserve the testimonies of those whom history has forgotten. For remember that behind each number, every statistic, every archive dusty, there is a life, a person, a pain, a dignity which deserves to be recognized.

Never forget because memory is the only one victory that we can offer to those who lost everything. Mr.