“Is She Screaming Yet?” – How Soldiers Used the “Electric Method” on French Women
She’s already screaming. That’s what I heard on the other side of the metal door, two German voices. One laughed, the other simply confirmed. I didn’t yet know what it meant, but my body was already trembling, because something in me, something primitive, already understood. My name is Therese Duvallon, I’m 83 years old, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to erase this question from my mind.
I didn’t succeed. She returns every dawn. Every time I close my eyes and the silence becomes too heavy, we weren’t taken to work. They didn’t take us in for questioning. They took us to a place where young French women were separated, observed, catalogued, and where some were chosen not at random, but according to criteria that none of us could have imagined.
I was just a nineteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a cook, born and raised in Annecy, a small town in the French Alps where everyone knew everyone, where the war still seemed far away. something that happened in the newspapers, not on our streets, until it stopped being distant, until he knocked on my door. March 1943.
Dawn. Icy cold. My mother was in the kitchen when we heard sharp, metallic, powerful blows. My father opened the door. Three German soldiers. Impeccable uniforms. Expressionless faces. One of them was holding a list. He read my name. Teresa Duvallon, 19 years old, single. Come with us without explanations.
No time for questions. My mother tried to grab my hand. She was pushed against the wall. My father took a step forward. The butt of the gun hit him in the face. He fell. Blood was flowing from his nose. I screamed, but they were already dragging me outside. The truck was waiting on the street, the tarpaulin was stretched out, the engine was running.
There were other women inside. I recognized some of them. Young people, most between 16 and 25 years old, sat on wooden benches with wide eyes and heavy breathing. Nobody spoke, nobody understood. If you had asked me at that moment what was happening, I would not have been able to answer. I thought it was a mistake.
I thought they would let us go. I thought I would be back home before dawn. I was wrong. We drove for hours. The cold in the truck was brutal. No blankets, no water. Only the noise of the engine, the smell of diesel and the growing fear between us. Some cried quietly, others prayed. I just looked at my hands, they were shaking. I couldn’t stop them.
When the truck finally stopped, it was light. We got off in a place I had never seen before. The complex is surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. Armed guards everywhere, long grey barracks built like coffins. There is a sign in German on the gate. I couldn’t read it. But one of the women next to me, who spoke German, quietly translated.
Women’s labor camp. Military control zone. Job. The word seemed almost soothing. I thought, “We ‘ll work, we’ll come back, this will pass.” But when we passed through the gate, I saw something that horrified me. Hundreds of women, thin, dirty, with empty eyes, moving like shadows between the barracks. Some carried buckets, others washed clothes in huge vats of dirty water.
But what scared me most wasn’t the work, it was the silence. No one spoke, no one looked at us, the new arrivals, as if they already knew, as if they had already given up warning us. We were brought to the barracks for registration. Inside, a German officer, tall, blonde, and impeccable, watched us while two assistants wrote down our names: age, city of origin.
She walked between us, slowly looking at each face, each body, as if choosing fruit at the market. When she approached me, she stopped, bowed her head, and said something in German to the assistant. They wrote something next to my name. I didn’t understand, but I saw the look of the woman next to me.
She heard and her face turned pale. It was only later that I learned what it meant. If you think you know the history of World War II, this testimony will change your perception forever. Therese Duvallon is about to reveal what was hidden behind the closed doors of the camps under German control.
Truths erased from history books, methods that were tried to be hidden, and cries that were tried to be silenced for more than sixty years. Stay until the end, because what she says no one should forget. I spent the first hours in this camp in a semi-conscious state. We were given uniforms, not clothes. Uniforms, thick grey dresses that scratched our skin, no socks, only wooden shoes that hurt our feet from the first steps.
We all had our hair shaved without exception. I remember the sound of scissors, the sudden cold on my neck, my chestnut locks falling to the floor, mingling with the hair of dozens of other girls. We were told it was for hygiene, but I think they wanted to make us the same, interchangeable. We were given a barracks. Number seven.
Inside there are wooden bunk beds. Three tiers. No mattresses, just a thin, holey blanket for each. The smell was unbearable. Sweat, urine, mold, the windows were boarded up. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, usually turned off. No one slept that first night. There were about thirty of us new, mixed in with women who had been here for weeks, months.
They didn’t talk to us . They looked at us with some kind of tired pity, as if they already knew what awaited us. I tried to talk to the woman on the bunk below me. Her name was Margarita. She was 34 years old. A teacher in Leon was arrested for hiding resistance documents. She looked at me with sunken, dark-circled eyes and simply said, “Don’t ask questions, do as you’re told, and pray they don’t notice your face.
” I didn’t understand. Not yet. The next morning at 5:00 a.m. we were awakened by a siren. Piercing, unbearable. We were ordered to go out and line up in the central courtyard. It was still dark. The cold bit at the skin. We stood barefoot in the frozen mud. The German officer counted us once, twice.
Then he gave the order. The guards began to separate the women. It was no coincidence that they looked at our faces, our bodies. They pointed to the right, to the left, the younger ones to the right, the older ones to the left. I was sent to the right. We were taken to another building, smaller and cleaner.
Inside there were chairs lined up in a row . A table with instruments, syringes, and vials. A German nurse was waiting for us. She examined us one by one and measured our height, weight, looked at our teeth, hands, feet, and wrote everything down. Then she injected us with something, a clear liquid. I felt my hand burning. I asked what it was, she didn’t answer.
Later, a French prisoner who worked as a translator whispered to me: “They are checking if you are healthy.” If you can, resist. Resist what, I still didn’t understand. But that evening, as we were returning to the barracks, I heard screams, women’s screams, piercing, frightened, coming from an isolated building deep in the camp, a windowless building, constantly guarded.
Margarita pulled me by the hand. Don’t look, don’t ask questions. But I looked anyway and saw a young woman, barely older than me. coming out of this building, supported by two guards. She didn’t walk, she was being dragged, her legs could no longer support her. Her face was white, her lips were trembling, her eyes were empty. I recognized her.
She came with me in the same truck. Her name was Lucy. She was 17 years old. What I saw on her face that night I will never forget. It wasn’t pain, it was something worse, something that had no name. And that’s when I realized it. This camp was not a labor camp. It was something else.
Something that no one talked about, something that the history books don’t mention . In the following days I tried to figure out how to remain invisible, how to avoid attention, but in this camp invisibility did not exist. Especially not for young people. Every morning the same ritual. Wake up at 5:00 a.m., line up in the yard, division.
The older ones went to work, sewing uniforms, washing clothes, sorting equipment. It was hard, exhausting, but they survived. We, the youngest, were kept separately. We were forced to wait for hours in the cold without explanation. Then on some days officers came. They watched us, talked among themselves, wrote something down, and called some girls by name or number.
They never returned to work the same day. Sometimes they didn’t come back at all. Lucy, the girl I saw that first night, became a shadow. She no longer spoke, did not eat, and sat on her bed. Staring at the wall. Margarita told me that she was taken away three times in 5 days. Why? – I asked. Margarita lowered her eyes.
For what they call medical experiments. But these are not experiments, these are tortures. They are testing the device’s methods on bodies they consider disposable. My throat tightened. What devices? She hesitated. Then she said to me in a broken voice: “They attach the electrodes to their wrists, sometimes to their ankles.
” Elsewhere, they send out shocks to see how long a woman can endure before losing consciousness. They call it electrical treatment. They say it’s for research, but that’s a lie. It’s just cruelty disguised as science. I stood rooted to the spot. My blood ran cold. And why us? Why young? Margarita looked at me with endless sadness.
Because you are fresh. Because your body resists better. Because you scream louder. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. But after 2 days my name was called. It was a grey morning, older. We were lined up as usual. The officer approached with a list. He read several names. Mine was the fourth.
Teresa Duvallon. Barrack seven. My heart stopped. The other girls looked at me. Some looked away , others whispered prayers. The five of us were led to an isolated building. The one without a window, the one from where the screams were coming. It was hot inside. It’s too hot. Powerful lamps illuminated every corner.
In the center of the room there is a metal table, cold, tilted, with leather straps at the corners. A German doctor was waiting for us. White coat, round glasses, impassive face. Next to him is an assistant and a nurse. They spoke to each other in German, calmly, as if discussing the weather. We were told to undress completely in front of them, without embarrassment, without humanity. I Yadrazhal.
My hands no longer obeyed me. The girl next to me was crying. Another one begged in French, in German. It didn’t matter. They didn’t react. They looked us over one by one, like Scott. The doctor took notes, measured our reflexes, pressed on certain parts of the body, and recorded our reactions. Then he chose the first girl, the one who was crying. Her name was Elin.
She was 20 years old. They laid her on the table and tied her wrists and ankles. She screamed and begged. The doctor made a sign. The assistant brought the machine, a metal box with dials, wires and clamps. They attached clamps to her wrist, to her ankle. Then the doctor turned the dial and she screamed.
Because I’ve never heard anyone scream. The scream that came from the depths, the scream that was not human, he recorded, measured, adjusted and began again. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t close my ears. I couldn’t escape from that sound, from that horror. After Elin, it was the turn of another, then another. I wasn’t chosen that day.
I do n’t know why. Maybe they wanted to leave some of us untouched for a little while longer . Maybe they already had enough data. But when I came out of there, I was no longer the same. Something died inside me . something I will never get back. I quickly realized that this camp functioned according to logic, a monstrous logic, but still logic.
Everything was organized, planned, documented. The youngest and healthiest women were left for experiments. The rest were working. Some died of hunger, others of disease. But those who were chosen for experiments died differently, more slowly, more painfully. There were categories. I learned about this from a Polish prisoner, Anna, who worked in the administrative offices and translated German documents.
She risked her life by speaking to us, but she did it anyway because she wanted us to know, to testify if we survived. They classify you according to three criteria, she told me one evening. Whispering in the darkness of the barracks. Age, appearance, physical endurance. The youngest and most beautiful are sent first, because to them you represent the ideal enemy.
Young French woman, beautiful, proud. They want to break you not only physically, but also mentally. She handed me a piece of paper. Report in German. I didn’t understand everything, but I recognized some words. Electrical treatment, pain tolerance test. They test how long a woman can last before she starts begging, before she loses her mind.
They record everything: duration, intensity, reactions. Everything is recorded and sent to Berlin for future medical research. I felt bile rising in my throat, and those who do not survive, Anna closed her eyes. They disappear. There is a pit behind the camp. You never see bodies, but at night you can hear shovels and the sound of earth being dug. I didn’t sleep that night.
I lay there, looking at the invisible ceiling in the darkness. I thought about my mother, about my father, about my little house Vansi, about my former life. Such a simple, such a normal life. A life that now seemed to belong to someone else. Weeks passed. I was called three times. I entered this building three times.
Three times I thought I wouldn’t get out of there. For the first time they tested my pain tolerance. Electrodes on the wrist, gradual discharges. They recorded my reactions. How long will it be before I scream? How long will it take before I pass out? The second time they tested my ability to recover.
How long after the session could I still walk, talk, and answer questions for the third time? For the third time, I don’t want to talk about it even today. Even after all these years, there are things that remain locked away not by choice, but for the sake of survival. What can I say? So that’s what I heard that phrase.
a phrase I will never forget. Two officers talking in front of a door before entering. Shti shishon shrine. She’s already screaming. One of them laughed, the other answered something that I didn’t understand. But the tone was clear, cheerful, detached, as if he were talking about an animal and not a person. And that’s what broke me.
Not pain, not fear, but indifference. It is the certainty that we are nothing, that our lives have no meaning, that our cries are just one of many sounds. If I’m still alive today, it’s not because of my strength. It’s not because of my courage. It’s because of those moments, those tiny moments, when someone, somewhere, decided to see me as still human.
Margarita, for example, is the one who lost everything. Her husband, shot by the Germans in 1942 for sabotage. These two children disappeared during a raid in Lyon. She, who no longer had hope, had nothing more to wait for. It was she who gave me her portion of bread when I could no longer swallow. It was she who held my hand at night when nightmares woke me up screaming.
It was she who whispered, “Breathe, Teresa, just breathe.” One breath at a time. She developed a method, a way to survive psychologically. In this ode she counted days, hours, breaths. She said that as long as you can count, you are still alive, still capable of thinking, still human. Don’t give them your spirit, she repeated to me. They can take your body.
They may hurt you, but your spirit, Teresa, is yours. Save it, hide it, protect it. I didn’t always understand what she meant, but I clung to her words like a life preserver in a stormy sea. Anna Polka. She risked her life every day to give us stolen information from administrative offices. She told us, “Never forget, if you survive, tell the story.
Even if they don’t believe you, even if they call you a liar, tell the story, because silence is their most powerful weapon.” Anna was a history teacher in Warsaw. Arrested for helping Jews escape. Her entire family was destroyed. She was left alone, but she refused to remain silent. She wrote down everything she could on tiny scraps of paper, which she hid in the seams of her clothes and in the cracks of the walls.
She told me, “If I die, someone might find these words and know.” I don’t know if anyone ever found these notes. I don’t even know if Anna survived. We were separated in February 1944. I never saw her again. And then there was this man, this German guard. I never knew his name. I never saw his face clearly. But one night, as I was leaving the building for experiments, unable to walk with trembling legs, with blurred vision, he carried me.
He didn’t drag me, he didn’t push me, he carried me. How to carry a child. He didn’t say anything. He left me in front of the barracks, looked around to make sure no one had seen him, and left without saying a word. Yes, without a glance. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he had a daughter my age. Maybe he was just human deep down inside.
Or maybe it was just a coincidence. A moment of pity in an ocean of cruelty. But this moment saved me because it reminded me of something. Something I had almost forgotten, that somewhere there still exists humanity, even tiny, even hidden, even suppressed under the weight of uniforms and orders.
There were also these small acts of resistance between us prisoners, these invisible gestures that kept us alive. The woman who shared a stolen lump of sugar. Another one who would hum softly at night to help us fall asleep. The third, who told stories about her former life to remind us that there was a normal world, that perhaps there would be a normal world again.
I remember one woman, Claire, a Parisian. She was a dancer in the opera. Sometimes she would show us ballet positions in the darkness of the barracks . Standing, despite her hunger, despite her fatigue, she raised her arms, stretched out her legs, and for a few seconds she again became who she was: graceful, free, beautiful.
“They can lock me away,” she said, “but they can’t stop me from dancing in my head.” Claire died in March 1944 from pneumonia. But until her last breath she continued to raise her arms, stretch her legs, and dance. Months passed, winter came, the cold became unbearable, our uniforms were not enough.
Our subs were cracking, our feet were bleeding. Many died from cold, hunger, and disease. The experiments continued, but they became less frequent. less systematic, as if even the Germans were beginning to run out of resources or interest, or perhaps they sensed that the war was turning, that their time was running out. There were rumors of Allied landings, German defeats, cities being recaptured.
We did n’t dare believe it, but we hoped silently, desperately. I was called up for the last time in January 1944 . almost a year after my arrival. This time it was not for electrodes, but for interrogation. They wanted to know if I knew resistance members, if my father had contacts, if I had passed on messages, if I had helped Jews, if I had hidden weapons? I didn’t know anything, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Not out of courage, but out of exhaustion. I was so empty that nothing mattered anymore. Nothing could break me anymore. The officer who interrogated me was young, maybe 25 years old. He spoke French with a strong German accent. He asked me the same questions over and over again as if he was hoping I would eventually break down and come up with something just to make it stop, but I had nothing to come up with.
So I remained silent or repeated: “I don’t know, I don’t know anyone. I haven’t done anything.” After 3 hours he gave up, looking at me with something that resembled contempt or perhaps disappointment. Then he sent me back to the barracks. I didn’t understand why they let me go. Maybe, maybe I was no longer valuable to them.
Maybe I was too damaged, too thin, too broken. Maybe I had become useless, or maybe the war had really begun to turn, and they knew their time was running out, that they were already trying to erase the evidence, destroy the traces, make us, us, disappear. In February 1944, they began transferring prisoners in groups to other camps: to Germany, to the east.
We didn’t know exactly where, but we knew it was a bad sign, a very bad sign. Anna was transferred, Margarita too. I saw them getting into the trucks. I couldn’t even say goodbye to them. They disappeared. And I was left with a handful of other women, the weakest, the sickest, the ones who should n’t have been transported.
We were left almost alone. There were fewer guards, and rations were even more meager. The barracks are even colder. It was as if they had forgotten us, as if we were already dead. But we haven’t been there, not yet. And then one August morning in 1944, we heard something: distant explosions, then closer and closer.
Shots, screams, but not our screams. The cries of the Germans. They ran, burned papers, loaded trucks, left, and we stayed there. frozen, unable to comprehend what was happening, until the doors opened and soldiers entered, but not German soldiers. American soldiers, free French people with flags, with smiles, with tears in their eyes.
They looked at us, and some turned away because what they saw was too hard, too unbearable. living skeletons, ghosts, women who no longer looked like women. One of them came up to me, handed me a blanket, and said in French: “It’s all over, you are free. Free.” The word seemed so strange, so unreal, as if it were a language I no longer spoke.
The camp was liberated in August 1944. The allies arrived, the doors opened. We were free. But what is freedom when everything is lost, when you don’t know who you are, when you carry within you images that no words can erase? I was returning to France, Vancy. My mother cried when she saw me. My father turned away. I no longer looked like the girl they recognized.
I was thin, bald, with an empty look. They asked me questions once, twice, then stopped because they saw in my eyes that I couldn’t answer. Not yet, maybe never. I tried to come back to life. I worked, got married, and had children. But a part of me always remained there, in this camp, in this building, on this table.
For 64 years I said almost nothing . A few words, a few phrases. never the full story because no one really wanted to know because it was too hard, too dark, too awkward. France needed heroes, not victims. She wanted glorious stories of resistance, not stories of young women tortured in forgotten camps. Then I was silent, like thousands of others.
We carried this silence alone in the hope that one day, maybe, someone would actually want to listen. This day came late. I was 83 years old when a historian contacted me . She conducted research on women’s labor camps in occupied France. She found my name in the German archives with the note: experimental subject, electrical treatment, survivor.
She wanted to interview me. At first I refused, then I agreed. Not for myself, but for Lucy, for Helen, for Margarita, for Anna, for all those who never returned. This interview lasted 3 days. And I told everything, or almost everything. And there are things that I still keep inside, that I will keep until the day I die, because they are too heavy, too personal, too unbearable.
5 years after this interview, I passed away peacefully in my sleep. But before I left, I asked for one thing: that my testimony be preserved, that these words survive, that what happened to us not be erased, because history should not be written only by the victors. It must also be told by those who survived, those who carried the weight of this war in their bodies.
Today I am no longer here, but these words remain, and as long as there is someone who reads them, hears them, and passes them on, what happened to us will not be buried in silence. We were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young women from France, Belgium, Poland, ripped from our lives, used, broken, and then forgotten.
But we existed, we suffered, we resisted in our own way, not with weapons, but with our will to remain human, no matter what. And that may be the only victory that really matters. If you are listening to these words today, I ask you one thing: do not forget us. Don’t let our stories disappear, because what happened to us can happen again in other forms, in other countries, with other women.
As long as humanity chooses to turn a blind eye, as long as it prefers indifference to the truth. My name is Teresa Duvallon. I was 19 years old when they took me. I was 88 when I passed away. Between these moments I lived. I survived, and now I bear witness forever. Therese Duvallon bore this silence for 64 years. 64 years of living with these images, these screams, this pain that no one wanted to hear.
But before leaving, she decided to speak. For Marguerite, for Anne, for Lucy, for Claire, for all those who never returned. Their dignity, their silent resistance, their humanity, crushed but never destroyed. All of this deserves to be known, to be honored, to pass through time. If this testimony has touched you, if you feel the heaviness of these words in your chest, we ask you for something important.
Subscribe to this channel to keep stories like this coming. Please like this video not just as a gesture, but as an act of remembrance for those who never got to tell their story. Share it with those who, like you, believe that some truths should not disappear, even when they hurt. Especially when they hurt.
In the comments, take a moment to reflect on where you are currently watching this documentary. What did Teresa’s story awaken in you? Do you think such horrors could happen again if we choose silence and indifference? These women survived not because they were exceptional, but because they refused to give up their humanity even in the darkness, even when all seemed lost.
Their courage deserves more than our fleeting silence. They deserve our voice, our commitment to never forget. Teresa passed away in 2008 at the age of 88 , but her words remain, and as long as there is someone to listen to them, to share them, to carry them forward, what happened to her will never be erased by time. Thank you for listening to the end.
Now make sure her testimony doesn’t stop here. Subscribe, share, comment and, most importantly, remember.
