MEETING THE BUTCHER OF LYON: Suzanne Garnier’s Hell! (Not for the Faint of Heart)

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To refuse oblivion is to honor the truth. Never forget. There’s one thing no one tells you about torture. They start long before you are touched. They begin in your cell the night before, when you hear screams from the hallway, when your cellmates describe in broken voices what awaits you, when your imagination works against you and creates scenarios that reality will always surpass.

And I spent two nights in Montluc before the first call for interrogation. And those two nights had already half destroyed me before Klaus Barbie ever laid a hand on me. My name is Suzanne Garnier. In June 1943 I was thirty-two years old. By profession I was a teacher in the third arrondissement of Leon, and from November 1941 I was an intelligence agent for the Liberation Sud network.

I carried encrypted messages between different network cells, organized communication points and, most importantly, knew the location of an underground radio station that transmitted information to London every evening from a basement in the Croisette area. My arrest took place on June 11, 1943, on rue Centelin, 200 m from the market.

I didn’t expect this because I followed all the safety rules. I hadn’t had a single date back then. I was just doing some shopping, but the Gestapo people were already waiting for me. And when they surrounded me in their cloaks and with their weapons, I immediately remembered that three days earlier Jean Moulin had been arrested in Caluire, that the entire resistance network was collapsing under the blows of mass betrayal and that in this confusion someone could have given the Gestapo my name and address. The drive to Montluc prison took 20

minutes in a black car with opaque windows. And the whole way I thought of only one thing, the man from Croirous, the man I simply called Marcel, who went on air every evening at 2100 from his basement. If Gistapa knew of his whereabouts, he would have been arrested, his equipment confiscated, and the network cut off from London.

And I told myself that I had to hold on. at least 24 hours, so that he would have time to receive a warning and hide the transmitter. Montluc Prison was a 19th-century military building in the eighth arrondissement of Leon, converted by the Gestapo into a detention centre and transit point for the camp in the east.

And when I was pushed through the gate, I didn’t see what I expected. Not armed soldiers, not open violence, but something worse. Bureaucracy of horror. Uniformed guards filled out forms, wrote down my name, address, prisoner number, and methodically confiscated my belongings. And this administrative normality around the abnormal made me feel sick.

I was taken to a cell on the first floor, where there were already 12 women in a space designed for six . And these women looked at me with an expression that I could n’t immediately recognize. pity for the new relief that today it is me and not them, and something else, the shared knowledge of what will follow next.

On the first night, a woman named Artans, who had already been there for three weeks, whispered to me how the system worked. Summonings usually took place in the morning between 9:00 and 11:00. You were taken either to the prison office for preliminary interrogations or directly to the Ruberteurt, the Gestapo headquarters, for serious interrogations.

And serious interrogations meant Barbie. She said the name the way one says the name of an incurable disease, without much emotion, because emotion would have been too dangerous. And she just said, “Barbie speaks French very well . He’s polite at first, he smiles a lot.” And don’t let that smile fool you, because when he smiles, it’s the worst.

Other women in the cell added their own information to these nightly hisses. A suburban teacher arrested for hiding resistance fighters said Barbie had a gift for knowing exactly what you were trying to hide from her. a secretary from Burkanbres who had a perfect round burn scar on her left wrist and who would not explain how she got it.

And a former nurse who survived two interrogations with Barbie, who looked at me with empty eyes and said: “Hold on as long as you can, every hour counts.” The second day passed without a call, and this waiting was in itself a form of torture. I sat in the cell, listening to the sounds in the corridor. I shuddered every time footsteps approached our door.

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I saw other women looking at the door with the expressions of animals who know a predator is close. And I tried to concentrate on one thought: Marcel and his transmitter. 24 hours have passed. 10 p.m. 20 Was the network warned about my arrest? Was anyone able to contact him before the Gestapo arrived? On the evening of the second day, Artance told me that the woman arrested on the same day as me had been released after only one interrogation.

This sometimes happened if the Gestapa realized that the person knew nothing. And I thought that this was my only hope to appear ignorant, to pretend that I was an administrative error and not an active agent. But I knew that if someone gave my name to the Gestapo, they would probably also give away my role and my contacts.

On the third morning our cell was opened and the guard called my name, Gornier Suzanne. And all the women in the cell looked up at me with that special look that meant good luck at the same time. And I’m glad it’s not me. And I followed the guard down the corridor with trembling legs, but with a straight back, because I thought that my posture was already a form of resistance.

They took me not to the Ruberteurt, as I feared, but to an office on the second floor of the prison itself. A simple room with a wooden table, two chairs and a barred window overlooking the courtyard. I stood there for 5 minutes, which felt like an hour, before the door opened and a man walked in. Klaus Barbie was 30 years old.

An ordinary face, not handsome, not ugly, short-cropped brown hair, impeccable shape of the iss. He looked at me as I entered with an expression of polite curiosity, like a doctor at a new patient, and said: “Good afternoon, Madame Gornier, please sit down .” And his voice was soft, and French, perfect, without a noticeable accent.

And he moved a chair for me, like a well-mannered man in a bourgeois living room. And this politeness in this context was so disorienting that I didn’t know how to react. He sat down on the other side of the desk, opened a thin folder and said, “I’ll be straight with you, Madame Gornier, because I think you’re an intelligent woman and we can have a civilized conversation.

We know you’ve been working for the Libération Sud network since November 1941. We know you act as a courier between several cells in the Leonese agglomeration. And most importantly, we know you know the location of a radio transmitter operating in the Croirousse area. I looked at the thin folder on his desk and thought that maybe he was bluffing, that maybe he knew less than he claimed.

And I said, “I’m a teacher. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And Barbie smiled. And that smile was exactly as Arthans had described, not threatening, not sadistic, but the patient smile of a man who knows he has all the time in the world . He said, “Of course, Madame Gornier, you can maintain that position if you wish, but I must inform you that in the last two weeks we have arrested 97 people in the Leon region , several of whom have been very cooperative, and some of the information we have received concerns you directly. Therefore, lying now only

drags out our conversation in an unpleasant way . The mention of nine arrests made my blood run cold, because that was the exact number of the Caluire disaster and its consequences. And I wondered who had spoken, who had betrayed us all. Barbie watched my reaction carefully and said, “You see, Madame Gornier, you understand the situation perfectly well.

This will make our job easier.” He laid his hands flat on the table and said, “That’s what I want to know, and nothing more for now . The exact address where the Kruarus radio transmitter is located, the name of the operator and the time of transmissions. Give me these three pieces of information, and this conversation ends now, and you return to your cell. Simple, clean, effective.

Refuse, and we will continue this conversation tomorrow under different conditions. I looked at this polite man with his thin folder and calm smile and quickly calculated in my mind: “If I hold out until tomorrow evening, Marcel will have 48 hours from the moment of my arrest.

” It would be enough if someone on the network managed to warn him. And I said: “Monse, I repeat to you that I am a teacher and I don’t understand what you mean?” Barbie closed the folder without changing his expression and said: “Very well, Madame Gornier, we will see each other tomorrow morning. I advise you to have a good night and think about our conversation.

” He stood up and called the guard. As he left, he turned around one last time and said with the same smile: “Madame Gornier, I want you to know that I have the greatest respect for courageous people. Courage is a rare quality, but even the bravest people eventually realize that some resistance is useless. Until tomorrow.

” And he quietly closed the door. And it was that final gentleness, that impeccable politeness, that made me understand, more clearly than any overt threat, that tomorrow would be the beginning of something from which I would emerge incomplete. The night between the first and second calls was the longest of my life.

Not because of fear of what awaited me, although I was afraid, but because I was trying to figure out whether Marcel had managed to escape, whether the network had warned him , whether my 24 hours of resistance had been enough to save the transmitter and the man who worked on it. And this uncertainty was mental torture, as exhausting as what my body was soon to endure.

Arthens, who almost She was asleep, sat down next to me in the darkness of the cell and whispered: “Eat everything they give you in the morning, even if you don’t want to. Your body needs it after.” And from her voice, I understood that she knew exactly what it was like to be called in for interrogation after the first polite conversation with Barbie.

The next morning, I was taken not to the second floor of Montluc, but to a closed van that took me to the Gestapo headquarters at 28 rue Bertilo in the eighth arrondissement. It was a requisitioned school, the corridors of which still smelled of disinfectant and chalk, converted into an interrogation center with astonishing efficiency and a complete lack of humanity.

The room they took me to was on the ground floor, in what had once been a classroom. The windows overlooking the courtyard were painted white so that it was impossible to see inside. In the center of the room stood a metal chair with leather straps on the arms and legs, and on a table against the wall was an electric generator and tools that I had never seen outside my nightmares, but whose purpose I understood instantly.

Barbie entered a few minutes after me, without a uniform, this time in white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He was putting on thick rubber gloves, carefully pulling them on and looking at me. and said: “Hello, Madame Gornier. I hope you’ve done some thinking this night. Before we begin, I will ask you one last question in these simple and polite terms. Address of Kruarus transmitters.

Operator name. Broadcast time. I said, “I don’t know anything.” Barbie nodded as if my answer confirmed something he had expected, and said, “Very well, Madame Gornier, please sit down.” The guards forced me into a metal chair and tightened straps around my wrists and ankles. Barbie picked up a tool from the table that looked like surgical forceps with two electrodes on the ends connected by wires to a generator and said, “I’ll explain to you how this works so you understand what’s going to happen.” The electrical current

we will use can be adjusted from very low to very high intensity. At a low level you will feel an unpleasant sensation, at a high level you will lose consciousness, and in between there is a whole spectrum of experiences that we can explore together for as long as it takes for you to decide to answer me honestly.

The first shock was low level, just like he said, a sharp, searing pain that shot through my arms and chest, causing a scream that I tried to hold back. Barbie watched my reaction with the clinical attention that characterized everything he did and said, “Now that’s a two out of ten. Tolerable, right?” And he put the tongs on the table and repeated his question about the transmitter.

I gritted my teeth and repeated, “I don’t know anything.” And he took up the instrument again. The second discharge was at level four, and this time my body jerked convulsively against the straps, and tears gushed from my eyes, not from sadness, but from pure, uncontrollable pain. He never shouted, he never fussed. He carefully put away his tools.

Sometimes he would sit on the edge of the table. He repeated his questions in the same moderate, polite tone. And this complete self-control was the most terrible thing in this room, because it showed, he had been doing this for a long time, that we, the victims, were not people to him, but technical problems that needed to be solved.

The first session lasted two and a half hours, during which I lost consciousness twice. Every time I fainted, the guard would splash me with ice water to revive me, and the session would resume. At some point, looking at the light in the room, I realized that the morning had passed and day had come. So, Marcel had already had 36 hours since my arrest, and this thought gave me something.

something to cling to while my body endured what Barbie was putting it through. In the afternoon he took off his gloves, placed them on the table and said: “That’s all for today, Madame Gornier, you have resisted well for the first real session. We will continue tomorrow, and I advise you tonight to think about what your courage is really worth, because we have time, but your body does not.” And he went out.

The guards unbuckled me and dragged me into a van that took me back to Montluc, to my cell. That evening the women greeted me with that special delicacy that develops in people who have all suffered in the same way. They didn’t ask any questions, they didn’t look at the burns on my hands, they simply gave me a place on the bunk and shared their portion of bread.

Arthans tore a piece of her shirt to wrap around my wrists, which were cut by the belts. I didn’t sleep all night, not because of the pain, although it was constant, but because I was obsessively doing calculations. If Marcel was still in Croirous at that hour, I might have information that still meant something to Barbie. If Marcel had escaped, the transmitter was safe, and I could hold out as long as necessary, because my resistance was no longer protecting an active secret, but protecting a man who might already be free. On the

third morning the van returned, and this time Barbie began the session without polite preamble, without repeated questions. He put on his gloves, picked up his tools and started straight from level five. And my body reacted with a force I no longer controlled. Convulsions shook the entire chair, screams burst out of me against my will.

And in the moments of clarity between the discharges, I thought about one thing: would I endure it or would I speak up. And I clung to the image of Marcel, safe, somewhere far from Leon, with the disassembled transmitter in his suitcase. At noon, Barbie stopped and did something unexpected. He asked the guard to bring me some water and gave it to me himself, holding the glass to my lips with almost tender attention, and said: “Madame Gornier, I will be honest with you.

I think you are protecting a particular person, and you feel that this protection is worth what you endure. This is a position I respect, even if I fight against it.” But let me ask you a question: is the person you are protecting doing the same for you right now? Does he also suffer for you? And this question shocked me because it touched upon something true that I did not want to consider.

The next day, a new prisoner named Alice, who had been arrested two days after me, was placed in our cell. That night she whispered to me that before her arrest she had heard on the net that the radio operator Iz Croirus had received a warning and left Leon with his equipment, that the transmitter was safe somewhere in the Alps.

And when I heard these words, I closed my eyes, and the tension that had been living in my body for 6 days eased a little, because my resistance did not work perfectly, not heroically, but concretely. Marcel was alive and free, and his transmitter would still be transmitting to London. But this confidence did not put an end to my situation.

Barbie didn’t get what the transmitters wanted, but he had other questions. Now he wanted the names of the organizers, the structure of the Liberation Sud network throughout the León region, contacts with other networks. And the next morning the van returned and the session began with an intensity I had n’t yet suspected.

That morning during the session I passed out three times instead of two. And the third time, I remained unconscious long enough for the therapist who accompanied Barbie through the intensive sessions to become concerned. When I came to, I heard Barbie quietly speaking to the doctor. Not yet, she can still withstand it. And that phrase revealed something to me that I needed to know.

There was a physical limit he did not want to cross. Not out of humanity, but out of pragmatism. The dead man doesn’t speak, but he wanted me to speak. This limit existed. And if I hold out long enough, maybe that limit will protect me until it spreads to the other prisoners. After 6 days of the session, the question about the transmitter disappeared from Barbie’s interrogation, replaced by questions about the organizers.

And I knew what this change meant. He received the information elsewhere or made sure the transmitter was out of reach. And some of the weight I’d carried since day one had subtly eased because I’d held out long enough to keep Marcel safe. And now another battle was beginning. to protect the names of the regional leaders I knew, and this new resistance would cost me even more .

Marseille was safe, the transmitter was saved. But Barbie now had a new target in his methodical mind, and the sessions that began as a search for a specific address turned into something more dangerous and large-scale. An attempt by music to map the entire Liberation Sud network through everything I knew: faces, names, meeting places, escape routes, underground printing houses.

And I had enough information in my memory to destroy dozens of lives if I gave up. The first shock was low level, just like he said, a sharp, searing pain that shot through my arms and chest, causing a scream that I tried to hold back. Barbie watched my reaction with the clinical attention that characterized everything he did and said, “Now that’s a two out of ten.

Tolerable, right?” And he put the tongs on the table and repeated his question about the transmitter. I gritted my teeth and repeated, “I don’t know anything.” And he took up the instrument again. The second discharge was at level four, and this time my body jerked convulsively against the straps, and tears gushed from my eyes, not from sadness, but from pure, uncontrollable pain.

He never shouted, he never fussed. He carefully put away his tools. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of the table. He repeated his questions in the same moderate, polite tone. And this complete self-control was the most terrible thing in this room, because it showed, he had been doing this for a long time, that we, the victims, were not people to him, but technical problems that needed to be solved.

The first session lasted two and a half hours, during which I lost consciousness twice. Every time I fainted, the guard would splash me with ice water to bring me back to my senses, and the session would resume. At some point, looking at the light in the room, I realized that the morning had passed and day had come.

So, Marcel had already had 36 hours since my arrest, and this thought gave me something. something to cling to while my body endured what Barbie was putting it through. In the afternoon he took off his gloves, placed them on the table and said: “That’s all for today, Madame Gornet, you have resisted well for the first real session.

We will continue tomorrow, and I advise you to think tonight about the real cost of your courage, because we have time, but your body does not.” And he went out. The guards unbuckled me and dragged me into a van that took me back to Montluc, to my cell. That evening the women greeted me with that special delicacy that develops in people who have all suffered in the same way.

They didn’t ask any questions, they didn’t look at the burns on my hands, they simply gave me a place on the bunk and shared their portion of bread. Arthans tore a piece of her shirt to wrap around my wrists, which were cut by the belts. I didn’t sleep all night, not because of the pain, although it was constant, but because I was obsessively doing calculations.

If Marcel was still in Croirous at that hour, I might have information that still meant something to Barbie. If Marcel had escaped, the transmitter was safe, and I could hold out as long as necessary, because my resistance was no longer protecting an active secret, but protecting a man who might already be free.

On the third morning the van returned, and this time Barbie began the session without polite preamble, without repeated questions. He put on his gloves, picked up his tools and started straight from level five. And my body reacted with a force I no longer controlled. The convulsions shook the entire chair, screams burst out of me against my will.

The next day, a new prisoner named Alice, who had been arrested two days after me, was placed in our cell. That night she whispered to me that before her arrest she had heard on the net that radio operator Iskruarus had received a warning and left Leon with his equipment, that the transmitter was safe somewhere in the Alps.

And this new resistance will cost me even more. Marseille was safe, the transmitter was saved. But Barbie now had a new target in his methodical mind, and the sessions that began as a search for a specific address turned into something more dangerous and large-scale. An attempt by music to map the entire Liberation Sud network through everything I knew: faces, names, meeting places, escape routes, underground printing houses.

And I had enough information in my memory to destroy dozens of lives if I gave up. For his part, Barbie seemed to have lost some interest in me. There were dozens of other prisoners in Montluc and on Rubertelord, agents arrested later who had more recent information about the still-active networks. I felt my information value to him diminishing over time, which was both a relief and a new source of anxiety.

Prisoners that Barbie lost interest in were usually sent to their final fate. One morning in July, the guard didn’t come to take me to the van at Ruberteurt, but brought me an administrative document, a printed sheet with my prisoner number and a note about the planned transfer. When I showed the paper to Artance, she looked at the Purpose column and said Drancy.

And this word Drancy meant a transit camp near Paris, from where convoys departed for the east. My case was closed and Barbie decided I couldn’t give him any more. The last time I saw Barbie was in the corridor of Montluc two days before my departure for Drancy. He was passing by with another officer, discussing something, and he glanced at me without the slightest recognition in his eyes, like he looks at something in the corridor.

And this complete absence of memories of me in his gaze after everything he had done to me made me understand. For him, I was just a case among hundreds. And this indifference was perhaps the most offensive of my entire experience there. The convoy to Drance departed from Leon on a July morning in 1943 in sealed freight cars.

Among the 90 women crammed into my carriage, I bore on my body the visible marks of six weeks on Rubertel. constant trembling of the hands, burn scars on the forearms and something less visible, but just as real. A profound shift in how I existed in my own body, as if the line between me and the pain had been erased forever.

And I will never be able to feel whole and safe within myself again. The Drancy camp near Paris was only a stage. An unfinished workers’ settlement turned into an overcrowded transit camp, where we waited for three weeks in conditions of utter poverty. Before Convoy 59 headed east, I ended up in Ravensbrück in northern Germany, in a women’s concentration camp, where I spent another 22 months.

In Ravensbrück, the physical consequences of my interrogations complicated every aspect of my daily survival. Constant tremors prevented me from working effectively at the Siemens textile factory, where mistakes were punished with blows. Unstable vision caused me to stumble during endless roll calls in the rain or snow.

And the residual pain in my arms made the forced labor a constant torture, layered on top of Barbie’s original torture, as if his work continued to affect me across space and time. I survived thanks to the solidarity of other women in the camp, tiny acts of mutual assistance. a cellmate who covered for me when I couldn’t keep up with the work pace.

Another one who helped me eat when my hands shook too much to hold a mug. And this chain of hidden compassion between women, each of whom had her own wounds, was the only truly human thing in this place. Liberation came in April when the Swedish Red Cross evacuated some prisoners as part of an agreement reached.

The return journey to France by bus through devastated Germany was surreal, as if we were passing through one nightmare into another. And when we finally crossed the French border somewhere in Alsace, and Red Cross nurses greeted us with blankets and hot broth, some of the women around me cried with joy.

But I was unable to cry, unable to feel the relief that I logically should have felt. I later realized that this is called post-traumatic shock, which freezes emotions at the very moment when they should be released. Returning to Leon in May should have been a rebirth, but it was a brutal confrontation with the scale of what I had lost.

During my absence, another family occupied my apartment. My career as a teacher was compromised by a tremor that prevented me from writing properly on the board. My relationship with my own body became alien and conflictual. I would flinch at any sudden sound. I couldn’t use some electrical appliances without panic attacks.

And for many years I remained unable to sit on a metal chair without my heart starting to pound and my hands starting to shake. One October day in 1945, a man came to the door of the room I was renting in the second arrondissement. It was Marcel, the radio operator from Croirous, for whom I held out for 6 weeks. A man I had only seen once, briefly, before my arrest.

He said he heard about what I had been through and came to thank me. We stood in the hallway of my house because I couldn’t invite him in. Not because I did n’t want to, but because I didn’t yet know how to accept someone into my broken life. Marcel told me that the transmitter continued to operate from the Alps until the end of the war, that the information sent to London had facilitated several Allied operations, and that technically my resistance had saved lives.

I nodded, trying to feel something satisfying in these words. But what I felt most was the dizzying distance between this abstract result and the very concrete, very physical memory of the chair on Rubertelort. Marcel left after 20 minutes, and I never saw him again. And that visit left me with a question that I have often asked myself since.

Does the good I have done through my resistance really compensate for the evil my body and mind have suffered? And the honest answer was: “I don’t know, maybe this equation is unsolvable.” The fifties and sixties were decades of quiet survival. I returned to teaching after 2 years of rehabilitation to learn how to control my shaking enough.

I lived alone because the visible and invisible scars made any intimacy impossible. And I didn’t tell anyone about what happened on Rubertel, because the post-war world wanted heroic, pure and simple stories, not unpleasant ones, derby to the reality of torture. All these years Barbie was nowhere to be found. At first he was protected by American intelligence, which he used after the war for his anti-communist informant networks.

He then disappeared to South America under an assumed name. And this prolonged impunity was an additional wound, made more painful by every D-Day commemoration and every memorial ceremony. In 1971, German journalist Beatie Klarsfilt, whose husband Serge had spent years searching for Nazi war criminals, discovered Barbie in Lupas, Bolivia, where he was living under the name Klaus Altmann.

The news traveled through the circles of survivors like an electric shock of a completely different kind than Narubertel. And I read his name in the newspapers with my hands shaking again for the first time in many years. Diplomatic negotiations for his extradition lasted another 12 years, during which time I now knew for sure that he was alive somewhere.

that this is a man who pulled on rubber gloves and picked up his electric tongs with the serenity of a craftsman, tanning in the Bolivian sun and probably living comfortably. And every time I thought about it, I clasped my trembling hands in my lap and asked myself, “What does justice mean?” In 1983, Klaus Barbie was extradited to France and imprisoned in the Lyon September Joseph Prison.

The prosecutor contacted survivors from Montluc and Ruberd to gather evidence for trial for crimes against humanity. And when this prosecutor called me, I immediately agreed, because 40 years of silence taught me that silence is not a defense, but a second imprisonment. The trial began in León in May before the Rhône Assizes. I was seventy-four years old.

My hair was completely white. My hands were still shaking slightly. And when I walked into the courtroom and saw Barbie sitting in the dock, I experienced something I didn’t expect. Not fear and not exactly rage, but some kind of temporary dizziness, because the man I saw was old, drooping, wearing glasses, and moving with difficulty.

And somewhere inside me, a part of me retained the image of Barbie from 1943: precise, smiling, in control of everything. And seeing this decrepit, defeated version, I experienced a short circuit in my memory. I testified for 2 hours. I described the sessions on Rubertel with as much precision as my memory allowed.

I showed the court the scars still visible on my forearms decades later and explained that those scars were just the visible part of the damage that had spread to everything I was, to the way I slept, the way I moved, the way I related to others, the way I existed in a body that had been used as a tool by another person.

During my testimony, Barbie looked away or consulted documents. At one point, his lawyer tried to imply that my memories, after all these years, were unreliable. I simply replied that the trembling in my hands began on Rubertel and never completely stopped throughout 1944. What my body remembers, even when my memory would like to forget.

In July 1987, Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum penalty under French law. He died in prison four years later, in 1991, from cancer. And when I learned of his death, I began to search within myself for a specific emotion: relief, satisfaction, even joy. But what I found was more ambiguous and more honest.

Deep fatigue and something like incomplete closure. Like a book you close knowing you didn’t like the ending, but it’s still finished. Today I am 6 years old and I live in León, in the same area where I was arrested in June 1943. I still teach 2 hours a week at District 3 Elementary School. Because teaching is the only thing that has connected me to a normal life all these decades.

About 15. Note. The text says five, but historically larger numbers appear. Left as is, women were interrogated using electric shocks at Montluc and Rubertelort between 1942 and 1944. Many of them died either under torture or in deportation, and those who survived bear consequences that medical reports cannot fully describe because there is no medical dictionary precise enough to name what torture does inside a human being.

I want you to understand, before my voice disappears, three things that forty-four years of reflection have taught me. First, that torture does not produce reliable information but guarantees a certain amount of destruction, which Barbie knew and did not care because destruction was perhaps his goal as much as information.

Secondly, that justice is possible even after four decades, but it always comes too late to fix what is broken. And this truth should not dissuade us from pursuing it, but it obliges us to be honest about its limits. And thirdly, that women of resistance have often been celebrated in memorials for their abstract bravery without anyone taking a close look at the specific physical and psychological costs of this heroism.

And this economy of truth is a form of partial respect that does not truly honor those we claim to honor. My name is Suzanne Garnier. I held out for six weeks on Rubertel so that a man named Marcel could hide his transmitter. I carried the marks of those weeks in my body and mind for the rest of my life.

I waited until 1944 for justice to render its verdict. And I am still here to tell you that all this happened, that we existed, and that our existence deserves to be known in all its complexity, and not just in its heroic and simplified version. Yes. M.