French prisoners reduced to “objects” — facing fascinated German soldiers…

 

 

 

I was 16 when I learned that he There are things worse than death. I My name is Jeanne Lemine, I am 78 years old and for 62 years I didn’t say a word about what happened in this place. Not because I lacked courage, but because no one would have believed. Today, sitting here in my house around 10 days facing a camera for the first time in my life, I wonder if there is still time, if it still matters.

But then I remember, if I don’t tell now no one will tell because that I was one of the last. It was October 1943. France had been occupied for three years. I lived with my mother and my little one brother in a village near Bone, in heart of Burgundy. My father was died in 1940, from the first days of the invasion.

We grew apples earth, turnips, everything that could grow in this hard soil and cold. I went to school when it was possible. I dreamed of becoming teacher. But war does not ask for what you dream. This October morning, two soldiers Germans appeared at our door. They didn’t shout, they didn’t have anything broken.

They simply said that I had to accompany them for a document verification. My mother has squeezed my hand. I saw the fear in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. Not in front of them. I never saw him again. Sometimes when I talk about all this, the people ask me where I get my strength to continue. I answer for certainty that someone somewhere needs to hear.

If you listen to me now, wherever you are from, know that your presence here already means something. Leave a comment, tell us where you’re looking at us from because that these stories cannot die in silence. I was taken to a facility German which does not appear on any official map of the time, nor in the French archives, nor in the German archives captured after the war. But I was there.

She found herself about 40 kilometers north of Dijon, hidden in a rural property which once belonged to a family winemaker. The Germans had it requisitioned in 1942. They surrounded everything with barbelets, built wooden barracks the rear, installed projectors which remained lit all night. Officially, the place did not exist not, but we, the women who were in there, we knew very well that he existed.

When I arrived, there had around 30 prisoners. The Most were between 14 and 20 years old. Some were accused of resistance. Others like me, simply found the wrong place, at the wrong time or had the wrong name or face. The first days, I still believed that I would be released, that someone would notice the mistake, that my mother would find a way to get me out of there.

But then I met Simone. Simon was 22 years old, dark hair, tall eyes, hands always cold. She was there for almost a year when I am arrival. It was she who explained to me the rules. Here you are no longer a person, she said to me gently first night. You are a number, an object. And more the sooner you accept this, the easier it will be to survive.

I didn’t understand about the moment, but Simone was right. We We all received a number when we arrived. Mine was 40. They sewed a piece of white fabric on the sleeve of my dress with this number embroidered in black. I quickly learned that when they called the number, I had 5 seconds to answer. If I didn’t answer, I received a baton blow in the back. I never failed to respond.

The routine was always the same. We we woke up at five in the morning to the shrill whistle sound. We formed wires outside the barracks, even in the rain, even in the snow. An officer was doing the counting. Then we were taken to work. The work varied. Some days we washed the soldiers’ uniforms. Other days, we were peeling potatoes in the kitchen.

Sometimes we were ordered to dig ditches or carry bags of cement. Nothing that we What we did didn’t really matter. The goal was to keep us busy, to control, to break. But the worst part wasn’t the work, the the worst was the looks. I noticed from the first weeks that there was soldiers looking at us indifferently. Not with hatred, not with indifference, but with something that I didn’t know not named at the time.

Today I know what it was. It was from the obsession. They watched us while we were working. They remained standing near the fences, smoking, talking among themselves, but still with eyes on us. Some Advent their favorite. I saw when a soldier fixed his gaze on a girlspecific day after day. He memorized his movements, learned his schedules, waited and then one night this girl disappeared.

The first time it happened, it was with a girl named Hélène. She was ten years old, blonde, blue eyes, delicate face. A German lieutenant began to follow her with the gaze of weeks after his arrival. “Simon has it noticed before me. He’s going to take it”, she said to me one evening while we were lying on our beds board.

“Take it where?” Did I asked. Simone did not respond. Very few time later, Helene was called by his number after curfew. Two guards entered the barracks, pointed towards her and said: “Come!” She came out in trembling, she came back before dawn. She didn’t speak to anyone. She lay down in bed, turned the face towards the wall and remained like that for two whole days.

When she finally started speaking again, his words were rare, broken. empty. Simon told me said, “Now she belongs to him.” I didn’t completely understand what that meant, but I started to to be afraid because I too was observed. There was a soldier. His name was Klaus. I never knew his name of family. He was young, maybe twenty or so twenty years old, tall, thin, hair whites cut short.

He had a way to walk that seemed studied, controlled and he looked at me. At the beginning, I tried to ignore. I did pretending not to notice, but it was impossible. He was always there when I carried wood, when I washed the dishes, when we formed the line for the morning count. He never said anything. He looked simply. Simon warned me.

Never look at him in return, never. Because if you look, he will think you are interested and then it will be worse. I obeyed. I have kept his eyes down. I walked slowly. I breathed deeply. I tried to become invisible, but Klaus continued to look at me. One evening, he appeared at our door barracks. He didn’t come in. He is just stood there, holding a lantern, lighting up our faces one by one.

When the light came upon me, it arrested. He enlightened me for long seconds. I felt my heart beat so hard I thought it was going to explode. Then he put out the lantern and left. Simon squeezed my hand the darkness. He’s deciding, she said. whispered. He doesn’t know yet if he’s going choose you, but he thinks about it.

What is this what do I do? I asked, feeling the tears streaming down my face. Nothing, she replied. You can’t do anything. Over the next few days, Klaus began to bring me things, small ones things, a piece of white bread, a apple, a liver, a clean handkerchief. He left the objects near me when no one was looking.

He didn’t say never anything. He simply posed the object there and left again. The others girls noticed it. Some me looked with envy, others with pity. Simone told me: “He’s courting you in his own way. This means that he thinks that you are special, but that means also that you are in danger.” For what ? Because if you accept the gifts, it will think you want.

And if you refuse, he may feel rejected and a soldier rejected is unpredictable. I didn’t know what to do. So, I accepted gifts. But I don’t never thanked. I didn’t look at him never. I never spoke. I have tried to remain neutral, invisible, without emotion. But he kept coming. And then one night he called me. It was mid-December.

Snow was falling outside. The barracks was freezing. I was lying there, trying to sleep when I heard the door open up. I heard footsteps. I have heard my number. I raised my head. Klaus stood at the entrance, the lantern by hand. Come, he said. Simon has squeezed my hand one last time. I have felt his nails digging into my skin.

Then I got up and followed Klaus out of the barracks. He told me taken to a small building stone at the rear of the property. Before, it must have been a wine cellar. Now it was empty except for one wooden table, two chairs and a lamp to oil. Klaus closed the door behind us. I stayed standing trembling, not from cold, from fear.

He looked at me for a long time. Then finally he spoke. Sit down. I sat down. He took out something something from his coat pocket. It was a photograph. He put it down on the table in front of me. She’s my sister, he said. Is she your age? 16 years old. I looked at the photo. She was a young blonde girl, smiling, holding a dog in his arms.

“She’s in Berlin,” continued Klaus. I haven’t seen him in two years. He remained silent looking at the photo. Then he looked at me. You remind me of her? I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. My body was stiff, my empty mind. Klaus pulled the chair closer. He sat down in front of me. His eyes were fixed on mine.

Are you afraid of me? he asked. I didn’t answer. He a mouse. A sad smile, almost melancholy. It’s okay to be afraid. Here, fear keep alive. He watched me again moment, then he got up, walking to the door and opened it. You can go back. I got up, legs trembling and I went out current. When I returned to barracks, Simon was waiting for me awake.

“What did he do?” did she asked. Nothing, I replied. He just spoken. Simone frowns. It’s worse, she said, because it means that he idealizes you and when reality will not correspond to its fantasy. She did not finish the sentence. She didn’t need it. I already knew. That night was not the first of many others.

Klaus has started calling me regularly, always late, always alone, always in this same stone room. Sometimes he just wanted to talk. He told about his sister, his mother, the city where he had grown up. He showed pictures, read extracts from letters that he received from home. Other times he remained silent.

He was watching me just as if he was trying to understand something that even he doesn’t didn’t know. I never spoke. I listened, I remained still. I was waiting for him to send me away and he always returned. But I knew that it wouldn’t last forever. Simon told me, he is getting ready, he builds something in his head, a story, a fantasy.

And when this fantasy will collapse, you will perish for that. She was right. Klaus was not in love with me. He was in love with the idea of me, of the girl he wanted that I am. the lost sister, the memory from home, the innocence that war had stolen from him and I couldn’t be all that. I was just a prisoner. Number 48.

A scared girl freezing in a barracks in occupied France. But Klaus didn’t want to see that. He wanted to see something else and that terrified more than any violence because I knew that when he would finally realize the truth, that would there be any left of me? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Today, sixty years later, when I close my eyes I still see this stone piece.

I still feel the cold. I still hear Klaus’ voice saying my number. And I wonder what’s worse? destroyed by a blow or be slowly disassembled piece piece by piece until there is nothing left nothing. If I don’t tell now, no one will tell because it exists things worse than death. And I have experienced all these things.

Jeanne Lemoine has survived. But what Klaus did to her in the following weeks changed to never his way of understanding the world, power and human fragility. What happened in this room stone when Klaus’ fantasy took over finally collapsed? And how Jeanne Did she find the strength to continue to live when everything in her was already dead ? The answer lies in the next parts of this story.

A story that remained buried for over 60xante and who now finally maybe told. There are things that the body doesn’t forget never, even when the mind tries desperate to fade away. Years after that January night 1944, I can still feel Klaus’ hands on my shoulders. Still hear the sound of his irregular breathing against my ear.

still see the trembling glow of the kerosene lamp which transformed this stone cellar into a theater of shadow and nightmare. That evening, when he learned that his sister was died under the rubble of a shelter Berlin, something broke in him. And this something, this crack in his already fragile humanity is became my prison for weeks following.

When I returned to barracks that night, he had to be 4 a.m. cold bit my skin through the dress blue that he forced me to wear, the one with the little embroidered flowers which had probably belonged to a French woman whom they had arrested or killed. My lips were swollen, my legs were shaking so much that I barely managed to walk to my mattress straw.

Simon was awake like always, waiting for my return with this expression mixed with relief and of deep sadness that she reserved on the nights when one of us returned from a summons. She didn’t say anything, she simply opened my arms and I collapsed against her, silent because that even the tears no longer came. I was empty as if everything made me Jeanne had been snatched and thrown into an abyss where I could never get it back.

Simon hasstroked my hair while whispering words that I didn’t really hear but whose gentleness was the only something that still attached me to the idea that it existed somewhere in this world devastated by war. A shape of tenderness which required nothing in return. The following days were unfolded in a sort of mist. I stood up when we whistled.

I formed the line for counting. I was working where I was told to work, but I was elsewhere. My body was moving, obeyed, functioned. But my mind had retired to a dark place and silent where Klaus could not touch, where war did not exist, where I was still that 16 year old girl who dreamed of teaching in a small school village.

But Klaus wouldn’t let me not peaceful. He called me now, almost every night, sometimes twice a night and each time, it was worse than the previous one. He had crossed a barrier this night January and now there was no more limit, no more rules, no more boundaries between what he wanted and what that he was taking. He touched me with a familiarity that made me sick.

He kissed me like if I were his girlfriend, his fiancé, as if we were two people who loved each other freely and not a soldier German and a French prisoner which he had at his disposal. He spoke to me about the future, about what would do after the war, how he would take me to Germany, how I would meet his mother, how we live together in a small house in Stuttgart.

And the most terrifying, is that he really believed in what he said. In his head, I had become a character in a story that he told himself to survive the horror of war. I was the young innocent girl who had saved him. I was the replacement sister who would fill the void left by that that he had lost. I was the proof that he was not a monster, that he was capable of love, protection, kindness.

But I was nothing of all this. I was just a child terrified who wanted to find her mother, who wanted to go home, who wanted all this to stop. Simon was trying to give me advice. She told me to play the game, to make him believe that I was grateful, that I appreciated it. because as long as he saw me as precious, he would protect from other soldiers.

He me would give food extra, it would keep me alive. Use it, she said. Use his obsession to survive. It’s the only one weapon you have. But I couldn’t. Every time he touched me, every time he murmured, these sweet words which should have come from a lover, but which came from a prettyer, I felt something die inside me.

A little piece of dignity. A fragment of humanity, a spark of hope. In February 1944, things got worse in a way that I could never have imagined. Klaus has started asking me to do things, little things at first. He wanted me to read him the letters from his sister whom he kept in a box metal. He wanted me to wear his clothes, those she had left behind the house and which he had taken with him.

He wanted me to sing the songs she sang, even though I don’t didn’t know the words, even if my voice trembled so much that the notes came out broken and false. And then, he started calling me by the name his sister. Greta he said. Sing for me, Greta. The first time I thought that he had made a mistake, but then he repeated it again and again.

Greta always Greta. He didn’t see me no longer like Jeanne at all. I wasn’t no longer number 48. I had become the ghost of his dead sister. A living illusion he had created not to face the reality of his loss. One evening he brought me a doll. A old porcelain doll with blonde hair and a faded pink dress. He handed it to me with an almost smile.

childish. It was hers, he said, she loved her when she was little. Now she’s yours. I took the doll because refuse would have been dangerous. But hold this object in my hands, this child’s toy which had belonged to a dead girl whom I had never met, but in which I was supposed to transform, it was unbearable. Klaus sat down across from me and looked at with a tenderness that froze me the blood.

You look so much like him when you hold this doll”, he whispered, exactly like her at age 1. “At this that moment, I understood that Klaus wasn’t just obsessed. He was crazy. The war had broken him inside and now he was trying to put the pieces back together using my body, my face, my presence like cement to seal the cracks in its fractured psyche. But the worst isarrived one night in mid-February.

Klaus took me to the cellar like usually, but this time he had brought something. a device photo, an old German model with a brass lens and a flash which crackled when he took a photo. “I want to remember you,” he said. said, “I want to have something when This will all be over.” He made me stand against the wall, sitting on the chair, holding the doll, wearing her sister’s dress, hair loose as she wore them.

Each flash was like a neck, every click of the shutter was recording. not who I really was, but who he wanted that I am. And then he asked me to smile. Mouse, Greta like on the old photos. I tried. I forced my lips to curve, my cheeks to rise. But what came out was not a smile, it was a grimace of pain, a mask of evil terror disguised.

Klaus frowned. No and no, it’s not like that. You must look happy. You must have seems to love me. He came closer. He touched my face. He used his thumbs to push the corners of my mouth up like that. So. Perfect. And he took another photo. That night when I came home, Simon looked at me and immediately knew that something had changed.

She has saw something in my eyes, a extinction, a resignation which does not wasn’t before. “He’s going to kill you”, she said softly. Maybe not physically, maybe not all of suite, but he will destroy you piece piece by piece until there is nothing left nothing. And when he’s finished, when he will have completely transformed reality of who you are in whose fiction he wants you to be, he will throw you away because that even his madness will have its limits.

So what do I do? Did I asked the broken voice? Simon squeezed my hand. You survive day after day, night after night. You remember who you are really. You keep a little piece of Jeanne hidden so deep inside you that he can’t reach it. And you wait because this war will not last not forever. The allies are advancing.

I hear the guards talking about it. They have afraid and when they are afraid, they will make mistakes. And in these errors, maybe there will be a chance. Mars is arrived with a cold rain which transformed the courtyard into thick mud. The news of the war filtered through slowly towards us through the surprise conversations between soldiers, through the changes in the atmosphere of the camp.

The Germans were nervous. The bombings allies were intensifying. The lines of supplies were cut off. Some things changed but for me nothing was changing. Klaus kept calling me, kept transforming me into Gretta, continued to live in his illusion until the day the illusion faded cracked. It was early April. Klaus called me as usual, but when I arrived in the cellar, he was different, agitated.

His hands were trembling, his eyes were red, bloodshot. “Sit down,” he said. ordered. “I sat down. He took out a letter from his pocket, another letter from his mother, I assumed?” But he doesn’t didn’t read it. He just held her, staring as if it contained secrets he didn’t want to know. “Then he looked up at me.

“You you’re not her,” he said suddenly. “my heart stopped. You are not Greta. You will never be Greta. You are just a French woman, a prisoner, nothing. He got up and started to take the steps in the small room. I tried, I really tried to transform into her, to see you as her. But you’re not good enough.

You don’t don’t sing like her. You don’t smile like her. You’re not He stopped. He looked at me with a mixed expression. of disgust and despair. You are nothing. I should have been relieved. I should have been happy that the illusion breaks, that Klaus finally sees the truth. But at that moment I understood what Simon had tried to tell me say.

An obsessed, dangerous man, but a man whose obsession is collapsing is deadly. Cloud approached me. He grabbed my face forcefully, his fingers digging into my cheeks. “Why can’t you be her?” he shouted. “Why can’t you just be what I need?” His hands moved to my neck. Not squeezing, not yet, but they were there, trembling, hesitant between violence and restraint.

I closed my eyes, I waited and then suddenly he let go of me, he backed away, he collapsed on the chair. He buried his face in his hands and started to cry. Big ones heartbreaking sobs collide all sound body. I’m sorry. he whispered between tears. I am so sorry for everything, for what I have you done, for what this war has done to usall transformed.

I stayed motionless. I didn’t know if it was real or just another manipulation. Then Klaus raised his head and looked. “Go on,” he said softly, hurry up before I do something that I couldn’t undo.” I got up. My legs were shaking so much that I could barely walk. And don’t come back, he added.

I won’t call you anymore, that’s finished. I came out of this cellar to last time. For two weeks, Klaus didn’t call. He didn’t have me watched during the counts. He didn’t tell me did not bring a present. It was as if I had ceased to exist for him. Simon told me I had to be careful, that this silence was perhaps more dangerous than obsession, that Klaus could turn against me at all moment.

But I dared to hope, hope that it was really over, that I had survived. And then on April 24, 1944, everything has changed. Allied bombers are came. They attacked the neighboring town, destroying railway tracks, bridges, supply depots. The camp entered a state of alert. The soldiers were running in all directions. The officers shouting orders contradictory.

Chaos has set in and in this chaos, Simon saw our chance. It is now, she told me, the eyes shining with a determination that I had never seen before. It’s now or never. This that night as the alarms blared and the soldiers were distracted, Simon and I, with three other girls, cut the mesh at the back of the camp and we fled into the forest.

We ran all night, stumbling on the roots, scratched by the branches, the heart beating so hard that we thought it was going to explode. Behind us we heard the barking dogs. The soldiers shouted, the Gunshots pierced the darkness. But we didn’t stop. Two challenges were caught before dawn. We we heard their cry, then the blows of fire, then silence.

But Simon and I continued. We walked for three days hiding in abandoned barns, drinking water streams, eating roots and bays that Simon identified as edible thanks to the knowledge of his peasant grandfather. And finally, exhausted, hungry, half dead, we reached a village controlled by the French resistance. We were free, but freedom, I learned, do not erase what has been done.

She doesn’t does not heal invisible wounds. It does not render the pieces of yourself that have been stolen. Simon and I survived the war. We saw the liberation in August 1944. We saw the Germans fight retirement. We saw the flags French float again in the cities. But we never spoke of what had happened to us in this camp.

Nobody asked us questions. The French partisans who found us, dirty, hungry, half scared to death, gave us hot soup, blankets and a place to sleep. But they don’t have asked what had happened to us. Maybe because he already knew, maybe because he didn’t want to know. Simon and I stayed together during the following months we moving from village to village, helping resistance as we could, wash clothes, prepare meals, carry messages.

We don’t let’s never talk about Klaos. We don’t let’s never talk about this camp which did not exist on the maps. We don’t We never talked about the nights in this stone cellar. But at night when everything the world was sleeping, I saw Simon wake up sweaty, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling as if she was reliving something that she never could never express in words.

And I knew she saw me doing it same thing. In June 1944 we heard that the allies had landed in Normandy. Hope began to flow like a shy whisper, becoming more and more strong every day. The Germans were retreating. The cities were liberated one by one, the France was reborn. But for me, nothing was reborn because than the girl I had been before October 1943, the one who dreamed of being a teacher, the one who sang while helping her mother hang out the laundry, the one who still believed that the world made sense, this girl was dead

in this cellar and the one that had survived didn’t know who she was. In August 194, when Paris was liberated, Simon and I were in a small village near Bone. The church bells were ringing, people were shouting in the streets, French flags flew everywhere. Simon looked at me with tears in the eyes. “It’s over,” she said.

“We survived. We are free.” I nodded but I didn’t feel not free because Klaus was stillthere in my head, in my nightmares, in every man who looked at me too much long, in every German voice that I heard by chance, in every moment when someone touched my shoulder without warning, I looked for my mother.

I walked to my village, with a beating heart, hoping against hope that she would be there, she would be waiting for me. But when I arrived, our house was empty. The neighbors told me that she died in February 1944 of pneumonia alone while whispering my name until his last breath. My little brother Pierre had been sent to cousins in the south.

He was 11 years. When I found him, he didn’t not recognized immediately. I had changed so much. We are kissed. He cried, me too. But we didn’t know what to say to each other because that what we had experienced during these years had transformed us into strangers one for the other. Simone left for Paris in September.

She wanted start again, forget, build a new life. We said to ourselves see you again on the platform of a small station. She hugged me for long time. “Never forget who you are really,” she whispered. Don’t let not what they made you define everything your life. And you ? I asked. She has smiled sadly. I will try to forget, even if I know it’s impossible.

It was the last time I saw. I learned years later that she committed suicide in 1953. She was 31 years old. During the 60 years that followed, I tried to live normally. I married a nice man who didn’t pose too many questions questions. I had two children. I have worked as a secretary in a school. I smiled when necessary.

I pretended to be happy. But every night I returned to this cellar. Every night I heard Klaus call me Greta. Every night I felt his hands on my face, rearranging my smile like I was a doll. And now, in 2005, sitting in front this camera at 78 years old, I wonder what that happened to Klaus. Did he survive war? Did he return to Germany? Has he rebuilt his life? Is he married? Did he have children? Did he grow old in peace? Or did he die somewhere leaves for the German retreat in carrying his obsession with him into the

falls? I will never know and maybe it’s better this way. What I know, it’s only hundreds, maybe thousands of sons like me experienced the same thing in camps which do not appear on any map, in cellars that have never been documented, under the hands of soldiers whose names have never been spoken during trials.

We were the invisible, the forgotten, the women whose the suffering did not correspond to the official account of the war. And the most of us died without never having spoken. But I speak now because if I don’t not, who will? I am often asked why I waited six years to talk, why didn’t I say anything after release, during trials, when the journalists looked for testimonies about camps, prisons, the atrocities.

The answer is simple and terrible. Nobody wanted to hear this kind of story. After the war, France wanted heroes, courageous resistance fighters, glorious martyrs. We wanted to hear talk about the men who had done jumping trains, women who had hidden Jewish children. We don’t didn’t want to hear about girls like me. Girls who had survived in a way they had ashamed to speak.

Girls who had wore a dead woman’s dress. girls who let a soldier call them by another name. girls who had not resisted because to resist meant dying. When I returned to my village in September 1944, people looked at me strangely. Some with pity, others with suspicion. Some whispered behind my back. How did she survive? What did she do to stay alive? These questions followed me everywhere.

She weighed no heavier than anyone what a direct accusation. So I learned to lie by omission. When people asked me where I had been during the occupation, I simply said in a camp of work. When people asked me what was there passing, I replied “We let’s work.” It was hard but I survived.

And the people with their heads, satisfied with this simple answer which does not did not force them to face the horrible complexity of what it is to survive really meant. In 1947, I met Henry. He was a carpenter older than me, widower without children. He was kind, patient and above all he didn’t ask questions. We got married in 1948. Our wedding night was a nightmare.

When he touched me, I saw Klaos again. When he kissed me, I felt thecold hands in the stone cellar. I cried silently in darkness while Henry slept next to me, probably wondering why his new wife was shaking like a leaf. But over time, I learned to compartmentalize, to be present without really being there, to work.

I had two children, Marie in 1950, Jean in 1953. I loved them fiercely, desperately, as if giving them all the love that I had not received, I could to repair what had happened to me. During For decades I carried this secret alone. Henry died in 1982 without ever find out what really happened to me. My children grew up thinking that their mother was simply a woman ordinary who had experienced the war as millions more.

But in 2003, something has changed. A French historian named Laurent Mercier published a book on undocumented detention centers during the occupation. He had found fragments of documents, scattered testimonies, evidence that these places had existed, even if it did not appear on no official map. He was looking for survivors.

I read his book and for the first time times in sixty years, I understood that I was not alone, that there had been other girls, other cellars, other clauses. I contacted Laurent Mercier. We met in a cafe in Dijon. I was 76 years old. My hands were shaking holding my cup of tea. He listened to me for four hours.

He did not judge, he did not questioned, he just listened. And at the end, he said something to me that changed my life. Your story matters. It has always mattered and it must be told. This is how I find myself here today in 2005 in front of this camera. Laurent convinced me that my testimony could help other women to speak, that each story told made the untold stories a little less heavy lifts.

So I speak for Simone who could not survive the weight of this silence, for Hélène and all other girls in this camp. for the hundreds of women whose names do not will never be known and for the young 16 year old Jeanne who just wanted to be teacher and who has never had this luck. There’s a question I’ve never been asked posed directly but which I see in people’s eyes when I tell my story history.

How can you forgive ? The truth is I don’t forgive not. I don’t forgive Klaus for transformed my body into a receptacle of his sorrow. I don’t forgive the officers Germans who created this ghost camp. I do not forgive those who after the war preferred to erase these stories rather than confronting their complexity. But I learned to live with what happened to me.

I learned that survival is not a shame. What do you need to do to stay in life, even when it means losing pieces of oneself is not a betrayal is strength. My children watched this recording after my death in 2012. My daughter Marie told me years ago late that she had cried for hours, that she finally understood why did I sometimes have this look distant, why do certain noises remind me startled, why didn’t I I couldn’t stand being touched without prevent.

You were so strong, mom, she told me the last time we spoken, stronger than I will be never. But I don’t feel strong, I feel just surviving. And there is a big difference. In 2008, 3 years after this recording, Laurent Mercier published a second book. He included my testimony as well than those of six other women who finally found the courage to speak.

The book created a small scandal in France. Some historians have challenged our stories, saying there wasn’t enough documentary evidence. Others have accused us of exaggeration, of confusion, of mixing up our memories with fiction. But for every voice who denied us, there was a woman who contacted Laurent saying “Me too, It happened to me too.

” The center of detention where I was held finally located in 2010. It had become a winery after the war. The current owner knew nothing of its history. Laurent suggested that I go back and see the place one last time. I have refused. I already carry this place within me every day. I don’t need it physically see again to remember.

If you listen to me now in twenty years after I recorded these words, know this. The official history of the war is incomplete. It is filled with holes, with silence, of stories that we preferred not to tell because they were too complicated, too ambiguous, too disturbing. We, the women who survived these ghost camps, we are its holesin history we are his silences, but we are not invisible.

Not if you choose to see us. Klaus, wherever he is now, dead or alive, does not define not who I am. This camp does not define who I am. I am Jean Leemoine, daughter of Jean and Marguerite Lemoine, sister of Pierre, mother of Marie and Jean, grandmother of five grandchildren who carry within them a resilience that they do not maybe don’t understand yet, but which comes from me, from what I have survived, because I refused to let it destroy me completely.

My last thought recorded here in 2005, 7 years before my death is this one. If you have experienced something that you can’t say, something that burns you from the inside, something that the world refuses to hear, know that your silence does not protect you. It consumes you. Speak even if your voice trembles, although no one seems listen, even if it takes six years because your story matters, it has always counted and it must be told.

My name is Jeanne Lemoine. I was 16 years old when they took me away. I have 78 now. And finally, finally, I can tell the truth. Jeanne Lemoine is died in March in Dijon France. Sound testimony as well as those of 23 others women were finally recognized officially in 2015 by the French government as proof documentary of the existence of centers of unlisted detention during occupation.

A memorial was erected on the site of the former camp in 2018. The Jeanne’s name is engraved there, as well as those of all women who do not have never been able to tell their story. The story of Jeanne Leemoine is not only a testimony of the past. It’s a mirror that forces us to look at what that humanity is capable of when power meets obsession.

When war transforms men ordinary in beauty of the soul, when the silence becomes accomplice, for 62 years, Jeanne wore this burden alone, enclosing his memories in the darkest corners of his mind until that day in 2005 when she finally found the courage to break silence. A few years later, she is part carrying with her the details that we will never know.