Hold on and don’t cry – a secret Nazi experiment on French women
On January 23, 1943, at 4:00 a.m., when the darkness on Draven with Trousers was so thick that it seemed as if the air itself had frozen, Roxana Volkova stood in line for roll call. Her feet, chapped by the cold, already felt the ice under her soles. She could taste the blood and the broken nose of a woman in the next barracks, but she didn’t turn around.
That day, unlike the others, the doctor with gold-rimmed glasses, whom everyone simply called Doctor, walked past the first three rows without looking up and stopped right in front of her. He looked at her hands, roughened by forced labor, her fingers blackened by frostbite, and wrote something down in his notebook.
Then he gave a short signal to the guard. Roxanne didn’t know what it meant, but when her number was called over the loudspeaker along with twelve others, she felt something break inside her. They were taken not to the workshop, as usual, but to a brick building at the far end of the camp, with boarded-up windows and a door that could only be opened from the inside.
Behind this door began what historians would later call pseudo-medical experiments on civilian prisoners. But for Roxana at that very moment it meant only one thing: the end. Roxana was born in a village in Burgundy to a family of school teachers. She grew up between a village school and fields in a land where people prepared not for war, but for life.
When the Germans occupied their region in 1940, her father was arrested for helping resistance fighters cross the demarcation line. He died in custody a few weeks later. Her mother died from the harsh realities of war and hardship in the winter of 1941. Roxana was arrested not as a combatant, but as a suspect. During the search, a coded message intended for the local resistance network was found in her bag, but she did not have time to destroy it.
Initially sent to a transit camp. She was later deported to Ravensbrück, the largest women’s concentration camp in the Third Reich. Among the thousands of women who arrived from all over Europe, a significant group were French. But some of them, young and healthy, considered salvageable, attracted the special attention of the SS doctors.
The logic was cold and methodical. to test the limits of the female body under extreme stress in order to adapt these data to the needs of the German army. But the lack of endurance was studied, the exact point at which a woman ceases to be human was studied. Roxana was kept under observation during the first week. Every mo
rning at 6:00 a.m. she was awakened and taken to a white room where two orderlies measured her temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, recording everything in thick logbooks. They didn’t speak, didn’t answer, didn’t look her in the eye. At first she thought about the medical commission. She might be sent to the infirmary.
But in the second week everything changed. She was taken to the basement. There were 10 bathtubs filled with ice water. “Come in,” said the doctor. Roxana entered. The shock was instantaneous. The water took my breath away. 3 minutes, then five, then 10. The doctor walked around her, examined her skin, touched her limbs, and checked his stopwatch.
When her body stopped shaking and began to come to its senses, she was pulled out. wrapped and measured again. They measured everything: heart rate, loss of consciousness, recovery time. In the third week, heat was added. After the ice, she was taken to a room where an open stove was burning. Take off your clothes! She stood by the fire while he recorded sweating, temperature, skin reaction, then ice again, then fire again. four cycles per day.
Soon Roxana could no longer distinguish between hot and cold. Her skin became covered in purple spots. Her hair fell out, her nails peeled, but the worst thing happened somewhere else. First she forgot names, then faces, then her mother’s face. One day she stopped recognizing even herself. The doctor noticed.
He smiled and made a note. Disorientation and memory loss with sudden changes in temperature. Interesting. Among the twelve women selected with her was An, an eight-year-old Parisian nurse and former midwife. She was a quick learner. During the first bath, she whispered to Roxanne: “Breathe slowly, don’t resist. Pretend you’re not there anymore.
” This advice saved lives. An became their support. She knew how to pretend to lose consciousness, how to slow her breathing, how to get a few hours of respite. She spoke about her son, who was sent to live with his cousins in the unoccupied zone before his arrest. “He will survive,” she said. “As long as I hold on, he grows.
” There was also Lucy, 20, from Britain, an artist before the war. She secretly sketched what she saw on scraps of canvas: baths, doctors’ fire. Someday someone will see this, she muttered. Natalie, a former physical education teacher, was forced to run around the icy courtyard in her nightgown until she collapsed. She ran because she knew she had to stop. means to die.
And then there was Elin, 18, almost silent. One night, when Roxana was delirious with fever, Elin placed her cold hand on her forehead. It was the first human touch in weeks. Then she whispered, “My grandmother used to say that French women don’t die here. They wait.” What Roxane and her friends suffered wasn’t an isolated case of the cruelty of a few psychopaths.
It was policy, integrated into a program the Nazis domestically called Operation Western Front. In Berlin, at the Institute for Racial Hygiene, Dr. Sigmund Raschk wrote reports on the ability of French prisoners of war to withstand extreme climatic conditions, cold and heat, which German soldiers barely managed to endure during long campaigns.
This research was funded directly by Himmler, who was convinced that understanding the resistance mechanisms of the French civilian population, accustomed to food rationing, occupation, and silent endurance, would optimize the survival of the Reich’s troops.
Hundreds of similar experiments were conducted in camps scattered across occupied Europe. The Voswien team tested the effects of Futsgen on Polish prisoners of war. Before the show, Italian prisoners of war were inoculated with malaria. At Ravensbrück, French women served as models for a study of extreme thermal shock. Every morning, a doctor collected data and transmitted it via an encrypted line to Berlin.
There, they plotted graphs, calculated averages, and wrote conclusions. The conclusions were simple. The French women’s bodies withstood the cold longer than expected. But that didn’t mean they were in their best shape. It meant they could be made to suffer longer. This information wasn’t just used to train soldiers. It was applied to improving interrogation and torture techniques.
After the war, archives revealed documents detailing how to expose a person to cold without causing instant death. These methods were used during interrogations in the camps. Roxana and her friends weren’t just victims, they were prototypes. Their suffering became a kind of guide. The first turning point came at the end of February.
The doctor announced that the experiment was entering a new phase. From now on, the speech It wasn’t just about enduring the cold and heat, but learning how to do it. Every woman had to learn to control her breathing to slow her heartbeat. It wasn’t a test, but training. He wanted French women to teach German soldiers how to survive.
Anne, the nurse, understood immediately. They want us to be their instructors. Then they will kill us to destroy the evidence. She proposed a plan: find knowledge, move forward slowly, pretend to be a failure, buy time. But the doctor foresaw this; he began to threaten. If you don’t succeed within a week, your children, the ones you talk about at night, will suffer the same fate.
The second turning point came in March. One night, after a particularly painful menstruation, seventeen-year-old Eline from Normandy didn’t wake up. She simply stopped moving. A doctor came, examined her, and declared: “Organic amnesia with a fatal outcome.” He was satisfied. It was the first death officially attributed to thermal shock.
He ordered that the body not be removed but kept in a cold storage room for an autopsy. Roxanne watched as frost formed on her hair . The third turning point came in April. Lucy, an artist, was caught with her drawings. The doctor personally entered the barracks, tore her robe and found the hidden canvas.
He didn’t get angry, he smiled. “ Okay,” he said. From now on, you will draw what I tell you to draw. He asked her to depict women in baths, but not as they really were. He demanded that she smile, be relaxed, as if she were at a health resort. Lucy refused. Then he placed his hand on the burning patch of hair and pressed the young woman’s fingers to it.
Draw where your fingers disappear. She drew. The fourth turning point was the most terrifying. In May, the doctor announced the start of the final phase. Three women were selected : Roxana, Anna and Natalie. They were led out of the camp into the forest near an abandoned hunting lodge. They were completely stripped and left in the snow overnight.
While doctors observed them from a distance using optical instruments. This was no longer an experiment, but a game. He wanted to see who could last the longest. Anna was the first to fall, followed by Natalie. Roxanne was left alone, kneeling in the snow, staring into the darkness between the trees and catching glimpses of smoldering cigarette embers.
She no longer thought about her home or the war. She thought only about the next breath. Every breath was a victory, every exhalation a defeat. She learned to count her heartbeats, slow them down with willpower, and distance herself from her own body. It didn’t make her stronger, it drained her. She watched as Ying told her son’s story every night and realized that N could no longer see his face.
She saw Lucy drawing, her hand shaking not from the cold, but because she no longer remembered how to hold a pencil. She saw Natalie running, realizing that she was running from her memories rather than from her tormentors. Roxana stopped crying. Tears froze on her cheeks. She stopped talking. Words have lost their meaning.
She stopped being Roxanne. She became model 47B. So the doctor wrote it down in his journal. Sample 47B. High resistance, identity loss 73%. One day she saw this entry in an open diary. She didn’t feel anger. She just thought 73%. This means that there are still 27% left. And in her 20s, she retained the image of her mother, the smell of warm bread, the sound of snow underfoot on the day of her father’s arrest, the fire that could neither be lit nor extinguished.
Every time the doctor told her to get up, she got up, because getting up was another way of saying, “I’m still here, I still remember.” She understood that this was the last cycle. She stood on the edge of the bathtub, looking into the dark water, then raised her head and looked straight into the camera the doctor had set up to film her.
She spoke slowly and clearly in French: “I will not die today. I will die when I decide.” Then she allowed herself to fall into the water. She didn’t fight. She simply lay on the bottom with her eyes open, watching the rays of light dance above her. She counted one, two. The doctor began to fidget. He shouted, “Get her out!” Nobody moved. She continued counting.
She saw her mother standing by the river. She saw her father waving at her. Then she was pulled out of the water. She wasn’t breathing. The doctor leaned forward and pressed her ear to his chest. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Kanty, this is my record.” She won, but her victory was as empty as her gaze.
After that day, the experiments stopped not out of pity, but simply because Rashki had received all the necessary data. In his final report, he wrote: “French prisoners show remarkable resistance to thermal shock, but progressive disorientation. Recommendation: possible use as a teaching aid exclusion from any social reintegration.
Roxanne and the survivors were transferred to a regular barracks. They were no longer models. They were simply prisoners again. But they could no longer work. Roxanne could no longer hold a spoon. Anne forgot how to tie a knot. Nathalie no longer ran. She sat, stared into space, and waited. They were waiting not to be liberated.
They were waiting to cease to exist. When the Allied troops arrived in early 1945 , this barracks was the last one to be opened. The door was locked from the inside. When it was forced open, they found 12 women sitting side by side, dressed in rags, with empty eyes. They were alive, but when spoken to in French, none of them responded.
They Forgotten the language, forgotten their names, forgotten themselves. Roxana was transferred to a military hospital near Paris. The doctors didn’t understand. Her body was alive, but her eyes were lifeless. She didn’t respond to noise, light, or pain. She lay staring at the ceiling. Then, three months later, she spoke. Her first word was “cold,” her second, ” mother.” Her third, “sorry.
” She lived another 40 years, but every winter she asked that the temperature in the room never exceed 15 degrees Celsius, because the warmth reminded her of her hair, and her hair reminded her of what would happen next. She never spoke of the camp. She only said, “There I learned to breathe and forgot why.” Raschka’s report was found in French archives opened in the 1990s.
It contained the names of twelve French women who had participated in the experiments. Next to each name was a note: used, excluded, lost. Roxana Volkova was listed as specimen number 40. At the bottom of the page, in different handwriting, was added: survivor, found in a military hospital, condition: amnesia, identity erasure.
Recommendation extended. She died in 1985, alone in a small country apartment. A scrap of paper was found on the table with a single phrase: “I remember how I forgot, but what exactly did I forget?” She was buried under the name Roxana Volkova, but her tombstone bore the birthdate she had chosen herself.
July 12, 1921, the day of her second birth, the day she understood that survival is not a victory, but a duty. A duty to remember, a duty to bear witness, a duty not to let them win, because he didn’t just want to kill, he wanted to erase you from memory. But memory is not the body. It cannot be frozen or burned.
It lives in every person who hears this story and does not look away. The question is not how much you can endure. The question is how much can you remember,
