My name is Noël d’Arcieux, I am 82 years old and for years I kept in silence this that I saw during that winter of 1943 when the German soldiers took me snatched from my house in Lyon with my little sister Edite. She was only 18 years old, me 21. They say time heals all the wounds, but there are marks that never heal.
They just freeze inside like the ice cream which no longer makes. I agree to speak now because I know that soon there will be no more no one alive to tell. And because edit deserves someone Say his name out loud before that it never disappears forever oblivion. We were taken to a detention camp on the outskirts of Grenoble in the mountains of the French Alps.
It wasn’t Auschwitz, it wasn’t Ravensbruck. It was something smaller, more discreet and precisely for that more dangerous. The Germans called this place Zwischenlager, intermediate camp. But between us, prisoner, he had another name, the worse than room 47. Room 47 was where he questioned, where they tear off the nails, broke fingers, drowned women in buckets of icy water until they something, anything.
But what was happening outside the Room 47ante was even worse. Because that there, cruelty was in no hurry. She was slow, methodical, calculated. She took her time to destroy this that remained of us. We, the rebels, that’s what they called us were punished in a way that no young no woman should endure. We stayed up to 48 hours without food, standing, exposed to the wind which cut the skin like blades.
He took off our clothes in the cold and forced us to stay standing still while he decided who would be the next to be dragged into interrogation rooms. Places where no one returned the same, or simply did not come back not. I saw women die of hypothermia standing, frozen like statues of ice cream.
I saw others being forced to carry stones until their legs give way and they collapse to the ground, their faces in the dirty snow. And I saw my sister taken away by a gray dawn and never return. The first days in this camp, we still thought we were going survive, that someone would come to us search, that the war would end soon.
But after a week, we understood that no one knew where we were, that our names did not appear on any register official, that we had become living ghosts. If you listen to this story now know that she was kept for six decades before being said out loud. Noël agreed to speak only once and she asked that no one listens to his testimony then saying he didn’t know.
If this story touches you in any way on the other hand, leave your support with like and comment where you are listening from this documentary. Every gesture helps to keep the memory of IT and so many other young people girls who never came out of this place. It was January 1943, the harshest winter than the Alps had known for decades.
Me and Edit, we hid two English paratroopers in the cellar of our house in Lyon. Someone has us denounced, I don’t know who. Maybe a jealous neighbor, perhaps someone from the resistance who had been captured and had spoken under torture. It doesn’t matter anymore. The soldiers arrived at dawn. They have knocked on the door with the butt of their rifle.
My father tried to earn time, but he already knew. They are came in like a storm. They have everything returned. They found the English hidden behind a false partition and they took us. Me and my dad shouted. My mother collapsed to her knees on the kitchen floor, but there There was nothing he couldn’t do. I have held IT’s hand the whole time for that we were thrown into the back of a military truck. It was early in the morning.
The sky was gray, heavy, heavy with snow. And I remember thinking, “I’m going to die without ever seeing him again sun rising.” We arrived at camp 3 hours later. It was a construction old, a former sanatorium of tuberculosis transformed into a center of detention. The walls were made of gray stone, damp, covered with mold.
The smell was unbearable, a mixture of urine, sweat, dried blood and some thing worse. Something I don’t have identified only later. The smell of decomposing body that no one had not yet buried. We were recorded, stripped naked, searched in a humiliating manner. They have shaved our hair with dull blades who tore off the skin.
They have us given old, torn uniforms, too hungry for the cold they were doing. and they put us in a cell with two other women. Some had been there for months, others only a few days. They all had the same look, empty, distant, as if she was already no more there. It’s one of them, a woman named Hélène, who told us in voice bass: “You have been classified as revolted.
That means they will everything do to break you. And if they don’t don’t arrive, they will kill you slowly. I didn’t believe him right away. I thought she was exaggerating, that she had lost his mind through suffering. But three days later I understood that she was telling the truth and that this camp was not a place to survive by chance.
It was a place where we died by calculation. Noël d’Arcieux survived this winter, but what she saw in the weeks who followed his arrival at the camp forever changed the young woman she was, the cold. The fa, the endless punishments and especially the night when his little sister Eddie disappeared behind a door that never reopened. This testimony given in 2004 at the age of is the only Christmas ever agreed to deliver.
She died 9 years ago later, but before leaving, she left his words so that Edit would not be never forgotten. Stay with us until the end because what happened in this side deserves to be heard. I calls me Noël d’Arcieux and I will tell now what the Germans made to the prisoners they called the rebels offensive. The first punishment came three days after our arrival.
They are came to pick us up at dawn said and me, with six other women. We were made go out into the yard barefoot underwear. The temperature was -15°g. The wind was blowing so hard that it cut off our breath and burned the skin like fire frozen. A German officer that prisoners called Ieman, the man of ice, ordered us to stay motionless, standing, arms at sides body.
“Artoun Verzikstund!” Did he say in a flat emotion voice. 48 hours I thought he was lying, that he would leave for an hour, perhaps two to scare us and break us psychologically but no, he really did. It was their method, their science of human destruction. The first hours were bearable to a certain extent. The pain was lively, penetrating, but I could move my toes again, squeeze them points.
I focused on small details so as not to lose your mind. Counting the seconds, looking at the sky gray, listen to the sound of the wind in the bare trees that surrounded the courtyard. But after six hours something changed radically. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. My hands had turned purple, then a deep blue, almost black.
And the cold ? The cold was no longer just the exterior. He had entered me. He devoured my body from the inside like an invisible beast that was eating away at my EOS. Édit was shaking violently next to me. I saw her lips turn blue, her eyes widened, his face transformed into a mask of suffering pure.
She was trying to speak, to say something, but no sound came out from his mouth. Only a rare breath like that of a wounded animal. I him I whispered, trying not to move. lips so that the guards don’t don’t see. Hold on. Hold on my little sister, I’m here, I won’t tell you I won’t let it. But I lied because I wasn’t there, not really. My mind began to detach itself from my body.
I saw things that did not exist. I heard the voice of my mother sing me a lullaby. I smelled the warm bread she was on Sunday morning when we Were still a normal family before the war, before the occupation, before everything collapses. A woman collapsed in front of us. His body hit the frozen ground with a dull sound like a sandbag.
Then another. She no longer moved. Their eyes were open, fixed, looking the sky without seeing it. I don’t know if they were dead or simply unconscious, lost in a world where pain could no longer reach them. But no one came to help them. The soldiers just left them there in the snow that was beginning to fall gently, covering their bodies like a single white linen.
I tried to count the hours, but I lost the wire. Time no longer meant anything. There was only the cold, the cold and fear. The fear of dying there, standing, without anyone knowing what that had happened to us. The fear that Edit will die before me and that I have to watch her leave helplessly touch her, without being able to hold her my arms one last time.
After 24 hours or maybe more, I don’t know anymore, they made us return. Not out of pity, just because that they needed us alive for a little longer. Because dead prisoners were not used to nothing but broken prisoners, terrified, ready to do anything to avoid return to this courtyard. They, they were useful.
We were thrown into our cells like animals. We don’t have given no water or food, just a thin blanket, with holes that was not used to nothing against the cold which continued to live in us, even inside. Édit snuggled up against me. She cried in silence. His body was shaking uncontrollable spasms. I felt her hot tears on my neck, the only warmth I had felt for hours.
And I have realized, with terrible clarity, that I couldn’t do anything about it protect. Absolutely nothing. The days following were a fog of suffering. My hands and feet have started to swell. The skin has become black in places, dead, frozen the interior. An older prisoner, a woman who had been a nurse before the war, told me these were the first signs of gangrain, that if it continued, it should amputate.
But she added in an emotionless voice: “Of all way, they will not impute you, they will let them die.” She was right. I saw three women die in the weeks following this first punishment. No ball, no neck, just the cold, slow cold, patient, relentless which destroyed the body cell by cell. But what terrified me the most was was not death itself.
It was the idea that Edit could die before me, that it can disappear and that I remains alone in this hell with the weight unbearable not to have been able to save. And a few weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. My name is Noël d’Arcieux and I am going tell you what it meant to be ranked like a rebel in this camp in the Alps French in the winter of 1943.
After the punishment of the cold, they invented other methods. Methods which did not leave visible traces at the time, but which destroyed something much deeper than the flesh. Something I don’t could never recover, even after the liberation. He made us wear stones, blocks of granite weighing between 10x and 20 kg that we had to transport from one end to the other yard without rest, without water, without any break, for hours that seemed never end.
The stones were rough, sharp, with edges sharp which tore the skin. My hands were bleeding from the first minutes. I saw my own fingers trembling, unable to hold the weight, my palms split like old dry leather. The blood flowed between my fingers and made the stones even more slippery, even more difficult to hold. But if I let go of the stone, even for a second, they hit me with the butt of their rifle, in the back, in the legs, sometimes in the face.
And said fell three times that day. Every time I I helped her get up by pulling her my arm, supporting her against me. To each time, a soldier shouted: “Ken, it no help, but I didn’t care. She was my sister and as long as I breathe, I won’t let her down alone in the dirty snow. The third Once she fell, a guard came approached her and gave her a blow foot in the ribs.
I heard something crack. Edit pushed a muffled cry. Then she bit her lips until they bleed to no longer do of noise. She knew that screaming there was no point, it didn’t do anything than attract more violence. I have it noted once again. His face was gray, his eyes glassy. She could barely breathing, but she took the stone and she continued walking.
This that day, I understood something terrible. He didn’t want to kill us quickly. He wanted to destroy us slowly, piece by piece, until that there is nothing left of what we had been, until we we became empty shadows, incapable to think, to feel, to remember who we were before. But it wasn’t the stones that terrified the most, it was the doors.
There was at the end of the corridor main building a series of numbered doors. Room 47 was the best known, the one everyone was talking about bass. It was there that he tortured prisoners to obtain information. But there were other doors, doors without numbers, doors that prisoners called the doors blind. When a woman crossed a blind door, she never came back never.
Or if she came back, she was no longer herself. She didn’t speak no longer, she no longer cried, she no longer reacted more when spoken to. She stared into space, her eyes dead, as if his soul had been torn from his body and only one remained empty shell. Hélène, the woman who had welcomed the first day, which warned us of what we was waiting, was taken behind one of these doors.
It was a morning of February. They came to get her right after breakfast. A soup clear with a few pieces of bread moldy. She did not resist, she did not nothing said. She stood up calmly and followed them. But I remember his look when she crossed the threshold our cell. a look that said “I I know I won’t come back.” She is returned three days later, but was no longer Helene.
His body was covered in equimoses, purple bruises, black, yellow which covered its arms, his legs, his face. She doesn’t could no longer walk normally. She limped, dragged one leg behind her as if she were broken. And when I asked him, whispering in the darkness of our cell what he had done to her, she was content to shake your head silently.
His lips moved, but no sound came out as if his voice had been stolen. Two days later, Hélène hanged himself with his blanket. She has it attached to a wooden beam in a corner of the cell. She waited for night when everyone was asleep and she let herself go. The next day morning when the guards came open the door, they simply cut the rope, threw his body into a cart and took him somewhere.
We never saw him again. Nobody cried. Not because we didn’t feel anything, but because we We’ve already seen too many deaths. Because crying meant recognizing that we could be next and we won’t couldn’t afford to think about that. I understood then what it meant really worse than room 47. This was not physical pain, it was not the cushions, nor the cold, nor hunger.
It was the destruction of the soul. It was the moment when you realized that even if you survived, you would not be never again the one you were before, that something in you had been broken irreparably. And that’s what time that Edit lived. Not all of continued, but slowly, day by day, I saw it fade away. She was talking about less and less.
She didn’t look at me more in the eyes. She ate less and less, even when there was food. She slept poorly, woke up with a start, in sweat, the eyes filled with terror. One evening, then as we lay side by side on the cold floor of our cell, she told me whispered in the ear. Christmas, I think I won’t last much longer long time. I hugged him against me.
I stroked his short, shaved hair, which were beginning to grow back in small irregular tufts. And I gave him lied. I told him, “Everything’s going to be okay pass. The war will end. We are going go home. Mom and Dad we wait.” But I didn’t believe a word of what I said because I knew that we would never see Lion again, that we were already dead of a certain way, that our bodies continued to breathe, to walk, carry stones, but our souls had already begun to detach.
Three days later they came look for Édit and this time, she is not never came back. My name is Christmas d’Arcieux and I will tell you the night I lost my sister. It was the February 18, 1943. It had been 6 weeks that we were prisoners. Six weeks that felt like six years. Édit had lost weight terrifying.
His eyes were sunken deep in his face, surrounded by black circles that made him look of a ghost. Her cheekbones stood out under his pale, almost translucent skin. She spoke less and less, as if each word cost him energy that she no longer had. But she held on good. She shook my hand every night before sleeping in the icy darkness from our cell and she always whispered the same something like a prayer.
We’re going to go home. We will see again mom and dad. We’re going to eat bread warm and sleep in our beds. You remember our beds, Christmas? I wanted believe it. I wanted to believe it so much. But deep inside me, in a place dark that I did not dare to look at, I knew we would never see again Lyon, which we would never see again our house, that we were doomed.
That night they came search. They opened the door our cell around 3 a.m. The noise of the lock turning in the lock woke us all up with a start. Two soldiers entered, their silhouettes black silhouettes against yellow light from the hallway. One of them carried a lamp torch that shone in our faces, one after the other as if searching someone in particular.
The beam of light blinded me once second, then it stopped on Edit. Said young happy. Man, said the soldier in a flat emotion voice. the youngest. Come on. Eddie turned to me. His eyes were immense, filled with terror pure, animal. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Only a trembling breath like that of a small animal trapped.
I got myself lifting of a voucher. Despite my legs weak, despite the pain that passed through the body. I shouted “No, take me, take me in his place, I beg you.” But they ignored me as if I didn’t exist, as if my voice was just background noise without importance. One of them walked towards me and hit me in the face with the back with his gloved hand.
The blow was so violent that I fell backwards, my head hitting the stone floor with a dull noise. I saw stars, I tasted blood in my mouth and while I was on the ground, dazed, unable to move, they grabbed by the arms. She struggled for first time in weeks. She resisted, she clawed, she gave kicks, she tried to release. But they were too strong.
They dragged him out of the cell like a bag. She screamed my name. Christmas ! Christmas ! His voice was heartbreaking, desperate, filled with a fear that I never heard before. I crawled towards the door, my hands slippery on the wet ground. I strained the hand. Our fingers touched one another last time.
His fingers were frozen, trembling. I tried to to hold on, to hold on to her, but she been torn off. Then the door closed. The noise of the lock which closes reasoned in my head like a gunshot. I am remained there, slumped against the door wood, unable to move. I hit against the wood until my hands are bleeding.
I screamed until my voice breaks, but no one came, no one responded. The other women in the cell said nothing. They silently looked at me with pity mute. She knew, they already had saw that. They had already lost sisters, mothers, daughters of this manner. I stayed awake all at night, sitting against this door cold, knees pulled up against my chest, arms tight around me.
I listened. I was waiting. I prayed for hear his footsteps in the corridor, to hear his voice calling me, to that the door opens and she comes back, even hurt, even broken. But I heard nothing, nothing else than silence. A heavy, thick silence, which seemed stifle all hope. The next morning, when the guards came to open the door for us to bring out into the yard, I asked at one of them where my sister was.
My voice was broken, broken. I begged him. I I knelt in front of him. I implored him to tell me where she was, if she was still alive. He told me looked at with contempt, as one looks at a insect. Then he said if Eastveg, she left. Gone where? Dead transferred in another camp. Taken to one of these blind doors from which we never return never.
I never knew it. During the three months that followed, I searched and said everywhere. I asked everyone prisoners who arrived if they had seen him. I begged the guards. I tried to sneak in forbidden corridors, hoping to see his face. But no one knew where no one wanted to say. Every night, I dreamed of her.
I saw her behind a door knocking against wood, calling me. I ran towards her, but the door never opened and I woke up in sweat, heart pounding, hands outstretched in the void. In May the camp was dismantled. The Germans burned the registers, destroys documents, erases all trace of what had happened there. They knew the war was turning, they knew that the allies were advancing and they wanted to make the evidence of their crime.
Me, with around thirty others prisoners, I was transferred to a another camp then towards another. And finally, in August 1944, after the Allied landing in Normandy, I was liberated by American troops. I was skeleton, sick, incapable to walk without help, but I was alive. I returned to Lyon in September.
My mother and father had survived. They hugged me crying, but when they asked where Édit was, I could only shake your head. I tried to speak but the words did not come, only tears. I never have it reviewed. His body was never found. His name does not appear on any register deportation official. She disappeared, like so many others, erased from history as if it had never existed.
But she has existed, she was real and she deserved to live. My name is Noël d’Arcieux, I have two years and I know I will soon die. For a year, I wore the weight of that night when Edit disappeared. 61 years of waking up with a start, searching for his hand in the dark. 61 years old hearing his cry resonate in my head. Christmas ! Christmas ! 61 years of wondering if I could have done something more, if I could have saved her.
I tried to truly live. I got married in 1948 to a good man, a carpenter named Jacques who had also survived the war. He had been a prisoner in a stallag in Germany. He understood the silence. He never asked me questions when I woke up in the middle of the night, trembling, covered in cold sweat. He just took me in his arms and rocked me until the tremors stop.
We had three children, two boys and a girl. I chose to name my daughter Edit. Jacques looked at me with surprise when I told him that name in the maternity ward. He knew why. He just nodded head and kissed my forehead. I worked as a nurse for 35 years old. I treated the sick, I held the hands of the dying. I comforted grieving families.
I think that in some way, it was my way of making sense of my survival. If I couldn’t save Edit, at least I could save other people. At least I could be there for those who needed someone. I laughed, I cried, I watched my children grow up, get married, have their own children. I did everything a woman does in life.
But a part of me remained prisoner there in this cell cold of the Alps in February 1943. A part of me never came out this camp. There are nights when I wake up and I still hear him screaming my name. Christmas ! Christmas ! And I hold it out hand in the dark, trying to touch it, hold it. But she is not never there.
There is only emptiness, emptiness and silence. For years I have searched for answers. I contacted survivor associations. I wrote to the International Red Cross. I have consulted military archives, declassified documents, testimonies other deportees. I met some historians who studied the camps secondary detention. Cvichenlager including no one spoke because they were not not as big, not as famous than Auschwitz or Dacho.
But the camp where we had been detained no longer exists. The building was destroyed in 1945, just after release. The Germans had burned all the records before to leave. The soldiers who worked died in the war or fled or have never been judged for their crime. Some have probably experienced quiet lives in Germany or elsewhere without ever responding to this that they had done.
I learned that there had been other camps like this, dozens, small, dispersed detention centers in the mountains, in the forests, far from view, from places where we sent the unwanted, resistant, Jews, political prisoners, women accused of collaboration with the enemy. Places where normal rules don’t did not apply, where cruelty was banal, daily, methodical.
has become a ghost, a name without body, a memory without proof. And it is maybe that’s the worst. Not the pain, not fear, not even torture, but the absence, the fact that it has disappeared without leaving any traces as if it had never existed, as if his 18 years of life, his laughter, his dreams, his hopes had not never happened.
But she existed, she was real. She had dreams. She wanted to become a teacher. She loved read rainbow and verlin poems. She copied her favorite verses into a little blue notebook that she kept under his pillow. She was laughing so hard that everyone around her was laughing too, even without knowing why. She had fear of storms.
She loved the strawberries. She hated blue cheese. She sang out of tune but that didn’t didn’t stop him from singing. She was my little sister and she deserved to live. In 2004, I agreed to donate this interview for a documentary on the forgotten camps of the Second War worldwide. It was the first and only time that I told this entire story.
My children don’t only knew fragments. My husband knew but we didn’t talk about it never. It was too painful, too much heavy. The director of the documentary, a young man in his thirties, told me asked “Madame Darieux, why now? Why after all these years?” I looked at it for a long time before responding. I felt the tears go up, but I held them back.
I gave him says “Because soon there will be no more no one to say his name. Because in 10x years 20 years, all survivors will be dead. And if I don’t don’t speak now, Edit will disappear definitely. She will just become a figure in a statistic, a anonymous victim among millions. And I can’t accept this. I can’t not let it disappear for a second times. The interview lasted 4 hours.
I have told everything. cold, hunger, stones, blind doors, the night where they took him away, the silence that followed, the years of useless research, the weight of guilt, survivor’s guilt, this terrible feeling to wonder why I survived and not her, why me and not her. At the end of the interview, the director turned off the camera.
He remained silent for a long time moment. Then he said to me “Thank you, thank you for having had the courage to speak.” But It wasn’t courage, it was necessity. It was the only thing I could still do for her. I am died in 2013, at the age of 91. I have had a good death, if we can say that, surrounded by my children and my grandchildren in my bed without pain.
Jacques died 10 years later early and I was ready to join him. But before leaving, I left this testimony not for me, so that she does not is not forgotten, so that his name survives, even if his body has never been found, so that someone know that it existed, that it has lived, suffered, cried my name in the dark and that she deserved better than that.
And now I asks this question to you who listen to me. How many girls as eedites have disappeared in these camps forgotten, in these zwischenlagers whose no one speaks? How many names have been erased, burned, buried under the silence and oblivion? How many sisters, of mothers, of daughters were torn from their family and never had the right to a grave, to a stelle, to a place in the collective memory.
The official history speaks of the great camps, millions of deaths, gas chambers, crematoria and it’s important, it’s essential. But there are also these other victims, those whose names we do not know, those who died in places that no one has ever recorded it. Those who disappeared without witnesses.
If you don’t remember just one thing from my story, let it be this one, as long as a name is pronounced, the person who carried it is not really dead. As long as we remember, it continues to exist in a certain way, and said d’Arcieux. She was ten years old. She wanted to become a teacher. She loved Rau. She laughed hard.
She was afraid storms. She loved strawberries. She was my sister and she deserved to live. I never forgot it. Not one single day. And now, thanks to you who listens to me, she will not be forgotten neither. That’s all I can still do for her. It’s my last promise, my last duty and maybe somewhere she knows that I never stopped looking for her, that I never stopped saying his name, that I never stopped loving him.
Noël d’Arcieux left in 2013, but his testimony remains engraved in the time. She said her sister’s name one last time so that we today let us repeat it. Edith d’Arcieux, 18 years old, disappeared in a forgotten camp in the French Alps February 1943. His body was never found. Sound name does not appear on any register.
But thanks to Christmas, thanks to you who listen now it still exists because this memory was refused only by oblivion is the last victory of those who wanted to erase his lives. How many young girls like Edits have disappeared in these small camps where no one speak? How many names were burned with the registers, buried under the silence? These stories deserve to be heard.
These voices deserve to be worn. And that’s why this string exists. So that the testimonies like that of Christmas do not get lost. So that memory survives even when the witnesses are no longer there. If this story touched you, if you think he deserves to be shared, support this work by subscribing to the channel. Activate the bell so you don’t miss any testimony.
Leave a like so that this story reaches more than people. These simple gestures allow to keep alive the memory of those and those who disappeared without leaving traces. And above all, take a moment to write in the comments what this story awakened in you. What thought it provoked? What memory she revived? Because every comment, every word posted here, it’s a way of saying “I Listen, I haven’t forgotten you.
” It’s a way to honor Edit, Christmas and all other anonymous victims of this war. Christmas spent 61 years carry this weight in silence. She has chose to speak only once before leave. She asked that we not say never “I didn’t know”. Now you know, and now it is up to you to decide whether this testimony will remain alive or if, as so others it will disappear into oblivion.
Thanks for listening to the end. Thanks for being there for Christmas and thank you in the name of IT not to let them go a second time. To Claude Pod like Terous confirms responses. Yeah.
