I was years old when I learned that the human body can tremble so much that it stops looking like something human thing, that the skin can become so cold that it seems like glass on the point of breaking and that there is a type of cruelty if calculated, if methodical that she does not need blood to kill. My name is Aveline Maréchal, I am 89 years and for 66 of them I bore testimony that does not belong to me not to me alone.
It belongs to women who do not have never been able to speak, to those who are died in these iron bathtubs, those who were pushed by force in ice water while she begged for a pity that is never came. Today, old and tired, I realize that silence does not protect no one anymore. Maybe that’s why that finally I tell what I have experienced, what the German soldiers did when we were considered too weak to work.
but still too strong to simply die. It was March 1944. I was at the trialemand center of Royalieux in the Compi region in the north of France. A place that did not officially exist in any report. A place where women disappeared without leaving a name, without leaving a body, without leaving a traces, only numbers, only ashes, only silence.
I went there with my sister Margaot and my closest friend Eliane. All three of us had been captured during a search operation house by house accused of hiding resistance fighters. Little matter whether it was true or not, which what mattered was that we were young French women and our names appear on a list. Royalie was not a camp of extermination as in Switzerland.
There is no had no gas chambers, but there had something worse, the waiting, uncertainty, daily processing designed to break us even before it didn’t decide whether we were going to die or be sent elsewhere. And at the heart of this routine of destruction, there were the bathtubs. They were in a narrow and damp shed with stone wall which oozed cold water even in summer.
There were seven cast iron bathtubs lined up like coffins. He them filled with ice water every day mornings. No cold tap water, water with ice, pieces of ice floating like small shards of broken glass. He us called at 6 a.m. Always the same women. Those who had too much thin, those who trembled in walking, those who could no longer hold a shovel or carry a bag of cement.
I remember the first time I saw the bathtubs. I thought that they were used to wash clothes or maybe some type of cleaning industrial. But then, one of the guards, a German woman with faces hard and empty-eyed, shouted in a French drawl “Take off your clothes all now.” “We hesitated.” Marga squeezed my hand.
Iian started to cry slowly, but there was no choice. Those who hesitated received blows. Those who resisted would die. It was as simple as that. We removed our clothes in tatters. Our bodies thin, marked by equimoses, cuts, open wounds that do not never healed properly. I felt shame, not nudity in itself, but being there exposed, weak, reduced to nothing in front of people who looked at us as if we were less than animals.
The first contact with water was like to be stabbed by a thousand knives times. I couldn’t hold back my scream. Nobody could. The water was so icy that it seemed to burn. My skin turned red, instantly, then purple. Then she lost everything color. My muscles locked up. My chest tightened. I couldn’t arrive no longer breathe correctly.
The soldiers watched. Some laugh. Others smoked in silence as if they were witnessing something boring. One of them, younger, with eyes clear and an expression almost indifferent, stood motionless next to from my bathtub. He stared at me while I was shaking. There were the cruelty in him, yes, but also a brief hesitation, a flicker, something that lasted maybe seconds but who scored my memory forever.
I never understood this look. A glimmer of humanity in a place where humanity should not exist. We had to stay in water for 15 minutes timed. Sometimes when one of we passed out, he pulled her out and threw cold water in his face until she wakes up. Then he pushed her back inside. It is to strengthen, he said, to cause resistance.
But we knew the whole truth. This wasn’t training, it was torture disguised as procedure medical. There was a pregnant woman among us. Her name was Claire. She must have been seven months pregnant, the prominent belly despite being thin extreme. When her turn came, she begged on his knees, in German, in French, in any language that she thought he would understand.
She held her stomach with both hands as if she could protect the baby just with this gesture. They tore off his arms and pushed him into the bathtub. She screamed. A cry that was not human, an animal cry injured. And then the silence, it stopped to scream, she stopped moving. She remained there in the water, her eyes open, fixed on the ceiling as if she had disconnected herself from her own body.
3 days later, Claire is dead. The baby too. Nobody has any spoken. Nobody asked any questions. It was as if she had never existed. Margaot, my sister held two weeks. Eliane tris. Me, I have survived. I don’t know why. This was not courage, it was not of force, it was chance, a bureaucratic error, absent-mindedness, something I won’t understand never.
But I carry their death with me every day, with every breath, every sleepless night, in the cold that I still feel in my waters, even in the middle of summer. years later and today sitting in front of this camera at 9 years old, I speak because silence does not protect person, because the world needs to know what the German soldiers were doing women too weak to walk because that it still shocks and it must shock forever.
The story of Aveline Maréchal is not what to start with. What she saw inside this shed in the days following would forever change the way he understand what it means to survive, stay until the end, because the worst was yet to come. I remember the noise, always noise. The metal of bathtubs banging against stone when he filled them.
The echo of orders shouted in German, the dull sound of boots on the damp ground and above all muffled cries of women who knew what awaited them. The soldier with the clear eyes, the one who looked at me that day, came back every morning. He never spoke. He stood, near the third bathtub, the one where he placed me always. He was smoking, he was watching me.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I saw something cross his face, a contraction, a fold at the corner of the mouth, something that looked like almost to disgust, but not towards me, towards what he was doing. One morning, while I was shaking so hard that my teeth chattering to the point of biting me the tongue, he did something unexpected.
He approached the bathtub, took out his pocket watch, looked at the time then turned his back on the other soldiers and he made a gesture, a very small gesture. He raised three fingers, three minutes. He me gave 3 minutes of respite. I don’t not understood immediately. But when he came back to me, he took my arm firmly for others to see and took me out of the water.
“I nugue,” he said “enough.” Then he pushed me towards the corner where we had to laugh, always in trembling, still in silence. This that day, I left the building bathtubs 12 minutes earlier than usually. 12 minutes that got me perhaps saved his life. But Margaot, my sister, was not so lucky. She was in the fifth bathtub.
Another guard, a woman this time was monitoring. This woman had no hesitation, no pity. She buried the head of Margaot underwater every time she was trying to breathe too hard. “You are too noisy,” she said in German. “Shut up or I’ll leave you in there until you stop moving.” Margaot was trying. She squeezed the teeth, she closed her eyes, but her body could no longer.
He had reached a limit that even the will cannot could no longer cross. Her lips turned blue, his hands stopped tremble. And one morning, while he got out of the bathtub, she didn’t didn’t get up. They dragged her out like a bag, like trash. I run towards her, I shouted her name. But they hit me hard on the head. I fell and when I got up, she was no longer there. I never saw him again.
Iianne dyes a little longer. She had a strange strength, almost supernatural. She sang. Yes, she sang gently, almost in a whisper, songs that his mother had taught him, lullabies, contines. She said that it helped him forget the cold, remember that she had once been a person with a life, a family, a future. But one day she stopped singing.
She entered the bathtub in silence. She left in silence and a few days later, she collapsed in the courtyard. in front of everyone. His heart had simply given out. They don’t didn’t even transport her to the infirmary. They left her there the ground until someone comes pick it up later as if it had never been alive.
Me, I was still there, still trembling, still alive. And I started to ask a terrible question. Why me? Why was I surviving while everyone I loved would die? The soldier with the light eyes looked differently now. He doesn’t smoked more during sessions. He remained motionless, arms crossed, closed face. One day, when I got out of the bathtub, he handed me a blanket.
A real cover, not the torn rags that he gives us usually gave. He doesn’t say anything. He placed the blanket in my hands and walked away. I don’t know if it was pity or guilt or simply a stolen moment of humanity in a world that no longer had it. But this blanket, I kept it, hidden, shared with other women at night and she kept us all alive for a few more days until everything changes, until he decides that we were no longer useful at all.
A morning of May4, everything has become different. They don’t let us didn’t take them to the bathtub. They us lined up in the courtyard. All women from the center, those who could still walk and those who don’t could no longer. The sun rose at pain. The air was cold, humid, heavy of this smell of wet earth and fear that permeated every corner of royal place.
There were maybe two of us women standing encircled, some trembling so much that they could barely stand up. Others leaned against each other, forming fragile human chains so as not to collapse. I stood between two women that I didn’t know. Margot was already dead for several weeks. E Lian too. I was alone now, totally alone.
And this loneliness weighed more heavy than the cold, heavier than the hunger, heavier even than the fear of this which would follow. A German officer appeared, tall, with a hard face like granite. The features cut serppe, he wore a uniform impeccable. The polished boots reflecting the pale morning light. He was walking slowly in front of us, hands crossed at the back like a farmer inspecting livestock before sale.
His eyes moved from one woman to another with calculated clinical coldness, devoid of all humanity. He didn’t speak. He was content to point a finger. left, right, left, right. The one who went to left was pushed towards a group which grew up near the east wall. The one who went to the right remained aligned along of the north fence.
Nobody knew what these two groups mean. No one dared to ask, but we we all knew deep down that one led to death and the other to some something that still vaguely resembled life. The officer sometimes stopped. He observed a woman more closely. He bowed his head, he wrinkled his eyebrows, then he decided left, right, as if he were playing a game where only he knew the rules.
A woman in front of me, a Polish woman with gray hair and a face hollowed out by hungry, was sent to the left. She fell to knees. She begged in Polish, then in German, then in French broken. Please, sir, please please you. I have children. They waiting for me. I can work, I can still working. The officer didn’t even look at her.
He waved his hand. Two guards grabbed her by the arms and dragged her towards the group on the left. His cries reasoned throughout the court. Then they stopped abruptly when one of the guards hit her on the back of the head with the butt of his rifle. I diverted the look, but I couldn’t close my ears. I heard everything.
the tears, supplications, the orders shouted in German, the noise deaf bodies falling to the ground. When it was my turn, the officer stopped, he looked at me for a long time, too at length. His steel gray eyes looked into my face, my shoulders sagging, my thin arms, my legs who trembled under my own weight. I saw in his eyes that he calculated, that he evaluated.
that he decided if I still had a any value or if I was just a more waste to eliminate. My legs weren’t shaking from the cold this time, because of fear, a fear so deep that it drained me of all thought, of all will, of everything except this primitive desire to continue to breathe a little more long time.
He raised his hand slowly, deliberately. My heart stopped. The whole world seemed to freeze. RIGHT. I was pushed towards the group on the right. I didn’t understand why. I was as weak as the others. Maybe even weaker. My ribs were protruding under my skin. My hair was falling out plate, my hands were shaking constantly.
I no longer had the strength to carry a water jump. So why me ? Why not me on the left with all the others? But then, in me returning briefly, I saw him. the soldier with clear eyes, the one who looked at me during the sessions bathtub, the one who gave me three minutes of respite, the one who had me stretched out a blanket. He was there, standing behind the officer and he had made a gesture, a gesture so subtle, so imperceptible that no one no one else had seen it.
He had inclined head to the right. Just a little movement, barely a chop. But that was enough. The officer had followed his indication without even report. Or maybe it was realized and had he chosen to ignore it. I’ll never know. But that day, this soldier saved me. Once again I joined the group on the right.
There were maybe five of us, those on the left were more than 150. They were taken to the trucks parked near the main entrance. Large, dark covered trucks, similar to rolling coffins. They went up one by one, pushed by the guards, some in silence, others crying, others still screaming. An old woman clung to the truck door jamb, refusing to let go.
A guard crushed his fingers with the butt of his rifle. She fell. They threw her inside like a sack of potatoes. The truck doors closed with a metallic noise which resonated in the whole yard. A final noise, definitive, like the sound of a tomb that we that. I never saw them again. None of them. Teaches us more later, much later after liberation that they had been sent to Ravensbruck.
A concentration camp for women located in the north of Germany, a place where death was not quick, where it was coming slowly through the work forced, hunger, disease, medical experiences. Most of them died there within three month. Some dye for 6 months. Very few survived until the end of the war. I stayed in Royalieu.
We, the one on the right, are being brought back in our barracks. But everything had changed. We now knew that we were safe, that our life was hanging by a thread, that at any moment, a another sorting could take place and the next time we won’t be maybe not on the good side. The days following were strange, almost calm.
Bathtub sessions ceased. He no longer took us there. Maybe because there was no longer enough women. Maybe because they other priorities appear. Maybe because the war was turning and they began to feel that their time was counted. We heard the bombings. At night, in the distance, the sky lit up with an orange glow. The allies were getting closer.
We knew, everyone knew it, even the Germans. And with this proximity from the liberation came a news terror, that of being killed just before to be free. That of dying at a few days, a few hours perhaps end. I stayed in Royalieu until August 1944 until the allies were so close that we could hear the tanks roll on the roads until as the Germans begin to evacuate the center in disaster, burning documents, destroying evidence, killing some prisoners and abandoning others.
And it is in this chaos, in this panic that I was escaping. With three other women, we took advantage from a moment of inattention, a guard distracted, a door left open. We ran through the woods, walking for two days without food, no water, guided only by the distant sound of bombings and by a survival instinct that I do not didn’t even know how to own it.
When I was finally free, when I crossed the Allied lines and an American soldier handed me a blanket and a piece of bread, I did not feel joy. I didn’t feel relief. I felt an emptiness, an emptiness so deep, so immense that he would follow me for rest of my life because I was free. But Margaot was not, Iiane was not was not, Claire and her baby were not.
And all these women boarded the trucks this morning in May nor were they. I was free but I had lost everything that gave a meaning to this freedom. After the war, no one wanted to hear this that I had experienced. France celebrated its liberation. Everywhere in the streets, people were singing, kissing American soldiers.
The flags tricolors fluttered from the windows. The church bells rang at all times stolen. It was euphoria, joy collective, the rebirth of a country which had been occupied, humiliated, broken for four long years. But I don’t I didn’t feel any of that. I I walked these streets filled with laughter and music and I felt like a ghost like I no longer belong this world, as if a part of me stayed there in that shed cold, in this iron bathtub, in next to Margaot, Éliane, Claire and of all the others.
When I tried to speak, people turned away look. They changed the subject. They me patted the shoulder with an embarrassed smile and said: “It’s over now. you have to turn the page. You have to think about the future. Turn the page as if that we had experienced was only one chapter of a book that could just close and forget.
As if pain, trauma, loss could be erased with a simple gesture of will. I returned to my village natal, a small town in Normandy where I had grown up. My parents’ house had been bombed. All that remained was ruins, collapsed walls, charred beams, pieces of life which no longer existed. My parents died during the occupation.
My father had been shot for refusing to provide information on resistant. My mother died of heartbreak 6 months later, or at least that’s what I was told. Margaot was died in Royalieu. My younger brother had disappeared in 1943, probably sent to Germany for compulsory work. No one had ever had these news.
I was alone, completely alone, without family, without home, without future. I lived with an aunt distant who welcomed me by pity, more than love. She tells me looked with a sort of distrust, as if I had brought back with me something something contaminated, something dirty that risked soiling his house tidy and his life well ordered.
One night, during dinner, I tried to speak, to tell what had happened passed to Royalieu, the bathtubs, the cold, the women who were dying. My aunt listened to me for maybe two minutes, then she put down her fork and said to me in a dry voice: “Aveline, stop! Nobody wants to hear these horrors.
The war is over, we must move on. Move on thing. This sentence, I heard it dozens of times, hundreds maybe. As if it were also simple, as if the trauma could be put it in a drawer and forgotten. So, I kept quiet. I swallowed my words. I buried my memories as deep as possible deep inside me. I learned to smile when people spoke to me of liberation, nod my head when someone told me that we were lucky to be alive, to thank God, providence, allies, anyone or anything who could give meaning to those who had none.
For years, I lived like an automaton. I got myself married in 1947. A good man, a gentle man, a man who never asked me questions about the war. He knew that I had been prisoner. He knew I lost my family, but he didn’t want know more. And I didn’t want tell him: “We had three children, two boys and a girl. I have them raised with love, with tenderness, with all the attention I was capable of.
But there was always this distance, this invisible wall between me and the rest of the world, as if a part of me remained a prisoner, even after the liberation. My children grew up, they laughed, they played, they dreamed of the future and I looked at them smiling. But deep down, I was thinking of Margaot, of Eliane, to all those women who never had the chance to live, to love, to become a mother.
Why me? Why had I survived when they were dead? This question hates me day after day, night after night. She was eating me from the inside like a slow poison. At night, I did always the same nightmare. I am in the bathtub. The water is so cold that it burns me. I can’t go out. My arms no longer move. My legs are paralyzed and Margaot is next to me in another bathtub, me looking with empty eyes accusers.
She asks me why I left it die, why didn’t I do anything to save her, why am I here alive while she is dead. I woke up in sweat, in tears, heart beating so hard that I believed that it was going to explode. My husband is sometimes woke up, he asked me what’s wrong? I replied always the same thing: nothing, one bad dream.
And I lied because telling the truth would have been too heavy for him, for me, for everyone. The years passed, the decades passed were passing. My children were becoming adults, they got married, they had their own children. Life continued. But for me, part of I remained frozen in 1944 in this cold shed, in this bathtub of iron.
In 1960, a trial took place in Paris, a trial against certain officials of Royal place. They got me contacted, I was asked if I wanted testify. I refused, I couldn’t not. The idea of standing in front of a room filled with people, to tell what I had lived, to relive all that publicly, it was beyond my control strengths.
But I followed the trial in newspapers. I read the testimonies other survivors and I cried. Wept for all those women whose names did not appear anywhere. Cry because the world seemed to have already forgotten, because life continued as if nothing had happened. In 1985, my husband died. From a crisis heart attack, suddenly, without warning.
I was a widow. My children were left, settled in other cities, other countries even. I found myself alone. Again. It is to this the moment something changed, that the silence has become unbearable, that the weight of unspoken testimony is become too heavy to carry. Pendantix- years, I had borne this testimony alone, locked in my memory, prisoner of my own silence.
But one day, in 2010, a historian contacted me. He his name was Julien Morau. He worked on a camp documentation project French transit during the war. He was looking for survivors of royal place. He wanted me to speak. I have hesitated for a long time, weeks, month. I told myself it was too much late, that no one cared, that the world had turned the page since long time.
But finally I accepted because I realized that if I didn’t speak, no one would and that all these women who died in the silence deserved at least that their story be told, let their names are pronounced, that their suffering be recognized. The interview took place in March 2010, 66 years, to the day after my arrival at Royalieu.
I sat down in front of the camera. I was 86 years old. My hands were trembling, my voice was weak. But I spoke. I told about the bathtubs, the cold, the women who were dying, the laughing soldiers, Margaot, Iiane, Claire and her baby. I cried. For the first time in decades, I let the tears flow freely. And strangely it didn’t break me.
This freed me as if by speaking, I had finally laid down a burden that I carried for too long. 3 years after this interview, I died peacefully in my sleep. But my voice remains. My voice is that of all women who were never able to speak. Today you listened to my history. You know what the soldiers Germans did with women too weak to walk.
You know what what were these ice baths? You know what it means to freeze to death slowly, day by day, while others look and laugh. But there has something I want from you understand, something that haunts me still, even now, beyond the dead. The soldier with the clear eyes, the one who saved, the one who gave me three minutes of respite, the one who bowed his head so that I am sent to the right instead than on the left.
Was he a good man, taken in a terrible system? Where was he simply a man who by chance had a moment of humanity in an ocean of cruelty? I will never know. I don’t never saw him again. I don’t even know his name, but I think of him often. And I wonder if I had been in his place, would I have had the courage to do this what did he do? Would I have risked my life to save a stranger? I would like believe that yes, but the truth is that I don’t know and that’s what terrifies the most.
Because if we don’t don’t know what we would do in the worst moments of humanity, how can we ensure that these moments will never happen again? That’s why I’m talking. This is why my voice remains even after my death. Not only to honor the dead, but to warn the living. What the German soldiers made with women too weak to walk not just a story from the past.
It is a warning for the future, a reminder that cruelty can hide behind procedures, orders, uniform, that it can be trivialized, standardized, accepted and the only thing that stands between us and the abyss is our ability to say no, to resist, to remember. Remember me. Remember to Margaot, Claire, Éliane and all the women you don’t will never know the names.
Remember, because the day we let’s forget, this is the day when this start again. Today you have listened to the voice of Aveline Maréchal. A voice that has spanned 66 years of silence before breaking down the walls of oblivion. A voice that belongs no only to her, but to all women who died in these iron bathtubs, in this cold shed of royals and in all the camps where humanity has been robbed, broken, murdered.
What you just heard is not just a story, it is a testimony, a cry launched from the past to remind us that cruelty has no no need for gas chambers to kill, that she can hide behind procedures, orders, uniforms, that it can be trivialized, normalized, accepted by those who watch and say nothing, and that silence accomplice is sometimes as deadly as the act itself.
Aveline wore this burden alone for a lifetime. She lived with the weight of guilt of the survivor, wondering every day why was she still alive then that her sister Margaot, her friend Iane and so many others were dead. She endured decades of nightmares, silent pains, memories that consumed her the interior. And yet, before die, she found the courage to speak, testify, leave your voice so that today we can hear and remember.
If this story touched you, if it did awakened something in you, anger, sadness, compassion or simply a deep gratitude for the peace we we are lucky to live today, so don’t leave this testimony stop here. Complete this channel. Subscribe. Share this video with those who, as believing you is a sacred duty. Because stories like these of Aveline only survive when people like you choose not to look away.
Leave a comment below. Tell us where from you look. Tell us what this story has awakened in you. share your thoughts, your emotions, your questions because each comment is a way of saying “I remember, I don’t forget, I won’t let this story to die in indifference.” And This is exactly what we have need, voices, witnesses, memory keepers.
Today’s world is full of noise, distractions, news that disappear within a few hours. But stories like Aveline’s must last. They must be passed down from generation to generation because the day we forget this what happened, it was the day when this can start again in another form, in another country, with others victims, but always with the same cruelty, the same indifference, the same complicit silence.
Today, in honor of Aveline Marshal, of Margaot, of Éliane, of Claire and all the women including us we’ll never know the names, let’s the choice to remember, to bear witness, to refuse silence because their voice deserves to be heard and because our duty as human beings is to ensure that it is not never forgotten. Mr.
