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Is she already screaming? That’s what I heard on the other side of the metal door. Two German voices. One laughed, the other simply confirmed. I didn’t know what it meant yet, but my body was already trembling because something inside me, something primitive, already understood. My name is Thérèse Duvallon.
I am 83 years old and I have spent most of my life trying to erase this question from my mind. I didn’t succeed. She’s back, Chacob. Every time I close my eyes and the silence becomes too heavy, they didn’t take us to work. They did not take us in for questioning. They took us to a place where young French women were separated, observed, and categorized.
And where some of them? Some were chosen, not by chance, but according to criteria that none of us could have imagined possible. I was just a 10-year-old girl, the daughter of a baker, born and raised in Hansy, a small town in the French Alps where everyone knew each other, where the war still seemed far away. Something that happened in the newspapers, not in our streets, until it ceased to be distant, until they knocked on my door.
March 1943, Aub. Freezing cold. My mother was in the kitchen when we heard sharp, metallic, authoritative banging. My father opened the door. Three German soldiers in impeccable uniforms, with expressionless faces. One of them was holding a list. He read my name. Thérèse Duallon, 19 years old. Bachelor. Come with us.
No explanation, no time for questions. My mother tried to grab my arm. She was pushed back against the wall. My father took a step forward. The butt of a rifle struck his face. He fell. Blood was flowing from his nose. I screamed, but they were already dragging me outside. The truck was waiting in the street, tarpaulin stretched out, engine running.
There were other women inside. I recognized some of them. Young, mostly between 16 and 25 years old, sitting on wooden benches , eyes wide, breathing shallow. No one spoke, no one understood. If you had asked me at that moment what was happening, I would not have known how to answer. I thought it was a mistake.
I thought they were going to release us. I thought I would be home before dawn. I was wrong . We drove for hours. The cold in the truck was brutal. No cover, no water. Just the sound of the engine, the smell of diesel, and the growing fear between us. Some were crying softly, others were praying. I was simply looking at my hands. They were trembling.
I couldn’t stop them. When the truck finally stopped, it was daylight. We went down to a place I had never seen before. A complex surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards everywhere, long grey barracks lined up like coffins. At the gate, a sign in German. I couldn’t read it, but one of the women next to me who spoke German translated it quietly : “Women’s labor camp, military control zone, work.
” The word seemed almost reassuring. I thought, “We’ll work, we’ll go home, this will pass.” But when we went through the gate, I saw something that chilled me to the bone. Women, hundreds of them, thin, dirty, with empty stares, moving like shadows between the barracks. Some carried buckets, others washed clothes in huge basins of dirty water.
But what frightened me the most was not the work, it was the silence. No one was talking, no one was looking at us, the new arrivals, as if they already knew, as if they had already given up on warning us. We were taken to a recording barracks. Inside, a tall, blonde, impeccably dressed German officer watched us while two assistants noted our names, ages, and cities of origin.
They walked slowly between us. she looked at each face, each body as if she were choosing fruit at the market. When she arrived in front of me, she stopped, inclined her head, and said something in German to the assistant. They wrote something next to my name. I didn’t understand, but I saw the look in the woman’s eyes beside me
She had heard and her face paled. It was only later that I discovered what that meant. If you think you know the history of World War II, this testimony will change your perspective forever. Thérèse du Vallon is about to reveal what was hidden behind the closed doors of the camps under German control. Truths erased from history books, methods that were sought to disappear, and cries that were silenced for more than six decades.
Stay until the end because what she’s going to say no one should forget. I spent the first few hours in that camp in a daze. We were given uniforms, not clothes, uniforms. Thick, grey dresses that scratched the skin. No underwear, no socks, just wooden clogs that hurt our feet from the very first steps. They shaved our heads, all of us without exception.
I remember the sound of the scissors, the sudden cold on the back of my neck, seeing my brown curls fall to the floor mixed with those of dozens of other girls. We were told it was for hygiene reasons, but I think he mainly wanted to make us identical, interchangeable. We were assigned a barracks. Number 7. Inside the raw wood bunk beds.
Three floors, no mattresses, just a thin, holey blanket for each person. The smell was unbearable. sweat, urine, mold. The windows were hand-tied and boarded up. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, and was switched off most of the time. That first night, nobody slept. There were about thirty of us, newcomers mixed with women who had already been there for weeks, months.
She wasn’t talking to us. She looked at us with a kind of weary pity, as if she already knew what awaited us. I tried talking to the woman on the bunk below mine. Her name was Marguerite. She was 34 years old, a schoolteacher in Lyon, arrested for hiding resistance documents. She looked at me with sunken, dark-circled eyes and simply said, “Do n’t ask questions, do what you’re told and pray he doesn’t notice your face.
” I didn’t understand, not yet. The next morning at 5 a.m., a siren woke us up, shrill and unbearable. We were ordered to go outside and line up in the central courtyard. It was still dark. The cold bit at the skin. We were barefoot in the frozen mud. A German officer counted us once, twice, then he gave an order.
The guards began to separate the women. Not by chance. They looked at our faces, our bodies. They pointed to the right, to the left, the youngest to the right, the oldest to the left. I was sent to the right. We were taken to another building, smaller and cleaner. Inside, there were rows of chairs, a table with instruments, syringes, and vials.
A German nurse was waiting for us. She examined us one by one, measuring our height, our weight, looking at our teeth, our hands, our feet, noting everything. Then she injected something into us, a clear liquid. My arm felt like it was burning. I asked what it was. She did not reply. Later, a French inmate who worked as an interpreter whispered to me .
He checks if you are healthy, if you can resist. Resist what? I still didn’t understand. But that evening, as we were returning to the barracks, I heard screams, high-pitched, terrified screams of a woman, coming from an isolated building at the back of the camp, a windowless building, permanently guarded.
Marguerite pulled me by the arm. Don’t look, don’t ask questions. But I looked anyway and saw a young woman barely older than me coming out of that building supported by two guards. It didn’t work. She was being dragged. Her legs could no longer support her. His face was white. Her lips were trembling. His eyes. His eyes were empty. I recognized him.
She had arrived with me in the same truck. Her name was Lucy. She was ten years old. What I saw on her face that night, I will never forget. It wasn’t pain. It was something worse, something beyond words. And that’s when I understood. This camp was not a work camp, it was something else. Something that no one talked about, something that history books don’t mention.
In the following days, I tried to understand, to remain invisible. to avoid attracting attention. But in this camp, invisibility did not exist, especially not for young people. Every morning, the same ritual: wake-up at 5 a.m., roll call in the courtyard, separation. The older ones went off to work, sewing uniforms, washing clothes, sorting equipment.
It was hard, exhausting, but she survived. We, the youngest ones, were kept apart. We were made to wait for hours in the cold without any explanation. Then some days, officers would come, they would observe us, talk amongst themselves, take notes, and some girls would be called by their name or by their number.
She never returned to work the same day. Sometimes she didn’t come back at all. Lucy, the young girl I had seen that first night, had become a shadow. She no longer spoke, no longer ate, remained seated on her bunk, her eyes fixed on the wall. Marguerite told me that she had been taken away three times in five days. For what ? I asked.
Marguerite lowered her eyes. for what they call medical experiments. But these are not experiments, this is torture. They test methods and devices on bodies they consider disposable. My throat tightened. Which devices? She hesitated. Then she told me, her voice broken by the electrodes.
He ties them to his wrists, to his ankles, sometimes. Elsewhere, they send shocks to see how long a woman can withstand before losing consciousness. They call it electrical treatment. They say it’s for research, but that’s a lie. It’s just cruelty disguised as science. I remained petrified. My blood ran cold. And why us? Why young people? Marguerite looked at me with infinite sadness.
Because you are fresh, because your body is more resilient, because you shout louder. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. But two days later, my name was called. It was a grey, rainy morning. We were lined up as usual. An officer approached with a list. He read several names. Mine was the 4th. Thérèse du Valallon. Barracks 7.
My heart stopped. The other girls looked at me. Some looked away , others whispered prayers. The five of us were taken to the isolated building, the one without windows, the one from which the cries were coming. Inside, it was hot, too hot. Powerful lamps illuminated every corner. In the center of the room, a cold, inclined metal table with leather straps at the four corners.
A German doctor was waiting for us. White blouse, round glasses, impassive face. Next to him were an assistant and a nurse. He spoke to them calmly in German, as if they were discussing the weather. We are told to undress completely in front of them, without modesty, without humanity. I was trembling. My hands no longer obeyed me. The woman in line next to me was crying.
Another one was pleading. In French, in German, it didn’t matter, they didn’t react. They examined us one by one like cattle. The doctor took notes, measured our reflexes, pressed on certain parts of the body, and noted our reactions. Then he chose the first girl, the one who was crying. Her name was Helen. She was twenty years old.
They laid him on the table, tied him down, wrists, ankles. She was screaming. begged. The doctor made a sign. The assistant brought a machine, a metal box with dials, wires and clamps. They fastened the clamps on her, on her wrists, on her ankles. Then the doctor turned a dial and she screamed like I’d never heard anyone scream before.
A cry that came from the gut, a cry that was not human. He noted, measured, adjusted, and started again. I closed my eyes. But I couldn’t close my ears. I couldn’t escape that sound, that horror. After Helen, it was the turn of another, then another . They did not choose me that day. I don’t know why. Perhaps he wanted to keep some of us intact for longer.
Perhaps he had already gathered enough data. But when I left there, I wasn’t the same person anymore. Something inside me had died. something I will never find again. I quickly understood that this camp operated according to a logic. A monstrous logic, but logic nonetheless. Everything was organized, planned, documented.
The youngest and healthiest women were reserved for the experiments. The others worked, some died of hunger, others of disease. but the one that was chosen for the experiments. They would die differently, more slowly, more painfully. There were categories. I learned this from a Polish prisoner, Anna, who worked in the administrative offices and translated German documents.
She risked her life by talking to us, but she did it anyway because she wanted us to know, to bear witness if we ever survived. ” He classifies you according to three criteria,” she told me one evening, whispering in the darkness of the barracks. Age, appearance, physical resistance. The youngest and prettiest are sent first because to them you represent the perfect enemy, the young French woman, beautiful, proud.
They want to break you, not just physically, but in your soul. She handed me a piece of paper, a report in German. I didn’t understand everything, but I recognized some words. Electriche Behandlong, electrical treatment. Schmerz tolerance test, pain tolerance test. He is testing how long a woman can endure before begging, before losing her mind.
He notes everything: the duration, the intensity, the reactions. Everything is recorded, everything is sent to Berlin for future medical research. I felt the bile rising in my throat and those that do not survive. Anna closed her eyes. They disappear. There is a pit behind the camp. We never see the bodies, but we hear the night, the shovels, the sound of the earth being turned.
That night, I didn’t sleep. I lay there , staring at the invisible ceiling in the darkness. I was thinking about my mother, my father, my little house in Hannesy, my life before. Such a simple, normal life, a life that now seemed to belong to someone else. Weeks passed. I was called three times.
Three times I entered that building. Three times I thought I wouldn’t get out . The first time, he tests my pain tolerance. Wrist electrodes, progressive charges. He was noting my reactions. How long before I scream? How long before I lose consciousness? The second time, they tested my recovery capacity. How long after a session could I still walk? Speak, answer questions? The third time.
The third time, I don’t want to talk about it, even today, even after all these years, there are things that remain locked away, not by choice, but for survival. What I can say is that I heard that phrase. The phrase I will never forget. Two officers talking in front of the door before entering.
Ist Shonam Shhrin, she’s already screaming. One of them laughed. The other replied with something I didn’t understand, but the tone was clear, amused, detached, as if he were talking about an animal, not a human being. And that’s what broke me. Not pain, not fear, but this indifference, this certainty they had that we were nothing, that our lives did not matter, that our cries were just one sound among others.
If I am still alive today, it is not thanks to my strength. It’s not thanks to my courage, it’s thanks to moments, tiny moments when someone somewhere decided to see me as a human being again. Marguerite, for example, she who had lost everything. Her husband was shot by the Germans in 1942 for sabotage. Her two children disappeared during a raid in Lyon.
She who had nothing left to hope for, nothing left to expect. She was the one who gave me my ration of bread when I could no longer swallow. She was the one who held my hand at night when nightmares woke me up screaming . It was she who whispered: “Breathe, Thérèse! Just breathe a breath of faith.” She had developed a method, a way of surviving psychologically in this hell.
She counted the days, the hours, the breaths. She used to say that as long as we could count, we were still alive, still capable of thinking, still human. “Don’t give them your mind,” she kept repeating to me. “They can take your body, they can hurt you , but your mind, Thérèse, is yours. Keep it, hide it, protect it.
” I didn’t always understand what she meant , but I clung to her words like a lifebuoy in a raging sea, Anna the Polish woman. She risked her life every day by passing on information stolen from administrative offices. She used to tell us: ” Never forget, if you survive, tell your story. Even if no one believes you, even if they call you a liar, tell your story because silence is their greatest weapon.
” Anna had been a history teacher in Warsaw, arrested for helping Jews escape. Her entire family had been exterminated. She was alone, but she refused to be silent. She wrote down everything she could on tiny scraps of paper that she hid in the seams of her clothes, in cracks in the walls. She told me: “If I die, maybe someone will find these words and know.
” “I don’t know if anyone ever found her notes.” I don’t even know if Anna survived. We were separated in February 1944. I never saw him again. And then there was this man, this German guard. I never knew his name. I never saw his face clearly. But one night, as I was leaving the experimental building, unable to walk, with trembling legs and blurred vision, he carried me; he did not drag me, he did not push me, he carried me .
Like carrying a child, he says nothing. He dropped me off in front of the barracks, looked around to make sure no one had seen him, and left without a word, without a glance. For what ? I don’t know. Maybe he had a daughter my age. Perhaps he was simply still human somewhere deep down. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence, a moment of pity in an ocean of cruelty.
But that moment saved me because it reminded me of something, something I had almost forgotten, that somewhere there still existed a humanity, however small, however hidden, however crushed under the weight of uniform and disorder. There were also those small acts of resistance among us, the prisoners, those invisible gestures that kept us alive.
A woman who shared a stolen piece of sugar, another who hummed softly at night to help us sleep. A third woman told stories from her life before, to remind us that there had been a normal world, that there might be a normal world again. I remember a woman, Claire, a Parisian. She had been a dancer at the opera.
She would sometimes show us broomstick positions in the darkness of the barracks. Standing, despite the hunger, despite the exhaustion, she raised her arms, pointed her toes and for a few seconds, she became what she had been. Graceful, free, beautiful. They can lock me up, she said, but they can’t stop me from dancing in my head.
Claire died in March 4th of pneumonia, but until her last breath, she continued to raise her arms. to point their toes, to dance. The months passed, winter arrived, and the cold became unbearable. Our uniforms were not enough, our clogs were cracking, our feet were bleeding. Many died from cold, hunger, and disease.
The experiments continued, but they became less frequent, less systematic, as if even the Germans were beginning to run out of resources or interest, or perhaps they sensed that the war was turning, that their time was running out. Rumors were circulating about Allied landings, German defeats, and recaptured cities.
We didn’t dare believe it, but we hoped desperately in silence. I was called up one last time in January 194, almost a year after my arrival. This time, it wasn’t for electrodes, it was for an interrogation. He wanted to know if I knew any members of the resistance, if my father had any contacts, if I had passed on any messages, if I had helped any Jews, if I had hidden any weapons; I knew nothing.
And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have said anything. not out of bravery, but out of exhaustion. I was so drained that nothing mattered anymore, nothing could break me any further. The officer who was questioning me was young, maybe 25 years old. He spoke French with a thick German accent. He kept asking me the same questions over and over again, as if he hoped I would eventually crack, invent something just to make it stop .
But I had nothing to invent. So I remained silent or kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know anyone, I didn’t do anything.” After 3 hours, he gave up, looked at me with something that resembled contempt or perhaps disappointment. Then he sent me back to the barracks. I didn’t understand why they released me.
Perhaps I no longer had any value to them. Perhaps I was too damaged, too thin, too broken. Maybe I had become useless, or maybe the war was really starting to turn around and they knew their time was running out, that they were already trying to erase the evidence, to make the traces disappear, to make us disappear. In February 1944, they began transferring prisoners in groups to other camps, to Germany, to the east.
We didn’t know exactly where, but we knew it was a bad sign. A very bad sign. Anna was transferred. Marguerite too. I saw them getting into the trucks. I couldn’t even say goodbye to them. They disappeared and I was left with a handful of other women, the weakest, the sickest, those who were no longer worth transporting.
We were left almost entirely alone. There were fewer guards, the rations even meager, the barracks even colder. It was as if he had forgotten us, as if we were already dead. But we weren’t, not yet. And then one morning in August 1944, we heard something. Distant explosions then getting closer and closer, gunfire, shouts, but not our shouts, the shouts of the Germans.
He ran, he burned papers, he loaded trucks, he left. And we stood there frozen, unable to understand what was happening until the doors opened and soldiers entered, but not German soldiers, American soldiers, Free French, with flags, with smiles, with tears in their eyes. They looked at us and some looked away because what they saw was too hard, too unbearable, living skeletons, ghosts, women who no longer looked like women.
One of them approached me, waited for me with a blanket, and said to me in French, “It’s over, you are free.” Free. The word seemed so strange, so unreal, as if it were a language I no longer spoke. The camp was liberated in August 1944. The Allies arrived, the gates opened. We were free. But what is freedom when you have lost everything, when you no longer know who you are, when you carry within you images that no word can erase? I returned to France via Ansy. My mother cries when she sees me.
My father looked away. I no longer resembled the young girl they had recognized. I was thin, bald, with a vacant stare. They asked me questions once, twice, then they stopped because they saw in my eyes that I couldn’t answer. Not yet, maybe never. I was trying to get my life back on track.
I worked, I got married, had children. But a part of me always remained there, in that camp, in that building, on that table. For 64 years, I said almost nothing. A few words, a few sentences, never the whole story because nobody really wanted to know, because it was too hard, too dark, too embarrassing. France needed heroes, not victims.
She needed glorious stories of resistance, not stories of young women tortured in forgotten camps. So, I kept quiet, like thousands of others. We carried this silence alone, hoping that one day perhaps someone would truly want to listen. This day came late. I was 83 years old when a historian contacted me.
She was researching women’s labor camps in occupied France. She had found my name in German archives with a note. Experimental subject, electrical treatment, survivor. She wanted to interview me. I initially refused, then I accepted. Not for me, but for Lucy, for Helen, for Marguerite, for Anna, for all those who never came back.
This interview lasted three days. I’m telling everything. or almost. There are things that I still keep, that I will keep until my death, because they are too heavy, too intimate, too unbearable. Five years after that interview, I passed away peacefully in my sleep. But before leaving, I asked for one thing: that my testimony be preserved.
May these words survive, may what happened to us not be erased. Because history should not be written solely by the victors. It must also be told by those who survived, by those who bore the weight of this war in their flesh. Today, I am no longer here. But these words remain, and as long as there is someone to read them, to hear them, to pass them on, what happened to us will not be buried in silence.
We were hundreds, perhaps thousands of young French, Belgian, Polish women, torn from our lives, used, broken and then forgotten. But we existed, we suffered, we resisted in our own way, not with weapons, but with our will to remain human despite everything. And that may be the only victory that truly matters.
If you are listening to these words today, I ask only one thing of you. Don’t forget us. Don’t let our stories disappear because what happened to us can happen again in other forms in other countries, to other women. As long as humanity chooses to close its eyes, as long as it prefers indifference to the truth. My name is Thérèse Duvallon. I was years old when they took me.
I got some when I left. Between the two, I lived. I survived. And now, I bear witness forever. Thérèse Duvallon carried this silence for 64 years. 64 years living with his images, his cries, this pain that no one wanted to hear. But before leaving, she chose to speak. For Marguerite, for Anna, for Lucy, for Claire, for all those who never returned, their dignity, their silent resistance, their humanity crushed but never destroyed.
All of this deserves to be known, to be honored, to stand the test of time. If this testimony has touched you, if you feel the weight of these words in your chest, we ask you something important. Subscribe to this channel so that stories like this one continue to exist. Like this video not as a simple gesture, but as an act of remembrance towards those who were never able to tell their story.
Share it with those who, like you, believe that some truths should never disappear, even when they hurt. Especially when they hurt. In the comments, take a moment to reflect. Where are you watching this documentary from right now? What did Thérèse’s story awaken in you? Do you think such horrors could happen again if we choose silence and indifference? These women survived not because they were exceptional, but because they refused to abandon their humanity, even in the darkness, even when all seemed lost; their courage deserves more
than our passing silence. They deserve our voice, our commitment never to forget. Thérèse passed away in 2008 at the age of 88. But these words remain, and as long as there is someone to listen to them, to share them, to carry them further, what happened to him will never be erased by time. Thank you for listening until the end.
Now, make sure that her testimony doesn’t end here. Subscribe, share, comment and most importantly, remember. Amen.
