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I was ten years old when I learned that the a woman’s body can transform into battlefield. Not in books, not in metaphor for real, on the skin, in the belly, in the silence who comes next. My name is Medw. I was born in 1924 in a village called Saint-Rémi sur Loir, so small that it didn’t even appear on military maps.
I grew up between vineyards and fields of wheat, between the laughter of Sunday and the masses were singing. My mother made bread every morning. My father repaired clocks. My sisters, Aurore and Séverine were everything what I knew about love unconditional. Aurore was 19 years old and dreamed of becoming teacher.
Séverine, an embroiderer of wedding dresses which she never wore. Me, I just wanted time stops, that the war of which all people talk never arrives until us. But she arrived in June 1942. They came to get us. Not because that we were criminals, not because that we had done anything, just because we were young, French and in the wrong place bad time.
An officer of the Vermart knocked on the door at dawn. My mother fell to her knees. My father has tried to argue, but it was pushed against the wall. Three soldiers we hung out while the sun still rose on the fields that we we will never see the same again way. We were thrown into the back of a truck under a dirty tarpaulin.
There was other women, all young, all terrified. Nobody spoke. She cried in silence. I held the hand of Aurore so strong that I felt her nails in my palm. Séverine whispered a prayer that never ended. The truck was moving on the broken road while the smell of sweat, fear and Burning gasoline was choking us. We don’t didn’t know where we were going.
We don’t didn’t know if we would come back. We only knew that something had broken that morning. We are arrived at camp late in the afternoon. This was not like Auschwitz or Dachot, no gas chamber or crematorium. It was something else. Something that the official history mentions rarely. A forced labor camp administered directly by an officer of high rank.
There, the rules depended of one man. His name was Auberst Friedrich Vonsteiner. General years old, gray hair, combed in back, straight posture, calm voice. He never shouted, never hit. He gave orders with a tone almost polite as if he was asking for sugar his coffee. This is what did the most fear. He chose who would work the kitchen, which would clean the rooms, who would sew the uniforms and who would be chosen for something else.
This other thing, no one described but we all knew it. The first days, we tried to become invisible, work in silence, head bowed. But Fun Steiner always observed. His gaze was not not that of a man desiring, but that of an owner. One evening, Séverine was called. Two soldiers appeared and uttered his name. She stood up trembling.
Before to go out, she looked at us goodbye silent. She came back at dawn, lying down, face towards the wall. She doesn’t spoke more. Three weeks later, Aurora in turn. Then I don’t I will not describe those nights, not by shame, but because there are things which, even after so many years, are too heavy to become words.
When I realized I was pregnant, it was winter. My body was skeleton, my hair was falling out but my belly was growing. Aurora also, Séverine too, three sisters, three pregnancies. When the camp found out, a strange silence covered everything. The other women looked at us with pity, horror and cruel relief for not being in our place.
Even the guards looking away. Von Steiner, he remained impassive. He has us summoned and simply declared that we would give birth in the camp, that the children would be declared orphans war then sent to families German. We would go back to work as soon as our bodies allow it. Séverine gave birth in April 1943 a girl.
It was taken from him before even if the cord is cut. She has shouted for three days and then nothing. She died six weeks later. Officially, Tyifus. Truly heartbroken. Aurora has had a boy in May. She was able to hold it a few hours. I saw his face break into irreparable fragments. I have gave birth in June. A boy, hair dark, tiny hands clutched my finger.
I felt love and hate at the same time. Love for my son, hatred because it was also his. They took it away the next day. The war ended but Steiner disappeared before the arrival of the allies. Some say he fled South America, others it was killed by his own men when they realized they were going to lose some. We we’ll never know.
I returned to Saint-Rémi sur Loire. My mother died of grief. My father didn’t recognize me when I knocked the door. I stood there, watching the old watchmaker, watching me like I was a ghost. Maybe I was. I survived still sixty years after the end of the war. I lived alone. I worked as a seamstress. I never bride.
I never had any other children. For decades I didn’t didn’t talk about what happened in this camp. not because I wanted forget, but because no one wanted to hear. Until 2010 at years old, I agree to give an interview for a historical memory project on the forgotten women of the Second War worldwide. It was the first and only time I told my story complete.
What I revealed in this interview goes way beyond what has already been said so far. Because what happened to me sisters and our children did not completed in 1945. In fact, it was just beginning. In the next chapters of this documentary series, I will reveal secrets that remained buried for nearly seventy years old.
Secrets about destiny reality of children born in this camp, on the clandestine network that Funsteiner coordinated, on the day I found something that I believed lost forever. I spent the next two years the end of the war in a sort of fog. I wasn’t really sleeping. I wasn’t really living. I existed just like a yellowed photograph that we keep in a drawer without ever look at her.
Aurore had returned with me in Saint-Rémy, but she was no longer Aurora. She almost never spoke. She sat by the window for hours, hands placed on knees, gaze fixed on something something that only I could not see. Sometimes she would whisper a name, always the same, the one she had given to his son during the few hours when she had been able to hold him.
She died in 1947. The doctor said it was tuberculosis. I knew it was the sorrow. I remained alone. The people from the village looked at me differently, not with pity, but with discomfort, as if I were a reminder living on something he wanted forget. France wanted to turn the page, rebuild, move forward. Women like me, those who bore the scars of war in their belly and in their soul, do not do not fit with this new image.
So I did what was expected me. I kept quiet. I found some work as a seamstress in a workshop in Orleans. I rented a small room above of a bakery. I sewed wedding dresses for women who still believed in accounts in fact. I went home in the evening, I ate alone. I fell asleep in thinking of my son. To what did he look like now? Did he have 5 years, 6 years? Did he know how to read? Did he have afraid of the dark like me at his age? Had he been told that he was orphan? Had he been lied to? about who I was? These questions
were gnawing, but I didn’t know where start. I didn’t even know the name given to him. I didn’t know not in which city, in which country he had been sent. Then in 1953, something has changed. I received a letter, a simple envelope, without return address, posted from Munich. To inside, a single sentence written hand in German.
If you want to know what happened to your child, come to the address next on March 12 at 2 p.m. My heart stopped. My hands were shaking so much so that I had to put the letter down on the table to read it again. Who had me sent this? How does this person Did she know who I was? Was it a trap? But I knew I would go.
Little no matter the danger, no matter the blow. March took the train to Munich. It was the first time I left France since my return. Every kilometer traveled revived memories that I had tried to bury. The uniforms, the orders shouted in German, the smell of camp. The address given was a gray building in a working-class neighborhood from Munich.
I went up the stairs up to the third floor, the heart beating so hard that I was afraid it would explodes. I knocked on the door. A woman opened middle age, gray hair, pulled back bun, severe but gentle face. She looked at me for a long time before saying “But duoc, I shook my head, she brought me in.” The apartment was modest but clean.
Pictures children covered the walls. She told me invited me to sit down and served me tea. Then she started talking. My name is Greta Hoffman. During the war, I worked as a nurse for Vermarthe. Not by choice, but because I didn’t have any other options. I was assigned to the camp where you and your sisters were detained.
My senses froze. I did not participate in what is yours arrived, she added quickly, but I saw and hated myself every day for not having done anything. She got got up and took a box out of a cupboard. Inside the documents, registers, lists of names. von Steiner kept meticulous records. He recorded everything, the names of mothers, dates of birth of children, German families to whom they were re-entrusted.
After the war, these documents had to be destroyed, but I saved a few. She placed a sheet in front of me, my name was there. And just below, a other line. Male child, born on 18 June 1943, transferred June 20, 1943, family foster care, Adler family. I reread this line until the letters become blurred. He’s alive, I whispered.
I don’t know, she replied. slowly, but now you have a starting point. I returned to France with this folded sheet in my bag and I took a decision. I was going to find him. No matter how long it would take no matter how many doors I should knock. My son existed somewhere and I I wouldn’t die without trying. The research lasted almost twenty years.
20 years of writing letters that remained unanswered. 20 years to hit at the administrative office doors where people looked at me as if I were crazy. 20 years of saving every franc to be able to take the train to Germany once or twice a year. The Adler family had moved from Hamburg in 1950. Nobody knew where at least nobody didn’t want to tell me.
The 1950s were the most difficult. Europe was rebuilding, forgot, buried his dead and his secrets with the same effectiveness. The archives had been destroyed, scattered, hidden. The witnesses refused to speak out of fear, shame, out of cowardice. I contacted organizations helping victims of war.
I consulted lawyers who looked with pity before explain to me that my case was complicated. unprecedented, probably without outcome. I even wrote to the Red Cross international. Their response was polite, professional and completely useless. The archives were incomplete. The witnesses were dead or refused to speak. Post-war Germany wanted forget her too.
And I wasn’t that one voice among thousands, a mother among many others, looking for a child lost in the chaos of war. But I couldn’t forget. Each night, I saw his face, his eyes closed, the tiny hands, the way which he had clung to my finger. I woke up with a start, soaked in sweat, convinced he heard a baby cry, but there was only silence of my empty room.
I worked during the day as a seamstress, sewing hems and buttonholes with mechanical gestures. In the evening, I wrote letters. requests, supplications. I have worn out dozens of pens filled with entire notebooks of names, addresses, tracks that do not led nowhere. The 60s are arrivals, then the 70s. My body was aging, my hair were graying, but my determination remained intact.
I refused to die without knowing. I refused to leave my son disappear into oblivion as if existence had never mattered. In 1972, I finally had a serious lead. A former administrator of Vermart had agreed to meet me. He lived in a retirement home Strasbourg. consumed by illness and guilt. When I entered his room, I saw an emaciated old man, his eyes pressed down, hands trembling.
He looked at me for a long time before speak. Are you rock corn? Yes. Sit down. I sat down. My heart was beating so so loud that I was afraid he would hear it. I remember the Adler family, he said slowly. They were privileged, close to the regime. They have received several children during the war, children of programs special.
I tightened the points to stop me from shaking. Where are they now? They went to Austria after the war, Salzburg, I think. But I don’t know if they’re still there. He gave me a street name, a neighborhood. It was more than all I had obtained in 29 years. I thanked him. He has looked away. unable to support my look. I left for Salzburg the following month.
I was 49 years. My hair was almost entirely gray. My hands were shaking constantly because of arthritis. My knees hurt every time not. But I went there. The journey lively lasted for hours. I was watching scrolling through the landscapes through the window, mountains, forest, village. I was thinking about all these wasted years, to all this time when my son grew up without me somewhere, maybe only a few hundred kilometers.
Did he look like me? Did he have my eyes? My mouth? Did he know that he was adopted? Had someone talked about me? I found an Adler in the directory telephone from Salzburg, Hans Adler. I wrote down the address in my worn notebook, the one where I had written hundreds of names over the years. Then I walked up to this house as we walk towards a precipice knowing that we are going jump anyway.
It was a house well-kept bourgeois with a flower garden. Roses were climbing the along the facade, a swing for children under a large chain. Everything breathed normality, peaceful life, quiet happiness. I rang the bell. The seconds that followed were the longest of my life. Then the door opened. A man of a thirty years old stood there.
Hair brown, dark eyes, marked trch. My heart stopped. It was him. I knew. Every fiber of my body knew. I recognized something in his features, a familiar glow, a shadow of my mother, of Séverine, of me. “Ja,” he said in German. “A little impatient, my voice didn’t come out. I watched unable to turn away eyes.
I was looking for traces of myself him. Traces of us. You are fine ? he asked, his tone becoming worried. I I’m looking for someone, I finally managed to say. A man born in June 1943, adopted by the Hler family. His face changed instantly. All color flew away. A shadow passed through his look. He took a step back. Why ? I took a breath to gather all my courage.
Because I am his mother. The silence What followed was unbearable. He me looked like a ghost. His hands tense on the framework of the door, his breathing short. Then slowly he backed away and closed the door. I stayed there, standing on the porch. Legs trembling, heart crumb. I heard voices the interior.
A woman asking what was happening, answering him something that I didn’t understand. I waited ten minutes, maybe an hour. The door never opened. Finally, I left a letter in the mailbox. A letter where I explained everything, who I was, what had happened, why I had come. I left the address of my hotel there. Then I came home and cried three days. He didn’t want me.
He didn’t want to know. I had traveled almost three years old, going through borders, saved every penny, pursued every lead and now that I had found him, he rejected me. But I couldn’t give up. Not now, not after all this way. I came back the next day. I rang the bell, no response. I came back on two days later. Same result.
I left other letters, photos of me when I was young, a photo of Séverine and d’Aurore, camp documents, everything that I had kept during all these years. The 5th time it opened. He looked exhausted, deep dark circles under the eyes, the hollow face. “What do you want from me?” he asked, his voice breaking, almost pleading.
“Nothing,” I replied quietly. I don’t want to take anything from you. I want just to know that you have been desired, that I have not abandoned you. We took me away from you not for a single day Throughout my life I have never stopped thinking about you. He closed his eyes. A tear fell on his cheek.
They told me that my mother died during the war, I was an orphan, that my parents biological had perished me in a bombing. I know, I whispered. I know what they told you. They got me lied. His voice trembled with anger and mixed pains. He opened his eyes and looked at me, really watched for the first time. What is your name? But ! He slowly head as if recorded every syllable.
Me, it’s Mathias. And for the first time in years, I heard my son’s name. Mathias and I never became close. Not really. How could we have ? I was a stranger who wore her face. He was a man built on a lie that I had just shaken. We saw each other sometimes after this first meeting. Cafes polite, careful conversations.
He asked me questions about Aurore and Séverine, at the camp. on Fun Steiner. I responded honestly, even when it hurt. One day he told me asked “Did you love me?” Even a little, I looked at this man 30 years old, this stranger who was my son and I told the truth. I loved you from the first second I felt you move inside me.
And when they have you ripped from my arms, a part of me is dead. I spent my life trying to find you. So yes, Mathias, I loved you. I still love you. He cried too. But love is not always enough heal what has been broken. Mathias had his own family, a wife, two children, a life built far from me. I couldn’t demand a place in this life. I didn’t want to.
I wanted just let him know. We are written for a few years, then letters are spaced out, then they are arrested. In 2005, I learned through an announcement that he had died of cancer. He was sixty years old. I don’t have not invited to the funeral. I got there still delivered. I stood at background of the church discreet, invisible.
I watched her children cry, her woman collapsed and I realized something. My son had a life, a real life despite everything, despite Viner, despite the camp, despite myself. And maybe that was enough. In 2010, when I gave this interview for the historical memory project, I was six years old.
My body was worn out, my fragile voice, but my mind remained clear. I was asked if I regretted anything thing. I answered no. No having searched for Mathias, not for having knocked on his door, not for having told the truth, because that silence also kills and because some stories can’t die buried. Von Steiner was never tried. The children born in this camp have no never been officially recorded.
Women like me have never received of recognition, of apology, of repair. We were simply erased. But as long as there’s someone left tell, we still exist. I died 5 years after this interview in 2015. I was 91 years old. I was alone as I had been for a large part of my life. But my words remained. And today, decades later, thousands of people hear my history.
Perhaps among them there are to a woman who recognizes something, a familiar pain, a silence that she wears. If so, I want let her know this. Your story account. Your pain is real. You are not alone. The world tried to erase us, but we are always there in every testimony, in every memory preserved, in each person who refuses to forget.
It was my story, the story of Corn of Rock, the story of three sisters who survived the unthinkable. And now it’s yours too. Because as long as you remember, we will live again. This story is not only that of rock corn, it is that of thousands of women whose names have been erased books. Women who carried in their stomach the scars of a war they had not chosen.
Mothers who have had their children before they can even memorize their smell. Survivors who had to learn to live with emptiness impossible to fill. While Corn was looking for her son for twenty years the world continued to turn. Memorials to the dead were inaugurated, the official speeches pronounced, the heroes celebrated, but she, like so many others, remained in the shadow because its history was uncomfortable, because it reminded that the war does not end when the cannons fall silent.
It continues in bodies, in memories, in the silences that cross generations. Today, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, we have a duty to remember not just battles and treated, but women like Corn, Aurore and Séverine, children like Mathias, torn from their history, truths buried because they disturbed.
If this story has you touched, if she woke up something within you, if you believe that these voices deserve to be heard, so don’t let this story end here. Subscribe to this channel to than other stories like this can continue to be told. Activate the bell so you don’t miss any testimony. Share this video with those who, like you, believe that this remembrance is an act of resistance against oblivion.
In the comments, tell us what marked you in the history of Corn. Did you know this little-known facet of war? Do you have in your family of stories never told? Your voice counts, your testimony account. Together we are building a collective memory which refuses to leave these women disappear into silence. Corn left in 2015 at the age of 91 years, but his words remained.
Sound courage to have broken the silence opened the voice to other testimonies suffocated. She proved that it is not never too late to tell, never too late to search, never too late late to refuse oblivion. So today, in his honor, in the honor of all these forgotten women, ask yourself this question: what story carry in you who deserve to be heard?
