I was 20 when I learned that the human body could be reduced to a stopwatch. I’m not talking about metaphor, I’m talking about something literal, measured, repeated with a mechanical precision. 9 minutes. It was the time given to every German soldier before the next time is called. There was no no clock hanging on the wall of the room, no dial visible.
And yet we all knew with one terrible accuracy when these minutes were coming to an end. The body learns to count time when the mind has already given up think. My name is Élise Martilleux. I have today is years old and it’s the first once I agree to talk about what actually happened in this building administrative converted into a sector of detention near CompiNgne between April and August 1943.
Almost no official register mentions this place. The rare documents that talk about it. They say it was simply a sorting center, a crossing point temporary to camps more important. But we, those who Were we know what was going on really behind these gray walls. I was an ordinary young girl, daughter of a blacksmith and a seamstress born and raised in Saintlis, a small town located northeast of Paris.
My father died in 1940 during the debacle French, crushed somewhere on a road crowded with refugees. My mother and I we survived by sewing uniforms for German officers, not by choice, but because it was that or die of starvation in an occupied country where each piece of bread was negotiated against his dignity. I had catty hair which fell to the shoulders, hands small and clever and I still believed with this naivety specific to youth, that if I kept my head down, if I don’t make me notice, the war would pass by me without really
touch. But on April 12, 1943, three soldiers of the Martha Glass knocked on our door in the early morning. The sun was not yet up. They said that my mother had been denounced for having hidden a clandestine radio station. This was not true. We never had owned radio. But the truth in these dark days no longer had any importance.
They took me too just because I was there, because that I was old enough, because my name was on a list that someone somewhere had written in an office cold and anonymous. We have been transported in a truck merchandise with eight other women. Nobody spoke. The engine roared like a mechanical beast. The road The author shook us mercilessly.
And I held my mother’s hand as if we were still able to protect ourselves each other. We arrived at the building around 10 morning hours. It was a gray building three stories with windows narrow and tall. A facade which had must have been elegant before the war. Now she was just cold, impersonal, emptied of all humanity.
They separated us the entrance. My mother was taken to second floor, me on the ground floor. I never saw him again. I learned more late by a prisoner who had survived longer than she was died of tyus three weeks after our arrival in a cell without ventilation where the air itself seemed putrefied. But at that moment, while that the door was closing between us and that his face disappeared behind the dark wood, I still believed that we we would find again.
I still believed that this nightmare would end. If you are listening to this story right now time, no matter where in the world where you are, know that it had been buried for more than six decades. Élise only spoke once times and it was so that we today we can finally hear this which the official archives have erased.
If this testimony touches you, leave a like, comment where you are watching this from documentary. Stories like these only survive when someone decides she deserves to be recalled. I was placed in a room with 12 other young women. All were between 18 and 25 years old. None of We didn’t know exactly why we were there, what crime we had allegedly committed to deserve this treatment.
Some had been taken with hidden resistance leaflets under their coats. Others, like me, were simply at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong name on wrong list. A of them, Marguerite, only had Barely 17 years old. She cried without interruption, silent sobs which shook his whole body. And one older woman named Thérèse was trying to calm her down by whispering that we would soon be released, that it was not than an administrative misunderstanding which would be quickly resolved.
But Thérèse lied. or maybe she had just need to believe herself this lie so as not to sink into madness. Late in the afternoon, an officer German entered the room. He doesn’t have not shouted. He didn’t need it. Its voice was calm, almost administrative when he explained the news to us rules with bureaucratic coldness chilling.
He said that this building served as a logistical support point for troops in transit, only soldiers passed here before leaving towards the eastern front. These exhausted men who needed rest and support morale before returning to the hell of the war. He used exactly these words: moral support. Then he clarified that we, the prisoners, would be designated to fulfill this function.
Nobody asked any questions. Nobody didn’t ask what that meant exactly. But we understood everything instantly. He continued in a voice monotone. He said there would be rotations, that each soldier would have right to exactly minutes, that the room designated for this was room 6 located at the very end of the hallway ground floor.
That any form of resistance would be punished by immediate transfer to Ravensbruck, this name that we we all knew, this camp concentration for women whose rumors were already circulating throughout the Occupied France. Then it [music] is out, leaving us alone with this heavy, suffocating, stifling silence where even the air seemed afraid of circulate.
Marguerite vomited on the stone floor cold. Thérèse closed her eyes and began to pray in a low voice, her lips trembling over words that I don’t couldn’t hear. Me, I am remained motionless, staring at the door which the officer had just left. I was trying to understand what it was like possible, how could the world have get there, how men had could decide in an office somewhere that 9 minutes was enough time to destroy someone, to reduce someone human being a mere cog in a machine of systematic dehumanization.
That night, [music] none of us didn’t sleep. We remained lying on our pallets, eyes open in the darkness, listening to the breathing jerks from others, trying to mentally prepare for what we was waiting. But how can we prepare for the unthinkable? The next day morning, the calls started. If this story upsets you, know that it is one of the thousands of voices that have been silenced.
Elise chose to speak so that we don’t forget never. Before we continue, take a moment to think. How many more stories have never been told? How many women have died without no one knows their name, their face, their suffering? This documentary exists to break this silence. Don’t let it die out. The first time I heard my name call, it was a Tuesday morning.
I remember because the sun was coming in through a crack in the wall and I said how can there still be sunshine in a place like this? A guard came to get me. He told me motions to follow him without a word. My legs were shaking so much that I had to lean against the wall to move forward. The other girls looked at me.
Some looked away. Others stared at me as if they were trying to memorize my face case I won’t come back. The hallway was long, narrow and smelled of damp and cold sweat. There were six doors. The last one at the bottom was room 6. It was painted gray with a worn copper handle. Nothing special, nothing that suggested what that was happening behind.
The guard has opened the door and pushed me the interior. Then he closed behind me. The room was small, maybe 3 I’m sure there was a narrow iron bed against the wall, a wooden chair and a high window blocked by boards. The smell The smell was what stayed the longest. A mixture of sweating, fear and something something older, deeper.
something I still can’t not name. A soldier was already there. He must have been 25, maybe thirty, blond, his face marked by fatigue. He didn’t look me in the eye. He simply said in French approximate, “Take off your clothes.” I couldn’t move. My body had ceased to belong to me. It was as if I were outside, trying to watching from the ceiling, see this 20 year old girl who still didn’t understand how she had arrived there.
He repeated: “More strong this time! And I obeyed. I don’t I’m not going to describe what happened then, not because I don’t care don’t remember. I remember it with one precision that still haunts me today, but because some things don’t need to be said to be understood. What I can say is that the 9 minutes was not an estimate. It was a strict rule.
Another guard knocked on the door when the time was over and the soldier left without a word, without a backward glance. I stayed lying on this bed for several minutes after departure. I stared at the ceiling. There was a crack that looked like a river. I focused on this crack to not think about what had just happened pass, so as not to feel my own body.
Then the door opened again, a another guard, another soldier. 9 minutes again and again. That day I counted seven times. Sep soldiers. Sep times 9 minutes, 63 minutes in total. But for me, it lasted forever. When they brought me back into the room common, I could no longer walk correctly. Thérèse helped me lie down. She gave me given water. She didn’t say anything.
What could she have said? Marguerite, the youngest, was called the same afternoon. When she is When she returned, she no longer spoke. She sat in the corner and stared at the wall for hours. Nobody has tried to talk to him. We knew there were no words for that. The following days were melted into each other.
There is no had more difference between the morning and in the evening. Just calls, doors which opened, footsteps in the corridor. And this number nine. Some girls tried to count how many times they had been called. Others refused to count. Me, I did not count by choice, but because my mind was clinging to anything which still resembled logic, an order, to something measurable.
As if by counting, I could keep a semblance of control. But there was something worse than the nine minutes themselves. It was the tent not knowing when your name would be called, hear footsteps in the hallway and ask is it for me this time? See the door open and feel your heart stop until you hear another name.
And then when this wasn’t you, there was this shame, this terrible shame of feeling relief because it was someone else, because you still had a few hours of respite, a few hours when your body belonged to you again. This, I believe, is what he wanted to destroy in us. not only our dignity, but our humanity itself. He wanted us to see ourselves as objects, like numbers, like minutes on an invisible clock.
A evening, Thérèse spoke. She said that she had read before the war that he torture methods existed psychological where the executioners did not even touch their victims. They were content to create a system where the victims themselves ended up destroy itself. She said that’s what he did with us, that room six was not not just a place of violence physically, it was a place of demolition psychological. And she was right.
But what she didn’t know yet, that none of us knew was that even in a place designed for us break, some of us were going to find a way to resist. no heroic way, not in a heroic way spectacular, but in a way silent, invisible and yet absolute. There was a girl in our group whose name was Simone. She was 23 years old, black hair cut short the flapper and a look that never gave in never, even in the worst moments.
Before the war, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was arrested in February for distributing leaflets calling for passive resistance in the streets of the Latin Quarter. The German authorities had questioned him for 3 days before transferring it here in this gray building on the outskirts of Compi Simon didn’t talk much to beginning.
She often stayed in her corner, arms crossed, observing everything with almost scientific attention. But one evening, after we all were brought back to the common room, exhausted, broken, some of us, unable even to cry so much we We were empty, Simone got up and sitting in the center of the room. She has waited until silence settled.
Then she said something that stuck with me forever, something that was going change the way we survive in the following weeks. She said, “They can take our bodies, they can lock us up, break us, use as objects. But there is one thing they can’t take, what we choose to keep inside of us.” At first, I didn’t didn’t understand what she meant.
I was too exhausted, too destroyed. My mind was numb as if a part of me had detached itself so as not to no longer have to feel pain. But Simone continued. She said that as long as we remain able to remember who we were before this place, as long as we keep within ourselves a fragment of our identity, of our dreams, of our memories, of our loves, as long as we refuse to become only what he wanted us to let’s be, he couldn’t destroy us completely.
She said “Every night, we are going to tell each other about our lives, not the one here, not the one in the bedroom six, but our real lives, the ones they will never know.” And that’s exactly what we have done every evening when the guards us finally left alone, when the heavy footsteps in the corridor were moving away and the door to the common room closed with this metallic noise sinister, we gathered in circle on the cold ground.
Some sat on their thin benchtops, others directly on the stones and each one told something. A childhood memory, a moment of happiness, a dream she had had, a book she liked, a dish that his mother or grandmother prepared on Sunday, a song that she freegave while working, no matter [music] what.
as long as it was ours, as long as it was something he didn’t couldn’t take us away, [music] something that existed outside these walls. Marguerite, the youngest of us, the one who was 17 at pain and who still sometimes cried night calling his mother in her sleep, told how she had learned to swim in the river near his village in Brittany.
She gave us describes the cold water on his skin, the July sun which made the surface like thousands of diamonds. The laughter of his older brother who shouted to him encouragement from the bank. As she spoke, her eyes lit up. For a moment, she was no longer this terrified girl and broken.
She had become the child again carefree girl playing in the water clear. Thérèse, the older woman who prayed constantly, talked about her husband, a village teacher who read to him poems by verline and rimbau evening by the light of an oil lamp. She recited whole verses to us that she knew by heart and her voice trembled with emotion while saying these words that reminded him of a time when love still existed, where beauty was possible.
Another daughter, Louise, who had hands damaged by work in the fields and who came from a village near Rouan, to sing a lullaby that his grandmother gave him sang when she was little. Its voice was soft, fragile, almost broken, but she sang until butt. And when she finished, we We had tears in our eyes. not of sadness, but of something deeper, of gratitude, perhaps for this moment of beauty in the middle of the horror.
And I, I told the story my father’s forge. My father was blacksmith in Saintlis. He had a little workshop at the back of our house, a space filled with shiny tools in the firelight with an anvil massive in the center and a bellows which snored like a living animal. When I was little, before war come and destroy everything, my father often took me with him to the forge.
He let me sit on a small wooden stool near the fire while he worked. I loved watching the metal turn red under intense heat, transform gradually, become malleable, ready to be shaped. My father took the glowing metal with his tongs, placed it on the anvil and struck with his hammer in a regular rhythm, precise, almost musical. Each blow resonated in the workshop and little by little, the metal took shape.
He became a grid, a horseshoe, a lock, a tool. My father always told me with this patient smile that he had been easily. It bends under pressure. He resists. It gets distorted sometimes but it does not break. And even when it seems completely destroyed, even when it is twisted and unusable, we can always reforge it.
We can give him a form, make it to a memory. You see, he remembers what he was before. At the time I didn’t understand really what he meant. I was too young. I just nodded head and I continued to look at the flames danced. But in this room, in the middle of its broken girls, of her bruised bodies and of his torn souls, I finally understood.
We were like doing this. We hit us, we were twisted, we were distorted. But we didn’t break completely. Not as long as we keep in us this memory of what we had been. Not as long as we refuse to forget. The weeks passed and our Evening circles became our sacred ritual. It was the only thing that we really belonged to this place where everything had been taken away from us.
Our clothes, our dignity, our freedom. He had taken all of this. But our stories, our memories, our voices, that remained ours. Simon who had launched this tradition often told us passages from books she had read. She had an extraordinary memory. She could recite entire pages of Camu, of Sartre, of Beauauvoir.
She spoke to us about philosophy, of existentialism, of freedom interior which exists even when the physical freedom has disappeared. One evening, she told us about the myth of Cisif. She explained to us how sharp, condemned by the gods to push eternally a rock at the top of a mountain to see it come down each time still found meaning to its existence.
She said: Camu writes that it is necessary imagine happy cisif. Not because his task has meaning, but because he chooses to find meaning in it, because he refuses to let the gods rob him of his inner dignity. I remember thinking that we were as cisives. Every day we climbed this impossible mountain.
Every day, the rock was coming back down. But every evening, in this circle, we chose to remember that we were more than our suffering. One day, some something strange and profound disturbing has occurred. A soldier is entered room six like usually. I was lying on the bed of narrow iron, the body tense, the mind already detached, ready to fly away mentally to another place during these endless 9u minutes.
But this time he didn’t do anything. He doesn’t did not come close. He didn’t have me touched. He just sat on the wooden chair in the corner of the room and he kept silent. I don’t didn’t understand. My heart was beating wildly break up. I was afraid, more afraid maybe when things followed their usual course.
Because I didn’t know what that meant. Was it a cruel game? Was it going to be worse afterwards? Was he going to punish me for something I didn’t know? But he remained seated. He was looking at the wall or maybe the ceiling. I don’t know. The minutes passed in a almost unbearable silence. Then the guard knocked on the door and the soldier left without a word, without a look towards me. I was confused, terrified.
I didn’t know what to think. But he is returned the next day and again two days later. The same thing every time. He entered, he sat down, [music] he stayed silent. Then he left when the time was up. On the third day, I dared to look up at him. I actually watched it for the first time times. He must have been 25, maybe.
26, blond hair cut short, a face marked by fatigue and something else. A kind of deep sadness which dug its traits. His hands were shaking slightly. On the 5th day he spoke. First in German, words that I don’t didn’t understand. Then he recovered and tried in French. with an accent heavy and hesitant sentences.
He has said, “I’m sorry.” I don’t have answered. What could I have said ? What an apology could change to what was happening here, to what what all these other men were doing all of us day after day? He has continued despite my silence. He said that he had a sister who was my age, that she lived near Munich, that he thought of her every time he entered in this room, that he did not know how did he become this type of a man, how could he have agreed to participate in this monstrous system.
He has said he had been sent to the front oriental, that he had seen things terrible there, that war transformed men into monsters. I listened to him without saying anything. A part of me wanted to scream. wanted spit in his face, wanted to tell him that his excuses were worthless, that he was an accomplice, which he could have refused, that he could have done something.
But another part of me, another part saw a broken human being in front of me, not broken like us were, not in the same way, not with the same suffering, [music] but broken all the same. Trapped in a system which exceeded it, which exceeded all. I never have it forgiven. I want it to be absolutely clear.
What he did, what all these men did was unforgivable. Nothing can justify what happened spent in this room, in this building, in all these places across Europe where women were reduced to objects for moral support soldiers. But that day, looking at him really for the first time, I understood something important, something that took me decades to fully accept.
They were them also caught in a system, a system immense, bureaucratic, dehumanizing which transformed human beings into machines, in number, in minutes, in cog of a mechanism of destruction massive. And this system this system was bigger, more powerful, more dangerous than any of them us. In our evening circles, I ended up telling this episode to others girls.
Simon listened to me attentively, then she said something that i will never forget. She said, “It’s exactly what Anna Harent would call the banality of evil. This does not are not always monsters who commit the worst atrocities. These are ordinary people who obey orders, which stop thinking through themselves, who allow themselves to be transformed as an instrument of a system which exceeds.
Thérèse shook her head. She said that she couldn’t accept this, that every man had a conscience, a choice, a responsibility. And I understood his point of view too. The truth, I believe, lies somewhere part between the two. Yes, every no one has a responsibility individual, but the systems entirely to crush this responsibility, to dilute it in a chain of command where no one feels really guilty because everyone just obeys orders.
This is the worst lesson I learned in this building. That horror does not have always need monsters to exist. [music] She just needs ordinary people who look elsewhere, who obey, who are silent. In June 1943, something began to change. Calls became less frequent. German troops were moving massively towards the east, towards the Russian front which was in the process of transform into a devouring abyss of man.
The building was losing gradually its importance strategic. Some girls were transferred elsewhere to camps work or to destinations unknown. Others, like the poor Marguerite died of illness, malnutrition or simply having abandoned all will to live. But even in these last weeks, we continued our circles. Even when there were only seven of us left, then c then three, we continued to tell our stories, to keep alive this inner flame that was everything what we had left.
Simon said that it was our greatest act of resistance powerful. Not armed resistance, no spectacular resistance, but existential resistance. Refuse to be reduced to what he wanted us to be. Maintain our humanity intact at the very heart of dehumanization. And she was right. In room 6, during these 9 minutes repeated at infinity, they were trying to us destroy.
But in our evening circles, we rebuilt ourselves minute later minute, story after story, memory after memory. We were the make my father, beaten, twisted, deformed, but not broken, never completely broken because we remembered, because we refused to forget who we really were. And it is this memory that he couldn’t take us. After the liberation, I returned to Saintlis.
But it was no longer my house. It was no longer anything that I had known before the war. My mother was dead. My father too since a long time already, carried away in 1940 during the French debacle. The little house I grew up with its garden at the back and the forge my father in the pentile had been pillaged. The furniture was missing.
The blacksmith’s tools had been stolen, even family photos hung on the wall, its precious black and white memories had been torn off. There was nothing left, absolutely nothing from my life before. I remember for standing in front of this house empty for a full hour. I was unable to move, unable to even cry.
My body was there, physically present, but my mind was still elsewhere. Part of me remained in this gray corridor, in this room with the iron bed. In those 9 minutes that never ended really, an elderly neighbor, madam Rousseau, saw me and invited me in at her house. She gave me hot tea and stale bread. She looked at me with this pity that I would see so many times subsequently in people’s eyes.
This pity mixed with unease because he didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t couldn’t understand what we had lived. She asked me where I had been. I have said in Compiègne in a building. She has nodded as if she understood. But I could see that she understood nothing. How could she ? I lived with my aunt Jeun Viè for a few months.
She lived in a neighboring village. My aunt was kind but distant. She didn’t know how to talk to me. She walked around me as if I was fragile, as if I was going to break at the slightest word. The nights were the worst. I hardly slept never. When I closed my eyes, I rewatched everything. the hallway, the door gray, the faces of the soldiers and above all I saw the other girls again.
Marguerite who cried, Thérèse who prayed, Simone who spoke of resistance. All these voices reasoned still in my head. I woke up in sweating, heart pounding. Sometimes I I shouted, my aunt came running and found curled up in a corner trembling. She never asked me what had happened and I didn’t tell him never said.
In 1946, I found work in a textile factory. I sewed clothes from morning to evening in a workshop noisy. The work helped me. [music] As long as my hands were moving, I didn’t have not to think. It was a way of keep madness at bay. The others Workers sometimes talk about the war. They told where they had been, what they had lost.
But me, I never spoke. When they asked questions, I answered vaguely. I was in a center detention. Nobody insisted. Some things were too much painful to say. In 1947, I met Henri. He worked as a mechanic in a garage. It was a calm man with skillful hands and a gentle look. We are met in a bakery. [music] He smiled at me. I smiled back.
A hesitant smile as if I had forgotten how to do it. We started seeing each other. He took me walking in the old streets of Sley. He never asked questions about my past. And I don’t never asked questions about his. We were two survivors trying to rebuild something on broken foundations. Henry was patient, terribly patient.
When I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, he took me in his arms and waited let the tremors stop. He never asked why. He just stood there, present, [music] solid. We got married in May in a small ceremony at the town hall. No big party, no music, just a signature and a shy kiss on the steps. We had two children.
Marie was born in 1950 and Jacques in 1953. I liked them. My god, I loved them with an intensity that made me sometimes afraid. When I held Marie for the first time, [music] I cried. Not sadness but relief. This little innocent life [music] was proof that something beautiful could still exist, that despite all the horror, it was possible to create love, hope.
I have been a good mother. At least I tried. I fed them, clothed them, educated them. I have sang lullabies. I did everything what a mother is supposed to do. But there always had this distance, this invisible barrier between me and the rest of the world. A part of me remained in this corridor and she never came back never completely.
Marie at fifteen gave me asked one day: “Mom, why don’t you never really smile?” I have been unable to answer. How to explain that the authentic smile had been ripped from me years ago in a a place she would never know existence? Henry died in 1989, Lung cancer. During the last few weeks, he asked if I had been happy with him. I said yes.
And it wasn’t a lie, but that wasn’t all truth either. Henry had been good. He gave me a house, children, a stable life. But happiness, the real one happiness that I had known before, this one never came back to me. How to explain that you passed all your life trying to forget something your body refuses to forget? That even in moments the sweetest, there was always a shadow.
Always this number 9. After Henry died, I found alone. My children were adults, married, with their own lives. I lived in a small apartment in Senley center. From my window, I saw the cathedral and the old streets where I grew up. The years passed in a sort of fog. I got up, I did my shopping, I watched television, gestures daily reassuring in their banalities.
But at night, dreams always came back. The corridor, the door, minutes. Even at age, even at 80, my body remembered. In all these decades I have not told no one about what happened actually happened. Not to my children, not to Henry. I thought that if I didn’t didn’t talk, it would end eventually disappear. But time erases nothing.
Time buries, he covers. But it doesn’t heal. Injuries remain there beneath the surface. A simple noise, a door slamming. [music] And suddenly I was 20 again. In 2009, 66 years after my release, a young historian came to see me. Her name was Claire Dufren Elle was researching centers improvised detention during occupation.
She found my name in an incomplete register in the archives national. She wanted to know if I will agree to testify. I first refused. I was 84 years old. My hands were trembling. Why reopen this wound after spending my whole life try to close it? But Claire is returned. She said to me “If you don’t speak no, no one will know.
And if no one I don’t know, it’s as if it didn’t never existed. These women deserve to be remembers her. And I realized that she was right. Marguerite, Thérèse, Simone, Louise. All these girls deserve to be remembered. They deserved someone to say “They were there, they existed, they suffered, they resisted. So, I have accepted.
The interview took place in my small apartment in Senl on two afternoons of November 2009.” Claire installed a camera on a tripod. She asked me questions and for the first time in 64 years, I spoken. I told him about the room, the minutes, the faces of the girls, the names that I had tried not to forget. I told him about Simone and its story circles, of Marguerite who no longer spoke, of Thérèse who prayed even when she no longer believed in anything.
And I told him about this soldier, the one who sat in silence, he who had said “I’m sorry.” Claire asked me if I had forgiven. I answered no because to forgive for me would have meant accept that what had happened could be erased. And it can’t. It shouldn’t. But I also said that I understood something more wide now that the war not only transforms the victims, it also transforms the executioners.
and that as long as we, as humanity, we will continue to build systems where human beings can be reduced to numbers, to minutes, to objects, nothing will really change. 4 years after this interview, I fell sick. [music] Water cancer. The doctors told me that I no longer had a lot of time, a few months, maybe a year.
Marie, my daughter, is came to see me at the hospital. [music] She was crying. She asked me why I didn’t tell her never talked about all that, why I had carried this burden alone for so long time. I told him that I didn’t want her to grow up with this shadow, that I wanted her to know a world where these things belonged to past.
But now I understood that silence protects no one, only silence, in fact, allows these things to reproduce. I died on March 18, 2013 in a small hospital room. in Compienne, not far from where everything was started sox years earlier. But before leave, I made a request to Claire. I asked him to make sure that this recording does not disappear, that someone somewhere is listening to it, that minutes from room 6 are not erased from history.
Today, if you are listening to this testimony, it is because that Claire kept her promise, because that she refused to let our voices be heard lose. I don’t know what you will feel when you hear this story. Maybe anger, maybe sadness, maybe even disbelief. How could human beings do this to other human beings? But if I can leave you with just one thing is this.
We are not than what happens to us. We are also what we choose to keep, what we choose to convey, what we refuse to forget. In the room, for minutes at the times they tried to reduce us to nothing. But we kept our names, our stories, our memories and now, decades later, you hear them. He couldn’t take that from us. No one will ever be able to tell us that.
take. This story is not just one testimony of the past, it is a warning for the future. Elise Martrieux carried the weight for 9 minutes for 64 years. Such a heavy burden that she preferred silence rather than to relive this pain. But before leave, she chose to break this silence, not for her, but for everyone those who never had this chance.
For Marguerite, who died at ten years old, for Thérèse who prayed until the last breath. For Simone who refused to abandon his humanity. Their voice does not can reason today that if you agree to listen to them, to carry them, to transmit them. If this story touched you, if it awakened in you something, anger, sadness, revolt, factou simply an awareness.
So don’t let die here. Subscribe to this channel so that other testimonials like this can continue to exist. Activate it bell so you don’t miss any documentary. Leave a like if you think these stories worth telling and above all take a moment to write in the comments where are you looking from this documentary? What is Did the story of Élise awaken in you? What lessons do you keep from these 9 minutes that marked an entire life? We live in a world where it is easy to forget, where the story ends dissolved in the constant noise of
current affairs, where the sufferings of the past become cold statistics in dusty books. But Elise was not a statistic. She was a young girl of 20 who loved watching his father forge metal. She was a mother who sang lullabies to her children. She was a woman who survived the unthinkable and who chose at the twilight of his life to entrust his truth to the world.
This choice does not sense that if everyone decides to honor him. [music] So share this video, talk about it to those around you, write a comment, even short, even simple, because each voice that raise to say “I remember” is a victory against oblivion. And oblivion, This is exactly what he wanted. What these women disappear, that their nine minutes disappear from history.
But as long as there are people to listen, to remember, to transmit, they will remain alive.
