He called us by a number, never by our name. But the first night, we didn’t even have a number yet. We were just fresh flesh. My name is Éléonore Vassel. I am 84 years and I will tell what the history books have never printed, what official documentaries have cut from the montages, what the witnesses survivors learned to bury in silence to succeed in living after the war.
because there was a ritual no official, undocumented, but systematized, practiced in several French prison camps under German command. A ritual that broke women even before they can think of resisting. They called for an evaluation, but they did not evaluate us as workers, they evaluated us as livestock are evaluated.
When I arrived at the camp in May4, I was years old. Three days earlier, I was in my father’s bakery in Baumont sur Sart in the interior of France, wrapping breads still hot for customers. I wore a light blue dress that my mother had sewing. My hair was tied with a white ribbon. The day of deportation, it was 6 a.m.
The the sky was gray and heavy. I heard the trucks before seeing them, the noise of diesel engine rumbling through the streets narrow, then the boots, dozens, hitting the cobblestone floor like hammers. My mother was in the kitchen. My father was still sleeping. I had just wake up when the door has been broken down.
They didn’t even knock. They are simply entered. three soldiers Germans. One of them carried a list, another pointed at me and said single word: “Raus!” They don’t have me left to take anything, nor change clothes, or kiss my mother. She tried to come closer and one of the soldiers pushed him against the wall with the butt of his rifle.
My father came running and received a punch in the stomach. He fell to knees, trying to breathe. I have been dragged out, literally dragged out. My bare feet scraped the ground. I felt the skin on my heels burn. I saw my mother shouting on the doorstep. My father still on the ground and I knew I didn’t would never see this house again.
The truck was already full of women. I have some recognized a few. Mrs Colette, the teacher. Margaot who worked at the grocery store. Simone, my childhood neighbor. Others were unknown to me but all with the same expression. Ye wide-eyed. Rapid breathing, trembling hands, no one spoke, she just cried gently or stared into space.
We were 47 women in this truck, most of them young, between 16 and 25 years old. Some older but very few. I will understand why later. The journey lasted almost two days. We are arrested three times. We don’t have given food, only water we relieved ourselves right there in the corner of the truck. The humiliation began before our arrival.
When the truck stopped for the last time, it was night. I heard the creaking of the gates in iron. I heard voices in German, short, dry orders. I have smelled the smell. A smell that I don’t have never forgotten. a mixture of earth damp, old sweat, smoke and of something that my brain does not could identify. Today I know what it was.
There was fear in the air. The truck doors opened. Bright lights blinded us. Of men shouted, dogs barked. We were pushed out. Some are fallen. I stumbled but I made it to hold me back. We were in front of a huge metal gate. Above the letters in German that I didn’t know read at the time. I discovered more late what they meant Harbate Mart Frey. Work sets you free. Lie.
Work didn’t free anyone. But before work there was the first night. We were lined up in a row. four rows, each with about twelve women, two German guards dressed in gray uniforms circulated between us. They looked, pointed, whispered between them. One of them stopped in front of me. She lifted my chin with the end of a chopstick, turned my face to the left then to the right, looked at my body up and down, said something in German which I didn’t understand.
The other guard laughed. She noted something on a block. Made a head gesture. I was pushed towards the right. Six other women were pushed on the same side. The others have been taken to the left. We don’t didn’t know what that meant. Not yet. We were taken to a separate barracks, smaller than the others.
The windows are bars, but the walls seemed not to cleaner. There was a faint light hanging from the ceiling. It smelled the disinfectant. One of the guards came in with us, locked the door then she spoken in broken French but understandable. You have been chosen. Tomorrow you will work inside, not at the factory, inside the neighborhood, kitchen, cleaning, services internal.
I thought it was a luck, that work inside would be better than working in the factory or in the fields. Some girls of mine sides seemed relieved. The guardian continued. But tonight you will pass by an evaluation. You will take a bath, put on clean clothes and you will be introduced. I didn’t understand what present meant, but my skin has become broken.
The word evaluation has ring within me like a fairy bell because I had already heard rumors, stories that my aunt whispered to my mother when she thought that I wasn’t listening. Stories about deported women who had never returned or who came back changed, broken the interior. I was taken to a cold bathroom with wooden walls cement, a rusty metal shower, dripping with iced water.
They ordered me to remove my clothes, all in front of two guards who remained there to observe. I had never been naked in front of anyone, except my mother. I shook. Not just from the cold, they given a rough soap which scratched the skin. I washed as quickly as possible possible. They wanted to check if I was completely clean.
We lifted my arms, looked at my hair, passed their fingers in my scalp louse search. Then they threw me away a thin towel and a gray dress. No panties, no bra, just the dress. I was taken back to barracks. The other six girls were already there, all dressed the same, all pale, all trembling. We sat in silence to wait.
Nobody knew what. Then the door opened and he entered. A tall German officer blonde hair combed back, impeccable uniform, shiny boot. He didn’t smile, he just walked slowly between us. looked at each one. Stopped in front of me. I felt his look like it was a hand touching my body without permission. He has said something in German.
One of the guardians translated: “You, get up, I got up. Turn around, I’m turned. Lift your dress to the knee. I froze. The guard repeated the order. Harder, I lifted my dress. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely hold her. He came closer, touched my shoulder, then my arm, then my waist, like if he was checking the quality of a product.
Then he said something that babysitter didn’t translate, but I included at temp. The way he treated me looked, I had been approved. He is went out, took two of the seven girls with him. They didn’t come back that night. The five who are remained and waited until dawn. We couldn’t sleep. We are just sat in silence wait until the door opens again.
This time it was another older officer. Prominent belly. He smelled of alcohol. And that’s when I understood. The first night was not about work, it was about about other things. Something that he would never write in the official records. Something that happened before transforming us into numbered prisoner. It was for us learn from the first moment that we we no longer had any control over anything, not even on our bodies.
Éléonore Vassel testified to something that governments have tried to erase. A hidden system inside the camps prisoner. A ritual that broke the women before they can resist. What happened this first night changed everything and this that she saw in the following days was even worse because this night did not was only his.
It was night of thousands and the story that followed has never been fully told. If you are listening to this now, anywhere in the world, leave a comment saying “Where you looking from because these voices must reason and the more people there will be who know, the less easy it will be to erase the truth.” My name is Éléonore Vassel and what I’m going to tell it now, it’s there night that followed.
The officer who is entered smelled of alcohol and sweat. He has walked slowly between us. His boots reasoned on the cement floor. Each step seemed to last forever. He stopped in front of Margaot, a girl from my village. She was ten years old, curly black hair, a face round and soft. She sewed dresses for weddings. I knew her since childhood.
He lifted his chin with two fingers, turned his face towards the light, smiled. A smile which made my blood run cold. He said something thing in German. The guard has translated: “You, follow me.” Marga has shook his head. His lips trembled. She whispered. “No, please.” The guard grabbed him by the arm and pulled him violently.
Margaot tried to resist. She clung to the edge of the wooden bed. Her nails scratched the wood. She screamed. “The officer took out his pistol. He didn’t point it at her. He just put it on the table slowly as if to say “If you keep it up, I’m using it.” Margaot said got up, she was crying. Her legs were shaking so much that she could barely walk. They took him away.
We we remained seated. Four girls. Me, Simone, an older woman named Jacqueline and a teenager whose never knew the name. She had maybe 15 years. She sobbed without noise. His shoulders shook. Nobody didn’t speak. What could we say ? Margaot came back two hours later late, maybe three, I don’t know. Time no longer existed.
She is entrance in silence. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, her hair disheveled, his face blank, as if something in her had died out. She got sitting on the bed next to me. I him took my hand. She didn’t have me looked. She was staring at the wall. Her lips were moving but no sound came out. I wanted to say something.
But what ? What do you say to someone who just been through hell? So, I am remained there, hand in hand, in silence. An hour later, the officer is income. This time he chose me. I have felt my heart stop. My hands are become mosses. My legs refused to move. The guard screamed. Stand up. I got up slowly. Every muscle in my body resisted.
He looked me up and down. Then he gestures with his hand. A gesture simple, as you call a dog. I followed him. We crossed a dark race. The ground was muddy. I heard voices in the distance, men’s laughter. The sound of a radio playing music German. Everything seemed unreal. He led me to a building small, an old house perhaps.
He there was a wooden door. He has it opened, pushed me inside. The room was small, an iron bed, a table, an oil lamp which lit dimly. It smelled of cold tobacco and damp. He closed the door behind him, turned the key. I was a prisoner not only from the camp but from this room. of this man of this moment.
He has took off his jacket, placed it on the chair, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, then he turned to me. I got myself backed up until my back touched the wall. There was nowhere to go. He has a smile, not a cruel smile, a almost banal smile, as if what he was about to do was normal, ordinary. He spoke in German slowly, like if he wanted me to understand.
But I didn’t understand the words, only the intention. He came closer, I closed your eyes. What happened then, I will not describe in detail, not because I forgot, but because some things shouldn’t never be told word for word. They don’t deserve to be relived in all their details, but I will saying this, it wasn’t violence raw. It was something worse.
It was methodical, calculated. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted that I remember, that I carry this in me forever. And he succeeded. When it was over, he put his jacket back on, lit a cigarette again, sat down on the chair and looked at me, cowering in the corner of the room. He said something, a word.
I understood more late what that meant. Gut. Good. Then he opened the door and made me sign to leave. I went out. My legs were shaking, my hands were numb. I no longer felt my body. As if I had left my own body and looked at someone else walk in this dark courtyard. The guard was waiting for me. She told me taken back to the barracks.
Didn’t tell me anything, didn’t even look at me. When I am entered, Margaot was still seated at the same place. She looked up me. Our eyes met and in that look, I saw what I felt. We were no longer the same. We don’t would never be again. The next morning At five o’clock, a siren sounded. We woke us up with a whistle, distributed striped uniforms, give wooden shoes that hurt us the feet.
We were lined up in the courtyard, hundreds of women, perhaps a thousand, all silent, all exhausted. A senior officer climbed onto a platform. He spoke in German. Someone translated it into French. You are here to work. You will work until we have more need you. If you obey, you will live. If you disobey, you die. It’s simple.
Then he added something that struck me. What happened last night has never happened took place. Understood ? Silence. Understood ? We all whispered. Yes. And it is so they cleared the first night of our official existence. as if she had never existed. But she has existed for me, for Margaot, for hundreds, maybe thousands other women in other camps.
This was not written in the registers, this was not photographed, it was not documented, but it was real. And during 65 years old, I carried this secret because that after the war, when we are When we got home, no one wanted to hear. People wanted to forget, to turn page, rebuild. We, the survivors, were told to keep quiet that it was better not to to stir up the past, that it was embarrassing, shameful.
So we kept quiet. But today, years, I speak because silence has protected the guilty and I refuse to die protecting their memory. After the first night everything changed, not outside, but inside us. We were sent to work. I was assigned to the kitchen officers, a building separate from the camp main, cleaner, better lit, with real food.
Every day I pay potatoes. I was washing pots. I served meals to men in uniform who laughed, smoked, drank wine French stolen from our own cellars. He looked at me like I was invisible. except when he wanted something. He there was an officer, Optman Kruger, who came often, tall, in his forties, round glasses.
He spoke French. Sometimes he asked me questions. Where are you from? How old do you have? Do you have family? I I responded in monosyllables. Yes. No, I don’t know. He smiled like he was nice, but I knew that he wasn’t nice. No one here was nice. One day he asked me to stay after the service. The other girls had already left.
I was alone with him in the kitchen. He sat on the edge of the table, lit a cigarette, looked at me at length. Then he said “You know, Éléonore, you could have a longer life easy here.” I looked down, he continued. There are girls who understand, who cooperate. They have better rations, better beds, less work. I didn’t say anything.
He got up, came closer, placed a hand on my shoulder, thoughtful. Then he left. I understood what he meant. He wanted me becomes, how to say, a favorite. Someone who willingly accepted what others were subjected to by force. Some girls did it. I don’t don’t judge. They did what they had to survive.
Me, I don’t have pu. So, I continued to work, peeling potatoes, washing potatoes pots, sleeping on a wooden bed in an overcrowded barracks where the fleas devoured us at night. The months have passed, summer, autumn, winter. In winter was hell. The cold penetrated the walls. We We only had a thin blanket. Some girls died during the night.
of cold, of illness, of exhaustion. One morning, I awake and the girl next to me doesn’t breathed more. Her name was Anne. She was 20 years old. She died in his sleep. Nobody cried. We We had no more tears. We won. Replaced by another girl in the evening same. That’s how it is worked. We were disappearing. We were replaced like parts in a machine.
Margaot, my neighbor from Baumont, held until January 1945. Then she got sick, a fever terrible. She was delirious, calling her mother, cried in her sleep. I him gave my water ration. I was trying to keep her warm, but it wasn’t enough. One morning, she didn’t awake. I cried that day the first time in months. I have cried because Margaot was not just a prisoner.
It was a girl that I had known as a child, with whom I had run in the fields, who was laughing burst when we stole cherries in Mr. Dupont’s orchard. She deserved better than to die in a forgotten camp reduced to a number. But that’s what happened to him and it made me broken something deep. SO, I decided to survive.
Not for me, but for her, for all those who could never tell. In March 1945, things started to change. change. The officers were nervous. We could hear bombings in the distance. The allies were approaching. Some girls said we’d be soon released. Others thought he would kill everyone before fleeing. We don’t didn’t know what to believe.
Then one morning April, the guards disappeared. Not all, but most. They took their things and are left during the night. We woke up in a camp empty. The doors were open. Nobody was watching us. Some girls ran towards the exit. Others remained too weak to move. I waited. I didn’t know no where to go. I no longer had a home, no more family, just an exhausted body and a memory full of nightmares.
Two days later, the soldiers Americans arrived. They opened the barracks, gave us food, blankets, medications. A soldier looked at me and cried. I didn’t understand why. Then I saw my reflection in a window broken. I no longer recognized myself. I was 20 but I looked like a skinny old woman, hair gray, hollow eyes.
The war had stole my youth and the first night had stolen my innocence. I returned to France in June 1945 in a military truck with dozens other silent women. When I arrived in Baumont sur Sart, the village was unrecognizable. Some houses had been destroyed, others abandoned. The streets were empty. My father’s bakery no longer existed, just a pile of stones. I knocked on neighbors’ houses.
An old woman opened the door. She told me looked at me without recognizing me. Then she put a hand to her mouth and Léonore? Yes. She cried, hugged me arm then told me what I feared. Your father died a year ago. Your heart, your mother, she left to live at your aunt’s in Lyon. I stayed standing without moving.
I had survived hell to enter a world where I had no more room. I went to Lyon. I found my mother. She held me tight, crying for hours, but she never asked me questions about what happened and I never told him because how to tell the untold? How to tell your mother that you have been reduced to an object, that we have been selected, evaluated, used? So, I did like the other survivors.
I kept quiet. I found a job in a textile factory. I got myself married in 1948 to a good man, Marcel. He knew that I had been deported, but he did not know everything and he never forced me to speak. We we had two children, a daughter Clémentine, a son Antoine. I have them loved with all my heart, but there was always a part of me that remained cold, absent, as if part of I remained in this camp.
Sometimes, At night, I woke up in a sweat. I still smelled the room. I still saw the officer’s face. I could still hear the footsteps in the yard. Marcel took me in his arms, but he didn’t understand. How could he? The years have past, I have grown old, my children have grew up, killed their own children. But the silence remained until 2009, I was 84 years old.
A French historian, Julien Blanc, specialized in testimonies of deportation, contacted. He found my name in archives. He wanted to interview me for a documentary. At the beginning, I refused. What would that change? The culprits were dead, the story was written. But he insisted. He told me said “Madame Vasselle, your testimony could help other women to speak, to break the silence.
” So, I accepted and for the first time times in 65 years, I told I recounted the selection. The first night, the ritual, the humiliation, the pain. I cried a lot but I spoke. The interview lasted six hours. Julien has everything recorded, everything filmed. When it was over, I felt more light, as if an immense weight had been raised.
I died 5 years later, in 2014, peacefully in my sleep. But my voice remained. The interview has been broadcast. Other women spoke after me, dozens then hundreds. Testimonies emerged from all of Europe, not just in France, in Poland, Hungary, Austria. The first night was not an incident isolated, it was a system and this system had been erased from the archives deliberately official because the victors did not want to dirty their victory with women’s stories raped because society did not want not hear what the survivors
had to say. So they were silent, but today, they speak thanks to women like Éléonor who found the courage to break the silence. I my name is Éléonore Vassel and this is my last word. If you are listening to this, it’s that I’m dead, but my voice remains because the silence has lasted long enough. For sixty years I carried the first night like an open wound.
I hid it, buried it, ignored it, but she never left me. She was there every time I looked at my children sleep, every time I saw a young woman laughs, every time we spoke of war as a chapter closed from history. Because for me, the war never ended. It continues in my nightmares, in my silences, in my tears when no one looks.
But today, I want you to know one thing. This Wasn’t our fault. We didn’t have not asked to be deported. We did not choose to be selected. We didn’t want this night. We imposed it on us and for decades, we have been made to believe that it was shameful, we had to keep quiet, that no one wanted to know. But it was wrong.
The shame was not there ours, it was theirs. The guilt was not ours, it was theirs and the silence, the silence protected them. So, I speak for myself, for Margaot, for Anne, for all those who have not not survived. I speak so that you know that the official story is never complete, that there are chapters that we deliberately tore off testimonies that we have voluntarily ignored because he was disruptive.
But the truth always bothers and it’s exactly what it should be for said. Today I am old, tired, sick, but I am free. Free to speak, free to denounce, free to refuse forgetting. And if my voice can help just one woman to speak, one the only survivor to break her silence, then my life will have had meaning. Because war does not end when weapons are silent, it ends when the ways get up. My name is Éléonore Vassel.
I survived the first night and refuse to take this truth into my falls. I leave you a question. How many other stories like mine still exist buried in the silence? How many women have died without having never been able to say what they had experienced ? And how much longer will we accept that history is written by those who prefer to erase rather than to face? My voice fades here, but yours can continue.
Speak, listen, remember because the silence sufficiently protected the guilty. It’s time to protect the truth. This story is not just a testimony of the past, it is a mirror stretched towards our present. Eleonore Vassel carried this silence for sixty-five years old. Thousands of others women wore it until their death.
How many voices still remain buried ? How many truths are waiting to be heard? The first night existed, she broke lives and for decades, no one wanted to listen. Today you listened. You have heard what the official story has tried to erase. You felt the pain of a 19 year old girl torn from her family, assessed as cattle, broken before they could even understand what was happening to him.
This voice must not be extinguished in the silence. She must reason, cross borders, touch hearts, raise awareness. If this testimony touched you, if the story of Éléonore made something tremble in you, then bring it to life. Subscribe to this channel so that other voices like his can be heard.
Activate the bell to don’t miss any testimony. Share this video with those who need know because memory only exists if we wear it together. Leave a comment. Say where you’re looking at this from documentary. Say what this story has awakened in you. Share your thoughts, your emotions, your questions. Every comment is proof that these voices did not die in vain.
Each message is a stone placed on the path of truth. And the more we will be many to speak, the less there will be easy to erase what really happened past. Éléonore died in 2014, but before leaving she chose to break silence. She chose to protect the truth rather than the guilty. She has chose to leave his voice so that you today can hear what entire generations have refused to listen.
Honoring his memory is not just remembering, it’s acting, it is to speak, it is to refuse forgetting. So, ask yourself this question: what would you do if this was your story? If it was your grandmother, your aunt, your sister who had experienced this hell? Would you stay silent or would you use your voice to never, never again, such horrors be erased from history? The The choice is yours, but know thing, silence protects the guilty, and the truth only lives through those who dare to say it. Mr.
osent la dire. M.
