Is she screaming already? This is what I heard from the other side of the door metallic. Two German voices. One laughed, the other simply confirmed. I didn’t yet know what that meant meant, but my body was shaking already because something in me, something primitive, understood already. My name is Thérèse Duvallon.
I am 83 years old and I passed the major part of my life trying to erase this question from my head. I didn’t succeed. She comes back Chacobe. Every time I close the eyes and the silence weighs too heavy, they didn’t take us for work. They didn’t take us to be questioned. They have us taken to a place where young people French women were separated, observed, catalogued.
And where some? Some were chosen, not by chance, but according to criteria that none of we never imagined possible. I was just a girl of years, girl of a baker, born and raised in Hansy, a small town in the French Alps where everyone knew each other, where war still seemed far away. A something that happened in the newspapers, not in our streets, until she ceases to be distant, until it are knocking on my door.
March 1943, Aub. Freezing cold. My mother was in the kitchen when we we heard sharp knocks, metallic, authoritarian. My father has opened the door. Three soldiers german, uniform, impeccable, face expressionless. 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 did a step forward. The butt of a rifle hit his face. He fell. The blood flowed from his nose. I screamed. But we was already dragging me out. The truck was waiting in the street. Tarpaulin stretched, engine running. There were other women inside.
I recognized it a few. Young, most between 16 and 25 years old. Sitting on benches wood, wide eyes, breathing atente. Nobody spoke, nobody understood. If you had asked me about this what was happening at that time, I wouldn’t have didn’t know how to answer. I thought it was an error. I thought they were going release us.
I thought I I will return home before dawn. I I was wrong. We drove for hours. The cold in the truck was brutal. No blanket, no water. Just the sound of the engine, the smell of diesel and the growing fear between us. Some cried softly, others prayed. I was watching just my hands. They were trembling. I couldn’t stop them.
When the truck finally stopped, it was day. We went down to a place I had never seen. A complex surrounded by barbed wire, guai towers, armed guards everywhere, long gray 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 in a low voice : “Women’s labor camp, zone of military control, work.
” The word has seemed almost reassuring. I thought, “We will work, we will go back, it will pass.” But when we passed through the gate, I saw something that chilled me. women, hundreds, skinny, dirty, looks empty, moving like shadows between the barracks. Some wore jumps, others washed laundry in huge basins of water dirty.
But what scared me the most wasn’t the work, it was the silence. No one was talking, no one looked at us, we new arrivals, as if they already knew, as if they had already given up on warning us. We have taken to a barracks recording. Inside, a German officer, tall, blonde, impeccable, we observed while two assistants wrote down our names. Age, hometown.
She walked between us slowly. Looked at every face, every body as if she were choosing fruit market. When she arrived in front me, she stopped, tilted her head head, said something in German to the assistant. They noted something thing next to my name. I don’t have understood, but I saw the look of the woman by my side.
She had heard and his face turned pale. It was only later that I found out what that meant. If you think you know the story of the Second World War, this testimony will change your outlook for always. Thérèse du Vallon is on the point of revealing what was hidden behind the closed doors of the camps under German control.
truths erased from history books, methods that we wanted to make disappear and cries that we tried to make land for more than six decades. Stay until the end because what she’s going to say no one should forget. The first hours in this camp, I spent them in a daze. We gave us uniforms, not clothes, uniforms.
Gray dresses, thick that scratched the skin. No underwear, no socks, just wooden clogs that hurt our feet from the first steps. We shaved the hair, all without exception. I remember the sound of scissors, sudden cold on the back of my neck, to see my brown curls fall to the ground mixed with that of dozens of others girls.
We were told it was for hygiene, but I think he wanted above all make us identical, interchangeable. We were assigned a barracks. Number 7. Inside, beds superimposed in raw wood. Three floors, no mattress, just a thin cover with holes for each. The smell was unbearable. sweat, urine, mold. The windows were hands and condemned.
A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, off most of the time. This first night, no one slept. We there were around thirty new ones mixed with women already there since weeks, months. She doesn’t let us didn’t speak. She looked at us with a sort of tired pity as if she already knew what awaited us. I tried to talking to the woman on the bunk below mine.
Her name was Marguerite. She was 34 years old, teacher in Lyon, arrested for having hidden resistance documents. She looked at me with sunken eyes, surrounded and simply told me: “Don’t pose no questions, do as you are told and pray he doesn’t notice your face.” I don’t understand, not yet. The next mo
rning at 5 a.m., a siren called us awake, shrill, unbearable. We ordered us to come out, to line up in the central courtyard. He It was still dark. The cold bit the skin. We were stuck in the mud jelly. A German officer told us counted once, twice, then he gave an order. The guards started to separate women. Not randomly. They looked at our faces, our bodies.
They pointed to the right, to the left, the most young people on the right, older people on the left. I was sent right. We have taken to another building, more small, cleaner. Inside, there had chairs lined up, a table with instruments, syringes, vials. A German nurse was waiting. She examined us one by one one to measure our height, our weight, to look at our teeth, our hands, our feet, note everything.
Then she gave us injected something, a liquid transparent. I felt my arm burning. I asked for this that it was. She didn’t answer. More later, a French detainee who worked as an interpreter slipped me while whispering. It checks if you are healthy, if you can resist. Resist to what? I still didn’t understand. But that evening, while we We were going back to the barracks, I heard screams, shrill cries of women, terrified, coming from an isolated building back of the camp, a building without windows, kept permanently. Marguerite pulled me
by the arm. Don’t look, don’t ask questions. But I looked anyway and I saw a young woman barely older older than me coming out of this building supported by two guards. She doesn’t didn’t work. She was being dragged. His legs no longer supported her. His face was white. His lips trembled. His eyes His eyes were empty.
I have it recognized. She had arrived with me in the same truck. Her name was Lucy. She was ten years old. What I saw on his face that night, I will never forget it. It wasn’t pain. It was something worse, something that has no name. And That’s when I understood. This camp was not a labor camp, it was something else.
Something of which no one spoke, something that history books do not mention not. In the following days, I tried to understand, to remain invisible. not to attract attention. But in this camp, invisibility did not exist, especially not for young people. Each morning, same ritual, waking up at 5 a.m., call in the courtyard, separation.
The older ones went to work, sew uniforms, wash clothes, sort equipment. It was hard, exhausting, but she survived. We, the younger, we were kept apart, we made us wait for hours in the cold without explanation. Then some days, officers came, they observed, spoke among themselves, were writing things down and some girls were called by name or by their number.
She never came back work the same day. Sometimes she doesn’t didn’t come back at all. Lucy, the young girl that I had seen that first night, had become a shadow. She doesn’t spoke no more, ate no more, stayed sitting on her bunk, staring on the wall. Marguerite tells me that she had been taken away three times in five days. For what ? I asked.
Marguerite looked down. for this which they call experiences medical. But these are not experiences is torture. They test methods, devices on bodies that they consider disposable. My throat tightened. Which devices? She hesitated. Then she told me the voice broken electrodes. He attaches them to wrist, ankles, sometimes elsewhere.
They send dumps to see how long a woman can stand before losing knowledge. They call it the electrical treatment. They say that it’s for research but it’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 sadness infinite. Because you are fresh.
Because your body resists better, because you scream louder. I don’t didn’t understand. I didn’t want understand. But two days later, my name was called. It was a morning gray, rainy. We were lined up as usual. An officer approached with a list. He read several names. Mine was Thérèse du Valallon. Barracks 7. My heart stopped.
The other girls looked at me. Some looked away. Others whispered prayers. We took the five of us towards the building isolated, the one without windows, the one from which come the screams. Inside he was hot, too hot. Powerful lamps illuminated each nook. In the center of the room, a table metallic, cold, inclined, with leather straps at four corners.
A German doctor was waiting for us. Blouses white, round glasses, face impassive. Next to him, an assistant and a nurse. He was talking to each other in German calmly, as if they were discussing the weather. We tells us to undress completely in front of them, without shame, without humanity. I was shaking.
My hands no longer obeyed me. The girl next door of me cried. Another begged. In French, German, whatever. They did not react. They us examined one by one like cattle. The doctor took notes, measured our reflexes, pressed on certain parts of the body, noted our reactions. Then he chooses the first girl, the one who cried. Her name was Helene.
She was 20 years old. They laid him down on the table, tied him up, punched him, ankle. She was screaming, begging. The doctor made a sign. The wizard brought a machine, a box metallic with dials, wires and pliers. They fixed the clamps on her, on her wrists, on her ankles. Then the doctor turned a dial and she screamed like I never had before heard someone screaming.
A cry that came from the bowels, a cry that was not human. He noted, measured, adjusted and started again. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t not close my ears. I couldn’t cannot escape this sound, this horror. After Hélène, it was the turn of a another, then another. They don’t did not choose that day. I don’t know not why.
Maybe he wanted keep some of us intact longer. Perhaps he already had had enough data. But leaving there, I was no longer the same. Some something in me was dead. something that I won’t find again never. I quickly understood that this camp worked according to logic. A monstrous logic, but a logic anyway.
Everything was organized, planned, documented. The youngest and oldest women healthy were reserved for experiences. The others were working. Some die of hunger, others of disease. But those who were chosen for the experiences. She died differently, more slowly, more painfully. There were categories. I learned this from a Polish inmate, Anna, who worked in administrative offices and translated the German documents.
She risked his life by talking to us, but she did it anyway because she wanted us to know, to testify if we never survived. It classifies you according to three criteria, she said one evening, whispering in the darkness of the barracks. Age, appearance, physical resistance. The most young and prettiest are sent to priority because for them you represent the perfect enemy, the young French, beautiful, proud.
They want 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 certain words. Electric Behandlong, treatment electric. Schmerz tolerance test, test pain tolerance. He tests how long can a woman endure before begging, before losing reason.
He notes everything, the duration, the intensity, the reactions. Everything is recorded, everything is sent to Berlin for future medical research. I felt bile rising in my throat and those who do not survive. Anna closed the eyes. They disappear. There is a pit behind the camp. We don’t see never the bodies, but we hear the night, shovels, the sound of the earth that we stir.
That evening, I didn’t sleep. I stayed lying down, staring at the invisible ceiling in the dark. I thought of my mother, my father, at my little house in Hannesy, to my life before. A life so simple, if normal, a life which now seemed belong to someone else. The weeks passed. I was called three times.
Three times I entered this building. Three times I thought I won’t come out. The first time, he tests my resistance to pain. Wrist electrodes, loads progressive. He noted my reactions. How many time before I scream? How many time before I lose consciousness? The second time they tested my recovery capacity. How many time after a session I could still walk? Speak, respond to questions? The third time.
The third time, I don’t want it speak, even today, even after all these years. There are things that remain locked up, not by choice, but by survival. What I can say is that I heard this sentence. The sentence that I will never forget. Two officers speaking in front of the front door to enter.
Ist Shonam Shhrin, she screams already. One of them laughs. The other answered something I didn’t understand, but the tone was clear, amused, detached, as if he was talking about an animal, not one human being. And that’s what broke me. Not pain, not fear, but this indifference, this certainty that they had that we were nothing, that our lives didn’t matter, only our cries were just one sound among others.
If I am still alive today, this is not thanks to my strength. It’s not thanks to my courage, it is thanks to moments, tiny moments when someone somewhere decided to see again as a human being. Marguerite, for example, she who had everything lost, her husband shot by the Germans in 1942 for sabotage. His two children disappeared during a raid Lyon.
She who had nothing left to hope, nothing more to wait for. It’s she who gave me her ration of bread when I couldn’t swallow anymore. It’s she who held my hand at night when nightmares woke me up screaming. It was she who whispered: “Breathe, Thérèse! Just breathe.” A breath at once. She had developed a method, a way to survive psychologically in this hell.
She counted the days, the hours, the breaths. She said that as long as we could count, we were still alive, still able to think, still human. “Don’t give them your mind,” she repeated to me. “They can take your body, they can make you badly, but your mind, Thérèse, is you. Keep it, hide it, protect it.” I didn’t always understand what she wanted to say, but I clung to his words like a buoy in a mother unleashed, Polish Anna.
She who risked his life every day in us transmitting stolen information in administrative offices. She who told us: “Don’t forget never. If you survive, tell the story. Even if no one believes you, even if we calls you a liar, tell it because that silence is their greatest weapon. Anna had been a teacher history in Warsaw, arrested for having helped Jews flee.
His family entire had been exterminated. She was alone, but she refused to be silent. She wrote down everything she could about tiny pieces of paper that she hidden in the seams of his clothes, in the cracks of the walls. She told me: “If I die, someone perhaps he will find his words and know.” “I don’t know if anyone has ever found his 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 guard German. I never knew his name. I never saw his face clearly. But one night, as I was leaving the experiment building, unable to walking, legs trembling, blurred vision, he carried me, he didn’t take me didn’t drag, he didn’t push me, he worn.
As we carry a child, he said nothing. He dropped me off in front of the barracks, looked around to make sure no one saw him and he left without a word, without a look. For what ? I don’t know. Maybe that he had a daughter my age. Maybe he was just still human somewhere deep inside him. Or maybe it was just a coincidence, a moment of pity in an ocean of cruelty.
But this moment saved me because that it reminded me of something, something something that I had almost forgotten, that he there still existed somewhere humanity, even tiny, even hidden, even crushed under the weight of the uniform and disorder. There were also these little ones acts of resistance between us, detus, these invisible gestures which kept alive.
A woman who shared a piece of stolen sugar, a another who hummed softly at night to help us sleep. A third who told stories of his life before to remind us that there was had a normal world, that there would be maybe a normal world again. I I remember a woman, Claire, a Parisian. She had been a dancer at the opera.
She sometimes showed us the darkness of the positions barracks broom. Standing up, despite hunger, despite exhaustion, she raised her arms, pointed her feet and for a few seconds, she returned to what she had been. Graceful, free, beautiful. They can lock me up, she said, but they don’t can’t stop me from dancing in my head.
Claire died in March4 of pneumonia, but until his last breath, she continued to raise the arm. to point your feet, to dance. The months passed, winter came, the cold became unbearable. Our uniforms were not enough, our hooves cracked, our feet bled. Many died of cold, hunger, illness. The experiments continued, but they became rarer, less systematic, as if even the Germans were starting to run out of resources or interest or maybe that they felt that the war was turning, that their time was running out.
The rumors were circulating, Allied landings, German defeats, cities times. We didn’t dare believe it, but we silently hoped desperately. I was called one last time January 194, almost a year after my arrival. This time it was not for electrodes, it was for a interrogation. He wanted to know if I knew members of the resistance, if my father had contacts, if I had transmitted messages, if I had helped Jews, if I had hidden weapons, I didn’t know nothing.
And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have said nothing, not out of bravery, but out of exhaustion. I was so empty that nothing mattered anymore. More nothing could break me more. The officer who interrogated me was young, maybe years old. He spoke French with a thick German accent. He asked me the same questions again and again as if he hoped that I end up breaking down, inventing something just so that stops.
But I had nothing to invent. So I remained silent where I kept saying “I don’t know, I don’t know anyone. I didn’t do anything.” At After 3 hours, he gave up, looked with something that sounded like contempt or maybe disappointment. Then he sent me back to barracks. I didn’t understand why they released me. Maybe I didn’t have more value to them.
Maybe Was I too damaged, too thin, too broken. Maybe I had become useless or maybe the war was starting really to turn and that they knew that their time was limited, that they were already trying to erase the evidence, to make the traces disappear, to us make us disappear. In February 1944, they began to transfer prisoners in groups to other camps, towards Germany, towards is.
We didn’t know exactly where, but we knew it was bad sign. Very bad sign. Anna was transferred. Marguerite too. I live them get on the trucks. I couldn’t even not say goodbye to them. They disappeared and I was left with one handful of other women, the most weak, the sickest, those who do not were no longer worth being transported.
We were almost left alone. The guards were fewer in number, the rations even meager, the barracks even colder. It was as if he had forgotten us, as if we were already dead. But we don’t We weren’t, not yet. And then a morning of August 1944, we heard something. Distant explosions then closer and closer, shots, screams, but not our screams, screams Germans.
He was running, he was burning papers, he loaded trucks, he was leaving. And we stayed there frozen, unable to understand what is happening passed until the doors open and soldiers enter, but not German soldiers, American soldiers, free French, with flags, with smiles, with tears in his eyes. They us looked and some turned away look because what he saw was too hard, too unbearable.
Of living skeletons, ghosts, women who no longer looked like women. One of them approached me, waited for me a blanket, told me in French “It’s over, you are free.” Free. The word seemed so strange, so unreal, as if It was a language I didn’t speak more. The camp was liberated in August 1944. The allies arrived, the doors opened.
We were free. But what freedom when we have lost everything, when we no longer know who we are, when we carries within itself images that no words can erase. I returned to France Ansy. My mother cries when she sees me. My father looked away. I don’t looked more like the girl they had recognized.
I was skinny, bald, with a blank look. They asked me questions once, twice, then they stopped because they saw in my eyes that I could not answer. Not yet, maybe never. I was trying to resume a life. I worked, I I got married and had children. But one part of me always stayed there, in this camp, in this building, on this table.
For 64 years, I have not almost nothing said. A few words, a few sentences, never the complete story because no one really wanted to know, because it was too hard, too dark, too embarrassing. France had need heroes, not victims. She needed glorious stories of resistance, no youth story women tortured in forgotten camps. So I have you like thousands others.
We carried this silence alone hoping that one day maybe someone would actually listen. This day came late. I was 83 years old when a historian told me contacted. She was doing research on female labor camps in Occupied France. She found my name in German archives with a mention. Experimental subject, treatment electric, surviving. She wanted to interview me.
I refused first then I accepted. Not for me, but for Lucy, for Hélène, for Marguerite, for Anna, for all those who never returned. This interview lasted three days. I say everything. or almost. There are things that I still keep, which I will keep until my death because they are too much heavy, too intimate, too unbearable.
5 years after this interview, I left peacefully in my sleep. But before leaving, I asked one thing: that my testimony is preserved. That these words survive, that what happened to us is not deleted. Because history should not be written only by winners. It must also be told by those who survived, by those who carried in their flesh the weight of this war.
Today I I’m not here anymore. But these words remain and as long as there is someone to read, to hear them, to pass on, what happened to us will not be buried in silence. We were hundreds, thousands perhaps young French women, Belgians, Polish, torn from our lives, used, broken 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 it is perhaps the only victory that counts really. If you listen to these words today I ask you just one thing. Don’t forget us. Don’t let not our stories disappear because what happened to us can be reproduce in other forms in other countries, to other women. As long as humanity will choose to close his eyes, as that she will prefer indifference to truth.
My name is Thérèse Duvallon. I had years old when they took me. I had some when I left. Between the two, I lived. I survived. And now, I testify forever. Thesis du Vallon carried this silence for 64 years. 64 years to live with its images, its cries, this pain that no one wanted to hear. But before to leave, she chose to speak.
For Marguerite, for Anna. for Lucy, for Claire, for everyone those who never returned, their dignity, their silent resistance, their humanity crushed but never destroyed. All this deserves to be known, to be honored, to stand the test of time. If This testimony touched you, if you feel the weight of these words in your chest, we ask you something important.
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In the comments, take a moment to think. Where are you looking at this from documentary at the moment? What is this that the story of Thérèse awakened in you? Do you think that such horrors could happen again if we choose silence and indifference? These women survived not because they were exceptional, but because they have refused to give up their humanity.
Even in the darkness, even when everything seemed lost, their courage deserves more than our fleeting silence. They deserve our voice, our commitment to never forget. Thérèse left in 2008 to the age of 88, but these words remain and as long as there is someone to to listen, to share them, to carry further, what happened to him will never be erased by time.
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