There is a sound that chases my memory for almost seven decades. This does not are not the screams, these are not the boots hitting the stone floor, it’s something quieter, sharper. It is the dry voice of a man saying in german next. The next. I was 19 when I heard this sentence for the first time times and in that moment, I understood that my name, my story, my dignity, everything it had ceased to exist.
I wasn’t more than one among others. A young French girl again dragged into a narrow corridor where the fate of hundreds of women decided in a few seconds. My name is Josette Aumont. I was born in 1924 in a small village named Saintom in northern France near the Belgian border. My father was a blacksmith.
My mother sewed clothing for families region. We led a simple life but worthy. I grew up helping the workshop, carrying tools, learning to calculate prices, while dreaming to one day open my own boutique fabric. Dreams of young girls, dreams that the war erased as we blow out a candle. In June 1940, when the Germans crossed the border and occupied our region, everything changed.
At the beginning, we tried to continue to live. My father hit the hammer on the anvil again. My mother still sewing, but the tension was going up. Soldiers passed through the streets, posters were stuck on the walls. Curfew, rationing, fear. Little by little, our village ceased to belong to us. I remember the fall of 1942 as from the moment when the occupation became personal.
Rumors began to circulate about young women taken away. At the beginning, we thought it was just stories to scare us. Then a neighbor has disappeared. Two weeks more later, another. Nobody explained nothing, no one asked questions. Silence was safer than the truth. It was one morning in March 1943 that they knocked on our door.
I helped my mother hang the laundry in the yard when I heard the sharp sound of boots the entrance to the house. Three soldiers German, one of them, very young, held a list. He read my name out loud by pronouncing it wrong, as if I were simply an article in a inventory. My mother tried to argue. My father took a step before.
The oldest soldier raised his hand without haste and said something in German which I didn’t understand. But the tone needed no translation. They gave me five minutes to collect what I could carry. I put on a coat. I took a small bag leather that my grandmother gave me. I kissed my mother. She doesn’t have cried in front of me, but I felt his hands trembling.
My father stayed motionless on the threshold of the door, the eyes downcast, unable to protect myself. And I was taken away. If you listen this story right now, you maybe ask how was he possible that this happened in broad daylight without anyone reacting? The answer is simple and terrible. Fear makes earth more than any weapon and we knew deep down what to react meant dying.
So a lot of us simply obeyed. Watch this video and comment from where you are watching it helps keep us alive the memory of those who could not tell their story. Because this is not just my story, it’s the story of thousands of people. We were taken away, me and six other young girls from my village and from neighboring villages in a truck soldier covered with a tarpaulin.
To inside, there was no bench. We sat on the floor cold metallic. Nobody spoke. The truck lurched for hours. I tried to count the time looking through the cracks of the tarpaulin, seeing the light change, but I lost count. When we we finally stopped, it was already night. We went down to a sort of courtyard surrounded by high walls.
There was an electric light powerful coming from the post. I blinked eyes trying to adapt to the clarity. I then saw the building in front us, a large brick construction dark with narrow windows and bars. It looked like a school abandoned or perhaps to an old hospital. But the smell that emanated from it was not that of an ordinary place.
It was acidic, chemical, mixed with something I couldn’t figure out identify, but who immediately made me feel nauseous. We have been conducted inside. The corridor was long and poorly lit. with wooden doors on each side. There had other women there, dozens, maybe a hundred. All young, all scared. Some cried softly, others stared into space.
I tried to look for familiar faces, but I didn’t find any. A woman German in gray uniform, hair pulled into a tight bun, made us stop in thread. She didn’t scream, she didn’t need it. His voice was cold, mechanical, as if reading instructions from a manual. She said that we were going to go through an increase vale, a selection.
She said we had to obey all orders. She has said that any resistance would be severely punished. And then, with a gesture In short, she told us to wait. And it is there, in this icy corridor that I heard it for the first time. Dinest next, you can’t imagine again what happened next, but if you continue to listen, you understand why this story had to be told.
Because what I saw in this place forever changed what I I thought it was possible in humans. The first door opened. A young woman entered. Maybe she had 20 years old. Brown hair, pale face. She was trembling. Two minutes later, she came out with empty eyes, directed towards another door on the left. Then another girl entered.
Then a other. DX Dx, die next. The rhythm was regular, almost industrial. None of the women spoke as they left. Some were crying, others seemed petrified. I understood, without being told, that what was happening behind that door would decide everything. When my turn is When I arrived, I felt my legs give way. A hand pushed me on the back.
I am entering a room lit by a lamp hanging from the ceiling. There was three men, two in uniform soldier, one in a white coat who wore round glasses and held a notebook. They didn’t look me in the eye. They looked at me like you look at a object that we evaluate. The man in the blouse gestured for me to take off my coat.
I obeyed, then my dress. I hesitated. He repeated the order louder. I removed my dress then my underwear. I stood naked in front of three men that I didn’t know in a room cold that smelled of alcohol and metal. The man in the blouse approached. He has examined my teeth as one examines a horse.
He felt my arms, my shoulders, my stomach. He noted something something in his notebook. Then he turned towards the two soldiers and said a few words in German. One of them has nodded. The other wrote a number on a sheet. I was told to get dressed again. I was taken to a another door. Not the one on the left, not the one on the right, the one in the back.
I don’t didn’t yet know what that was meant. I learned it later. In this center, there were three possible destinations. Three doors, three destinies. The door on the left led in the medical wing. This is where they sent to the women considered as interesting for their experiments. I heard some years after the war of testimonies survivors who spoke about forced sterilization, injection, tests carried out without anesthesia.
Some women died, others were coming back. broken, unable to carry children, marked for life. The door of right led to the soldiers’ wing. The women considered desirable, young, beautiful, healthy, were sent there to serve the officers and troops. They were locked in tiny, violated pieces daily, treated like disposable flesh.
Many did not survive no more than a few months. Those who survived lost all light in the look. The back door, the one where we sent me, led to forced labor, a munitions factory a few kilometers from the center. There we work 12 hours a day, assembling metal parts, breathing toxic fumes, sleeping on damp benches. It was brutal, it was exhausting, but it was a chance of survival.
Why was I sent there and not elsewhere? I never knew it. Maybe because I was thin, maybe because I had a little scar on the cheek, memory of a childhood fall. Maybe just because that day, they had the labor needs and no cobail. Chance, [music] the absurdity, the horror. In the factory, we were around fifty women, all French, all young.
Some came from Paris, others from Brittany, Normandy, South. We shared the same fate but we we spoke little. Fatigue made us mute. The end too. In the morning, we woke up at five o’clock. We gave a piece of black bread and a sort of grayish soup. [music] Then they took us to the factory. There we had to assemble detonators to shells.
Meticulous work, dangerous. If we were wrong, the room could explode. I saw two women lose fingers. Another lost the right eye. In the evening, we were taken back at the barracks. We were given a other soup, sometimes with a piece of potatoes. Then we lay down, tight against each other so as not to not die of cold.
Some prayed, others were crying. I stared at the ceiling and I was trying to remember the my mother’s face. After 6 months, I started losing my hair. My skin has turned gray, my teeth are are unshod, my body was slowly decomposing and I could feel it. But I held on because somewhere deep down, I refused to give them this victory.
I refused to die in this place. One day, some news wife arrived in our barracks. Her name was Marguerite. She came from Lyon. She was 23tit years. She had been captured then that she distributed leaflets resistance. We went through it the same way sorting room than me. But she, she had been sent first to the wing of soldiers.
Then when she became useless is the word they were using, it was transferred to the factory. Marguerite hardly spoke. But one night as we lay side by side, she whispered to me: “He treated like cattle, but we We are not cattle. We are women and one day they bridge. She is died three weeks later. Pneumonia or maybe just exhaustion.
We took him one morning, we never saw him again. There was in this centers an implacable logic, a mechanism of dehumanization which worked with precision terrifying. The men who examined us did not did not see as human beings. We were resources, objects to to sort, to categorize, to use. This reality hit me with a force brutal the day I understood that our lives did not depend on our choices.
of our courage or our faith, but of a cold gaze, of an inscription on a notebook, with a bureaucratic gesture which assigned us to one of the three doors. This sorting room was not unique. After the war, I learned that he there were dozens of centers similar throughout occupied France. secret places hidden behind facades of abandoned schools, hospitals, converted administrative buildings, places where thousands of women French, Belgian, Polish, Dutch have been evaluated, sorted, sent to destinies that they had not chosen. Some centers
were in Paris in neighborhoods that I knew. Others were settled in lost villages, far away looks, but all worked according to the same principle, transformed from human beings in statistics. Some historians estimate that between 1940 and 1944, more than 200,000 women been deported, locked up, exploited in these centers.
But this figure is probably much lower than the reality. Many have never been recorded. Many died without so that no one knows their name. A lot survived but never spoke. The silence after the war was often the only way to continue living. Me, I survived. But for a long time, I wondered if it was really a luck because surviving meant carry within oneself the weight of all those who did not have this opportunity.
Surviving meant waking up every morning with their faces etched in my memory. Surviving meant living with guilt that I could not manage name. In the factory where I was sent, life followed a mechanical rhythm and merciless. Every day was like the last. Each gesture was calculated to extract from us the maximum productivity before that our bodies do not give in.
The German foremen did not shout often. They didn’t need it. Their presence was enough. Their silence was more threatening than any order shout. In the morning, we woke up at 5 a.m., sometimes earlier if the air warning sirens resounded. We were given a piece of black bread so hard that it had to dip it in some sort of grayish soup to be able to chew it.
This soup had no taste, or rather, it tasted like dirty water mixed with a few peelings of rotten vegetables. But we drank it because it was everything we had. Then we taken to the factory. The journey lasted a twenty minutes walk whatever time. Rain, snow, freezing wind. We marched in column escorted by armed guards.
Some women fell along the way. Exhaustion, [music] malnutrition. Sometimes she got up, sometimes she remained on the ground. And we continue to walk because stopping was risked joining the one who does not was more relevant. The factory itself was a massive red brick building blackened by smoke. Inside, the air was unbreathable.
A heat stifling in summer, biting cold in winter. The machines ran without stopping, producing a deafening noise which prevented us from thinking. Maybe it was intentional? Maybe he wanted us to become automatons incapable of thinking, unable to feel. There, we had to assemble detonators for shells. A job careful, dangerous.
Each piece had to be handled with precision absolute. If we were wrong, if we applied too much pressure, if we incorrectly inserted a pin, the part could explode. I saw two women lose fingers in accidents. One of them, a young Parisian named Hélène, lost three fingers of the right hand. She has continued to work the next day.
The bandaged hand, livid face. Because that being hurt didn’t mean you could rest. This meant simply that we became less useful. And becoming less useful was closer to the end. Another woman whose name I never knew has lost the right eye when a fragment metal ricocheted. She screamed then she was silent.
They took him to the infirmary. I never saw him again. In the evening, we brought back to the barracks. It was a long and low wooden structure with a roof that leaked when it rained. To inside, there were rows of superimposed chalis with benches thin and moist. No cover, as little as it made no difference.
We slept close together against each other so as not to die of cold. We were given a other soup, sometimes with a piece of potato. It was a treasure. A whole potato meant that we might have enough strength to last one more day. Some women kept their apple pieces earth for the next day. Others ate immediately, lest we do not steal from them during the night.
Then we was lying down. Some prayed, [music] others were crying. Me, I I was staring at the ceiling and trying to memory of my mother’s face. But with time, even his memories became blurry. As if hunger, fatigue, pain erased everything that was not essential for immediate survival. After 6 months, I started lose my hair.
They fell through handle. I found them on my straw, on my shoulders, between my fingers. My skin has turned gray, almost translucent. My teeth are loose. I felt my body decomposing slowly, cell by cell. And However, I held on. Because somewhere deep inside me, I refused to give them this victory. I refused to die in this place.
But the line between holding and collapse was held. I saw it in other women. One day, they were there standing working. The tomorrow, something in them had broken. They continued to move, to obey orders, but their eyes were empty. They were became shells and a few days later, they died [music] simply without noise, as if their will to live was gone.
One day a new woman arrived in our barracks. Her name was Marguerite. She came from Lyon. She was years old. She had been captured then that she distributed leaflets resistance in the streets of his city. We had passed it through the same sorting room than me. But she had been sent first to the soldiers’ wing.
Then when it became useless, that’s the word they used, we got it transferred to the factory. Marguerite barely spoke. But one night, as we lay side by side side, she whispered something to me that I never forgot. [music] She said, “He treats us like cattle, but we are not from livestock.
We are women and one day they bridge.” I wanted to answer him, tell him that yes, she was right, but the words did not come out because at this At that point, I was no longer sure of anything. I was no longer sure that justice existed. I was no longer sure that there would be a after. Marguerite died three weeks later.
Pneumonia or maybe just exhaustion. We have it taken away one morning. We never saw him again. But these words remained. One day they piront. I held on to this sentence: Even if I didn’t believe it really, even though I knew that a lot of them never died. There’s had in this system a cruelty which went beyond physical violence.
It was psychological cruelty calculated, intended to break us from the interior. He knew that to hold us hungry, exhausted, sick was not enough. He also wanted to make us lose our humanity, make us forget that we were individuals with names, stories, families. In the factory, we were called by numbers. No name, never a name.
I was number 247. And after a while, I started to see myself that way. Not like Josette Aumont, not like the daughter of blacksmith of Saint-Homere, but like a production unit, a pair of hands, a body which assembled parts until he can’t anymore. And that’s perhaps the most important thing terrible thing that I learned in this place.
You can steal from someone freedom, one’s health, one’s life, but we can also steal his identity. And when we lose our identity, we also lose a part of his will to survive. But there were rare moments, fleeting moments where this humanity remade surface. One evening, an older woman that we, maybe 40 years old, started to sing softly.
A French song who I knew since childhood. The other women joined her one by one. Soon, everyone barracks sang. The voices were weak, broken, but they were there. And for a few minutes we We were no longer numbers. We were become women again. The guards are arrived, they screamed, they threatened, but they didn’t shoot.
Maybe because that they knew that we would break completely also meant losing their workforce. Or maybe because that even for them there was a limit to barbarism. That evening, I asleep with a strange feeling, something that looked like hope or maybe just awareness that as long as we could still singing, we weren’t completely lost.
The weeks are transformed into me. The winter of 1943 gave way in the spring of 1944, then to summer. The seasons passed but nothing did not change. We work, we barely ate, we slept poorly and every morning we wondered if this would be our last. But something was starting to change on the outside. We heard it in the murmurs of guards, in their growing nervousness.
The allies were advancing, the bombings were getting closer. Sometimes at night we heard the distant rumble of had and we pray that they come, so that they destroy everything, even if it meant dying under the bombs, because to die like this liberation. In August 1944, the Germans began to evacuate the centers.
One morning, we said to gather our things. We had almost nothing. A piece of cloth, a piece of stale bread. It was all we had left. We were made ride in trucks. Some women thought they were going to kill us. Others hoped that we would release. I didn’t think anything anymore. I was too tired to hope, too much empty to be afraid.
We were taken to another camp to the east. Then a few more weeks later, this camp was also evacuated and so on. We were moved like parcels from one place to another at will the advance of allied troops. Each transfer brought us closer to death because the Germans knew they were losing the war and they knew also that they had to erase the traces of what they had done.
In November4, I was freed by soldiers Americans. They found our convoy abandoned near the border German. There were about thirty of us women still alive. Skeletons, sick, and stupid. An American soldier gave me a cover. He spoke to me in English. I didn’t understand a word, but I understood his look.
It was a look of horror. He saw in us something something he never imagined possible. And that look made me realize for the first time in months that we were still human, that we weren’t just numbers, that we had survived. But survive, I was going to understand later, was only the beginning of a another form of suffering. I returned to Saintomer in December 1944.
The return journey took several weeks. Infrastructure railways had been destroyed by the bombings. The roads were crowded with refugees, soldiers, military convoys. I traveled in Red Cross trucks, then in crowded trains where we were crowded standing for hours. But I don’t felt nothing anymore.
Neither fatigue nor cold, nor hunger. My body was there, but my mind was floating elsewhere in a gray area between life and death. When I arrived in my village, it was dark. The tricks were deserted. Many houses had been damaged during the occupation. Some had been requisitioned by the Germans then abandoned. Others were simply empty, their occupants who fled or perished.
I walked slowly, as if in a dream, trying to recognize places of my childhood. But everything seemed to me stranger, as if I were returning to a place I never really had known. My mother was still alive. My father had died 6 months earlier of heart attack. When I crossed the threshold of our house, my mother frozen.
She looked at me for a long time like if she didn’t recognize me. And then suddenly she understood. She got rushed towards me. She squeezed me in her arms and she cried. She cried for hours without power stop. Her tears flowed down my shoulders, wet my hair, soaked my dress. But I wasn’t crying. I couldn’t. Something in me had gone out.
Something that I never managed to turn it back on completely. The first weeks have been strange. My mother tried to to feed me, to take care of me, to make me regain strength. She was preparing soups, stews, whatever she could find with the little provision available. But I couldn’t eat normally. My stomach, accustomed to month of casifamine, could no longer tolerate normal portions.
I vomited often, I lost even more weight and my mother looked at me with concern that she was trying to hide. She didn’t ask me any questions. She felt like I wasn’t ready to speak. And I wouldn’t have known where to start. How to explain the inexplicable? How to describe what cannot be described in words ordinary? So I stayed silent.
I spent my days sitting by the window, looking at the street, observing the people passing by, trying to convince myself that I was really back. Sometimes, neighbors came to see my mother. They brought a little food, news from village, condolences for my father. They cast furtive glances at me, curious, embarrassed.
She didn’t know what tell me and I didn’t know what tell them no more. So I was falling the eyes. I looked away and she left, relieved not to have to broach the subject. For months I lived in a kind of fog. I got up in the morning because I had to rise. I ate because I had to eat. I breathed because I had to breathe.
But I didn’t live really. I simply existed as a automaton that performs gestures without to think, without putting any soul into it. At night, the nightmares returned. I I woke up with a start, my heart beating, his body drenched in sweat. I saw the sorting room, the three [music] men, the hands that felt me. I saw the corridor, the women who were waiting.
Say, I heard this voice again and again, even in silence from my room and I stayed awake for trembling hours, unable to go back to sleep. My mother finally realized it. One night she came into my room. She sat on the edge of my bed. She took my hand in hers and she told me in a soft voice but firm: “Josette, you’re home. [music] You are safe now.
They can’t hurt you anymore.” But she was wrong because he continued to hurt me, not physically, but through memories that never left me, through the images which returned without cease, through this sensation permanent to still be there in this cold corridor waiting for a decision of my fate.
In 1946 life began to be resumed in the village. The men were gradually returning from the front or camps. Businesses were reopening. The people were trying to rebuild what had been destroyed. There was a collective desire to forget, to turn the page, to start again as if nothing had happened. But I couldn’t not forget and I felt that this inability to forget separated me from others.
People wanted to talk about the future, reconstruction, hope. Me, I remained a prisoner of the past and I felt more and more isolated. It was at this time that I met Henry. He was 27 years old. He was coming back from captivity in Germany where he had spent 3 years in a prison camp war. We met at the bakery. He smiled at me.
I turned away the eyes. But a few days later, we saw each other again and little by little, we started talking to each other. Henry was different from the others. He doesn’t didn’t ask indiscreet questions. He didn’t try to find out what was wrong with me arrived. He spoke little about himself captivity, but I felt that he understood, that he knew what meant carrying things within oneself that cannot be shared.
and this silent understanding brought me closer of him. We got married in 1950, a small ceremony without pomp with a few relatives. I was 26 years old. I wore a simple, white dress that my mother had sewing. Henry held my hand and for first time in years, I felt something that looked like of peace. But even in this new life, the past never left me not.
Henry and I had two children, one boy then a girl. I loved them all my strength. I tried to be a good mother, but there were moments when I felt absent, like if part of me had stayed there in this center and would never return. My children knew nothing about what had happened to me. I never told them talked about the war, the deportation, from the factory.
When they asked me questions, “Mom, what are you did during the war? I replied vaguely. “I worked.” And I changed the subject. Henry does not didn’t ask me any questions. He respected my silence, but I knew that he was worried. Sometimes at night when I woke up screaming, he took him in his arms and he waited that I calm down. He didn’t say anything.
He was simply there. And it was sufficient. For years I didn’t told no one about what was wrong with me arrived. Not to my mother, not to my friends, not even to Henry. I kept everything locked up as if by not pronouncing the words, I could reality. But the memories remained. They were coming back at night.
He came back in moments of silence. He came back when I saw a girl walking down the street carefree and wondering if she knew how much the world could be cruel. I remember one day in particular, it was in 1958. I was at the market with my daughter who was 5 years old at the time. We We were doing our shopping and suddenly I heard a voice behind me.
A voice of a man with a German accent. He spoke French but the accent was there. Undeniable. My heart stopped, my body froze. I felt panic rising, uncontrollable. I turned around. It was a man elderly, probably a tourist, who asked a shopkeeper for directions. He was nothing threatening, but for me, this accent was enough.
I grabbed the hand of my daughter. I left the market in running and came home trembling, unable to explain what had just happened. [music] My daughter looked at me scared. Mom, what what is there? I tried to smile. I have said “Nothing, my dear, nothing.” But she knew it wasn’t true and I too. The years have passed.
My children have grew up, they left home. Henry retired. We had little children. Life continued. But I was still a prisoner of 1943. In 1985, I read an article in a local newspaper. A historian was looking testimonies from women who have been deported during the war. He wanted document what he called the forget about the occupation.
Women whose stories had no never been told because they were considered less important than those of resistance fighters or deportees policies. I cut out the article. I I kept it in a drawer for 3 years. I took it out sometimes. I was reading it. I wondering if I should answer. But each time, I put the article back in the drawer and I closed it because to speak meant to live again and again meant suffering again.
One day, in 1988, I wrote a short, sober letter. I just said I was taken away in that I had been in a sorting center, that I had worked in a factory ammunition, that I had survived. I don’t didn’t give details. I didn’t tell not the room, the doors, the men in white coat. Not yet. The historian answered me quickly.
He thanked me for my courage. He asked me if I will agree to testify more detail. Maybe during an interview recorded. I read his letter several times and then I said no, I don’t I’m not ready. For years more, I refused to speak. I refused all requests from historians, journalists, documentary filmmakers. All wanted me to tell, everyone thought that my testimony was important.
But I couldn’t cross the line not. Henry died in 2003. A long illness. I accompanied him until end and when he left I felt an immense emptiness settling inside me, a empty different from the one I wore since 1943 because this time it was the emptiness of the absence, the absence of the only person who understood my silence without ever judging me.
After his death, I started to think differently. I said to myself “You kept silent your whole life. You did it for yourself protect. But who did it help? Not to me because silence does not didn’t protect me. He just had me locked more in my solitude and certainly not to the one who did not have survived.
Because she didn’t have no more voices and if I continued to silence, their stories would disappear with me. But even with this taking conscience, it took me another 8 years to find the courage to speak. In, I saw a report on television. It was about the last survivors of the Choa who testified before dying. Very old men and women, some in wheelchairs, others connected to machines, but all determined to tell their story before it’s too late.
And I am told, if I don’t speak now, who will do? I was then 87 years old. My health was declining. I knew that I didn’t have much time left. So, I contacted an archive center historic sites in Paris. I said that I was ready to testify, that I had something to say and that it was necessary let it be recorded before I disappears.
A team of historians French came to my house in Saintomer. They installed a camera, they prepared questions and they asked me asked to tell. I told for three days, three whole days with pauses because my voice broke, because my strength were leaving. But I told everything that I had kept within me for 68 years. I told about the sorting room, the three men who examined me like an object : the sour smell, the cold, the nudity forced. I told about the three doors.
The medical wing where the women served of cobaï, the soldiers’ wing where the bodies were raped until exhaustion. the factory where we assembled ammunition for a war we don’t understand more. I told Marguerite her voice in the night. A day, they bridge. I told the women who died in silence, the bodies which were fading, the names that no one pronounced more.
And when I was done, when there was nothing left to say, I cried. For the first time since 194, I have cried. Tears that I had held back for almost seven decades. Tears for all those who could not return. For all those whose voices were extinct forever. This testimony has been deposited in the archives French nationals.
He is part of a collective memory project on women deported during the Second World War. Hundreds of testimonials like mine have been collected. Some are public, others remain sealed upon request families. I asked that the mine be made public after my death because I wanted people know. Because I owed that to everyone those who have never been able to tell.
Because the silence ultimately had no only amplifies the suffering. I am died in 2015 at the age of 91. But before leaving, I told my little one girl: “Never let anyone forget, never let anyone tell that it wasn’t that bad because it was serious and it was real. And she has kept his promise. Today, if you listen to this testimony, it’s because my little girl kept her promise.
She had the recording digitized. She shared it with researchers, teachers, documentarians and now she shares it with you. He there is a question that was asked to me often during his interviews with historians. How did you manage to survive? I always answered the same thing. I don’t know because truth is that I didn’t do anything heroic. I didn’t resist.
I don’t have not fought. I simply obeyed, I simply held one day after another, one hour after another. And maybe that this is survival. Not an act of bravery, just silent stubbornness not to disappear. But there is a another question that no one asked me never asked and I’m still asking today. Why me? Why was I sent to the factory and not to the medical wing? Why was I spared while Marguerite is dead? Why did I return to Sainthomer while so many others have never saw their family again? I don’t have any answer and maybe that’s the weight
the heaviest. Knowing that I survived by chance, by a roll of the dice, by a arbitrary decision made by a man in a white coat who didn’t know not even my name. During all these years I carried a guilt that I couldn’t name it. The guilt for having survived. The guilt of having been the next was [music] lucky. But as I got older, I understood something.
It’s not me who should carry this guilt. This are they, the ones who built these centers, those who organized these sorting, those who decided that certain lives are worth more than others. And if I tells this story today, this is not for pity, it is so that we remember. Because the barbarity does not begin with the gas chambers.
She doesn’t Don’t start with the death camps. It begins with a sentence, a simple sentence, bureaucratic, almost banal. Dinest, next. [music] It begins when we stop seeing the other as a human being, when we reduces it to a number, to a category, to a utility. It begins when we accept silence, when we turn away look, when we say to ourselves “It’s not my problem.
” So today I asks you this question. If you had been there in this corridor in 1943, what would you have done? Would you have resisted? Would you have obeyed? Would you have look away? I don’t judge you because I myself don’t know what what I would have done if I had been there place of those who guarded us. But I know one thing, we all have it responsibility to ask ourselves this question today, now, before that it is not too late because history repeats itself, it repeats itself always in other forms, in other places, with other words, but
the mechanism is the same. And if we don’t let us not remain vigilant, if we do not let’s not defend the dignity of each being human, then one day somewhere someone else will hear this sentence say next and it will be too late. My name is Josette Aumont. I was 19 years old in 1943. I survived.
But I won’t forget never. And now it’s up to you remember. The story of Joseph Aumont is not simply a testimony of the past. It’s a warning for the present. Each word she said before she died carries within itself the weight of thousands of extinct voices, of thousands of destinies broken in the shadow of this war. In listening to his story until the end, you did more than hear a story.
You have honored the memory of all those who were never able to return home them, who have never been able to tell what that they lived. You have become the guardian of their memory and this role don’t stop here. If this testimony touched, if these words reasoned in you, so take a moment to think.
What do you feel now ? What have you learned about fragility of human dignity? on barbarism which begins with a simple classification, by a bureaucratic sentence from ex. Leave a comment below. Share your thoughts, your emotions, your thinking. Tell us where you watch this video, what impact this story had on you? Because every comment is proof that Josette’s story continues to live on, that his courage was not in vain.
Supporting this channel means choosing to don’t forget. It is to refuse that these stories disappear into silence. By subscribing, by activating the bell notification, by sharing this video with your loved ones, you contribute that testimonies like that of Josette continues to be heard, preserved, transmitted to generations future.
You become a link essential in the chain of memory collective. Because as long as we let’s tell, as long as we listen, as long as we that we remember, they did not won. And now ask yourself this question that Joseph herself asked before leaving. If you had been there in this hallway in 1943, what would you have done? This question does not wait for easy answer.
It forces us to look within ourselves, to recognize our own humanity, our own vulnerability. It reminds us that vigilance is never optional, what to defend the dignity of every human being is a daily struggle. So don’t let This testimony stops here. do it live. Share it, remember, because that history always repeats itself until we decide together to prevent it.
