January 23, 1943, northern France, Pas de Calais region. Snow fell heavily on the ruins of a old textile factory transformed into something that military maps Germans called medical unit of campaign 19. But there was nothing medical there, only the cold sharp, the smell of disinfectants mixed with dried blood and the muffled sound order given in German.
Between these gray stone walls, women French women were stripped of their names, their clothes and all trace of humanity. And it all began always the same way. “Take off your clothes and get on your knees.” It was the sentence that resonated in the narrow corridors, pronounced with a clinical coldness, without anger, without hatred, just an order carried out as if it it was a protocol.
What was coming afterward, no one dared to tell it, least not for a long time. Officially, this place did not exist not. In the Vermarth records, it only appeared as a point of medical triage for suspected civilians involvement with the resistance French. In practice, it was a laboratory and the man who did it was Doctor Ernst Felker, a physician trained in Berlin, member of the medical profession German soldier with a background impeccable, at least on paper.
Vulker was methodical. He wore thin-rimmed glasses, spoke gently and still kept his hands clean. He wrote everything down. Temperature body, resistance time, skin reaction, degree of pain. Everything was recorded in notebooks black hard cover, written in precise cursive. For him, these women were not victims, they were data.
Among the prisoners, there had nurses captured then that they treated allied soldiers wounded, messengers of the resistance intercepted on rural roads, teachers accused of hiding Jews, seamstresses denounced by collaborating neighbors, women ordinary, women whose faces have disappeared from collective memory because their names were never found.
They were kept in damp cells in the basement of the old windowless factory. without natural light, only one bulb weak which hung from the ceiling and swayed when the military trucks were passing on the road above. The cold was so intense that some woke up with chapped lips, strength to tremble during the night. He there was no mattress, only old straw and blankets torn pieces that smelled musty.
The routine was always the same. At six hours in the morning, soldiers were knocking to the iron gates with crooks of rifle. Ofstein, get up. The women were led away naked through the icy corridors until a large room which must once have been the factory’s fabric warehouse. There, under white light from lamps improvised surgical operations was held on Doctor Felker.
At his side, three assistants, German nurses forcibly recruited who obeyed the orders without looking up. And in a corner of the room, still standing, hands crossed behind the back, an officer of the SS observed everything in silence. He never spoke. He was only note and it was even scarier. Take off your clothes and get started knees.
The order was repeated by one soldiers. In broken French but understandable. Some women obeyed immediately, already resigned. Others hesitated, looking around looking for something, exit, a witness, a miracle. But he there was nothing, only the cold, the silence and the indifferent gaze of doctor. Felker wasn’t shouting, he wasn’t wasn’t threatening, he was just waiting.
And when everything was on its knees, naked, vulnerable, he began his work. Injection of unknown substances, test resistance to cold, women immersed in tanks of ice water for minutes, sometimes hours while they were timing and noted. Small incisions made without anesthesia to observe the healing, finger amputation, of ears under the pretext of studies scientists.
But the worst wasn’t experiences were silence. The women were not screaming, not because that they did not feel the pain, but because they had learned that shouting was no use. Scream only attracted more attention, more soldiers, no more order. So, they bit their lips until they bled, tightened the stitches until their nails dig into their own skin and supported.
Supported because there was no other choice. And when finally, she returned to the cells, staggering, bleeding, trembling, she cowered in dark corners and waited until the next morning. Some never came back. The bodies were withdrawn at night, always at night, wrapped in military tarpaulins carried by rank-and-file soldiers who obeyed orders without questioning questions.
Nobody knew where they were going. But in February a peasant who lived near the ancient factory began to notice an odor strange coming from an abandoned cellar the back of the field. He did not investigate. At that time, investigating could signify death. So he closed simply the windows of his house and tried to forget.
Volker continued his work for more than a year. He received occasional visits of senior officers who leafed through his notebooks with clinical interest, asked some technical questions and left again. Nobody questioned ethics, no one spoke of humanity. The war had transformed morality into something malleable, adjustable, practical.
And these women officially didn’t even exist. He there was no entry register, no medical form, no name, only numbers scribbled in handwriting on the wall of each cell. Number 7, number 12, number 23. Women reduced to numbers. In April 1944, when the Allied forces began to advance in the north of France, unity medical field was evacuated in emergency.
Documents were burned, medical equipment was loaded in trucks. The prisoners still alive, only 17, were transferred to destinations unknown. Vulker disappeared, his notebooks too. And the old factory was left behind, silent, empty, as if it had never sheltered anything but dust and shadow. For decades, no one talked about this place.
nor the local residents who avoided passing near the ruins, nor the Allied veterans who had never heard of a camp there, nor the historians who found no document. History of these women was buried with their body. But in during renovation work for transform the land into a parking lot, workers found something, a sealed cellar.
inside the remains humans, dozens and among the bones, fragments of paper, pages torn stained diaries damp but still legible, written in French, written by hands trembling and on several pages the same repeated phrase “Take off your clothes and get on your knees.” But what really happened after this order? What were the soldiers? And why hasn’t anyone been punished? The truth is even more brutal than anything one could imagine and it is about to be revealed.
Ernst Fulker was born in 1911 in Dresden, son of a pharmacist and a teacher piano. He grew up in a family middle class who valued education and discipline. He was a exemplary student. He entered the faculty of medicine from the University of Berlin in 1920, specialized in pathology and 193, when the National Party socialist took power, he was already a respected doctor with articles published on diseases infectious diseases and resistance bacterial. He was never a fanatic.
He did not shout slogans, he did not did not wear a swastika outside of the uniform, but he believed in effectiveness and he believed that the science should not be limited by sentimentalisms. When the war began, Vulker was recruited into the medical profession of the Vertmarthe. He hadn’t asked for it but he did not refuse either.
And when he received the proposal to lead an experimental unit in the northern France, he accepted without hesitate. The proposition was clear: study human resistance in extreme conditions, cold, pain, deprivation, infection. All this under pretext to better prepare the soldiers Germans for the Eastern Front.
But in practice, what Volker was doing was torture disguised as science. Its academic training had given him the tools, his cold temperament had gave him the ability and the war had given permission. In Germany 1940s nazi borders between medical research and cruelty had become blurred. Doctors respected were participating in programs euthanasia.
Scientists brilliant people designed experiments on human beings without their consent. And no one questioned because everything was done in the name of something greater. Victory, science, progress. Fulker fit perfectly into this system. He wasn’t a monster by nature. He was a man who had learned to deactivate his empathy in the name efficiency.
The experiences followed a precise pattern, first the dehumanization. The prisoners were stripped, numbered and processed like objects. Vulker believed that it was necessary to eliminate the emotional variables. If they were treated like people, the assistants might hesitate. If they were treated like numbers, the efficiency would be more big. And it worked.
The German nurses who worked with him obeyed without questioning. Not because they were cruel, but because routine normalized the horror. Inject bacteria into a defenseless woman simply became experimental protocol number 4. Watching someone die of hypothermia simply became data collection on thermal resistance.
The process of dehumanization began upon arrival. The women were taken to a room where their clothes were confiscated and burned. Their hair was cut short, almost shaved. Their personal belongings, letters, photos, wedding rings were thrown away in a bag and forgotten. She received a coarse gray tunic without underwear that exposed them to the cold constant.
And then came the number painted with a black brush on their left forearm. Some tried to rub it, to wash it, to do it disappear, but the ink was indelible and over time, it stopped trying. The number became part of them and their names little by little were fading. One of the experiences cruelest involved immersion in ice water.
The prisoners were placed in tanks metal filled with water at temperatures between 2 and 5°gr Celus. Naked, immobilized with leather straps which cut their wrists and ankles. Vulker was timing how much how long it took for her to lose consciousness. He noted the temperature body every five minutes in using rectu thermometers.
The contact was brutal, invasive, adding an extra layer of humiliation to physical torture. Some resisted 15 minutes, others one half hour. None exceeded a hour. When they were removed, the skin was bluish, lips purple, eyes glassy. Some never regained consciousness. They were taken back to the cells where they die during the night.
alone freeze didn’t just observe. He also tested methods of warming. Some women, after have been immersed up to the limit of death, were against naked bodies of German soldiers to measure whether the human warmth could resuscitate them. Others were immersed in baths hot water, causing shock thermal which often stopped the heart.
Vulker wrote everything down. The most effective, according to his notebooks was the gradual warming with heated blankets. But this conclusion was paid with dozens lives, women dead by hypothermia, cardiac arrest, shock. Everything for a note in a notebook black. Another experiment involved deliberate infections.
Vulker injected live bacteria, tethanos, gangrains, septicemia in small cuts made on the legs or the arms of the prisoners. He then observed the progression of infection without offering treatment. He noted the speed at which the fever rose, skin color around the wound, the moment when the delirium began. Some died in three days, others in a week.
They compared the results, looking for diagrams and when one of them died, he simply noted subject number 12, next deceased. He was testing also antiseptics experimental applied to fields opened without anesthesia. Women screaming, writhing against the straps who kept them on the tables metallic.
Volker measured the intensity pain by observing the muscle contractions, dilation pupils, heart rate. For him, pain was not a suffering, it was a given, a physiological indicator to record and analyze. But perhaps the most disturbing was the constant presence of the SS officer. He didn’t touch never anyone. He never gave of order.
He simply observed and noted. His name was Klaus Ritner and he was responsible for ensuring that everything is documented for reporting superiors. He had a notebook small in black leather and wrote with a fountain pen still standing, still in silence and always with the same look cold as if he were attending a routine surgical procedure and not to an atrocity.
Ritner represented something more insidious than Fulker himself. Fulker was the scientific. Ritner was the bureaucrat. He didn’t get his hands dirty hands but his presence validated everything. He was the official witness, the guardian of administrative legality and it was this bureaucratization of the horror that made it all possible.
Without Ritner, Vulker would not have been just a mad doctor. With Ritner, he was an authorized researcher and it is precisely this authorization, this systemic permission that did harm Nazi something more dangerous than simple individual violence. The German nurses who worked under Fulker had reactions different. Some refused to look into the eyes of the prisoners.
Others developed rigidity mechanical, carrying out orders with robotic precision, as if disconnecting emotionally was the only way to survive this. A one of them, named Greta Hoffman, kept a secret diary. She wrote: “I don’t know who I am anymore. I am become another person. One person who holds a woman’s hands while let the doctor cut off his fingers.
A no one who no longer cries. a no one I no longer recognize in the mirror. This diary was found decades later, hidden between ceiling beams of a house abandoned in Lille. Greta was 24 years old when she was assigned to Unit 19. She had studied to be a nurse pediatric. She dreamed of working with children but the war had them decided otherwise.
And now she spent his days attending torture. In her diary she recounts how she tried to escape mentally. She recited poems. She remembered songs from her childhood. She imagined that she was elsewhere. But it only worked partially because his hands were still there, holding the instruments and his eyes saw always everything.
and his presence, too passive as she was, made her a accomplice and the victims, they tried to protect themselves from all possible ways. Some created little mental rituals, counted until 1000, recite prayers, remember faces of children that she I might never see again. Others simply disconnected, entering a state of emotional absence which almost looked like death.
But the body don’t forget. Even when the mind tries to escape, the body registers every pain, every humiliation, every violation and it never goes away not ever. In July 1943, one of the prisoners, a young woman of around 25 years old, identified only as number 19, manages to engrave a message on a wall of his cell using a rusty nail.
The message read: “My name is Élise. I existed.” When ruins were explored in 1978, this message was still there, covered in blunt but readable. He was photographed, cataloged and today, it is in a museum in Paris in a permanent exhibition on crimes forgotten war. Elise was teacher in a small village near of Aras.
She was arrested because that she had refused to denounce a Jewish family who hid in their cellar. She was twenty years old. She loved Rimbau’s poetry and played the violin. She wanted to travel to Italy after war. She never did. She died in this cell three days after engraving his name. But this name survived and today he is all that what remains of her.
But despite everything some survived not because that they were spared but because their body, by some good. When the unit was evacuated in April 194, ten women were still alive. They were transferred to other camps where they were lost in the chaos of the end of the war. Some were liberated by the Allies in 1945. Others died shortly after, destroyed physically and emotionally.
And the few who managed to return home they never talked about what they had lived, at least not publicly. Because who would believe them? The company after the war didn’t want to hear talk about these horrors. People wanted to rebuild, forget, move forward. And the women who had survived these camps carried a shame that she didn’t deserve.
A shame imposed by a world which preferred not not know. So they were silent. They buried their memories, they were trying to get back to normal. But some scars don’t heal never. And the question that no one wanted to ask was: “Comb others Did places like this exist? How many other women have disappeared in silence?” The answer is terrifying.
When the Allied Forces liberated France between 1944 and 1945, thousands of Nazi documents were captured, cataloged and archived. But not everything was preserved. Many records were deliberately destroyed by the Germans themselves before their retirement. Others disappeared simply, lost in the chaos of post-war and some were hidden deliberately because they contained truths that no one, neither allies nor the French, nor the Germans themselves, did not want to see revealed.
Ernst Fulker’s notebooks were part of these documents disappeared. Officially, they never existed. But envingat years after the discovery of the cellar sealed, an antique dealer in Munich put sale of a lot of historical documents from the Second World War. Among them, three black hardcover notebooks handwritten in German with detailed annotations on medical experiments carried out between 1943 and 1944.
The buyer was a French historian named Laurent Morau, specialized in war crimes. When he started to read, he realized that he was holding something explosive thing in his hands. The notebooks contained records meticulous, dates, code name, description of procedure and results. Vulker noted everything with a coldness clinic which made reading even more disturbing. Subject 7.
Female sex, estimated age 28 years, experience. Immersion in water at 4°C. Duration 22 minutes. Result: loss of consciousness at 18 minutes. Final body temperature 30° C. Subject died during the night. Page after page, the same annotations repeated themselves: numbers, data, deaths, as if it were a statistic of agricultural research and not of torture register.
Morau spent weeks locked in his office, reading and rereading each page. He took notes, he compared the dates with other historical documents. He looked for inconsistencies, but everything seemed authentic. The writing was constant, the medical vocabulary was precise, the anatomical details were accurate and the more disturbing, the tone.
Fulker didn’t write like a criminal trying to hide his actions. He wrote like a researcher documenting a scientific experiment. There is no had no trace of guilt, no euphemism, no attempt to moral justification, only facts, observations, conclusions. But the most shocking were not the experiences themselves, it was naturalness with which they were described.
Vulker did not show guilt. He didn’t use euphemisms. He simply reported as a scientist who notes the reaction of a chemical substance. And this revealed something terrifying. For him, these women really weren’t human. It was biological material and this dehumanization was not the fruit of hatred or sadism, but of a cold, rational logic, almost bureaucratic.
It was commonplace evil, like philosopher Anna Harent would describe it years later analyzing the crimes Nazis. Morau knew he had to check the authenticity of the notebooks before making them public. He told graphology experts who confirmed that the writing was indeed dated from the 1940s. He consulted specialist historians in Vermarthe who recognized the codes and terminologies used.
He sent paper samples to a laboratory in Switzerland which confirmed that the paper and ink matched the materials used in Germany during the war. Everything matched. The notebooks were authentic. Morau became obsessed with notebooks. He spent years of trying to cross information with other documents, seeking to confirm authenticity.
and he found clues. Reports German soldiers mentioned a experimental medical unit in the northern France without giving details. Testimonies from elders soldiers confirmed the existence of interrogation centers where civilian prisoners were detained and human remains found in 1978 corresponded to the descriptions of notebooks.
Everything matched, but it was still missing something crucial, witnesses alive. He searched the archives French military. He recounted associations of former resistance fighters. He placed advertisements in newspapers regional. But for years he received no response. Lots of women who had survived the camp had died in the decades following.
Others had emigrated, changed their name, cut all ties with their past and those that were still in life often preferred to keep the silence because speaking meant to live again and again was too much painful. In 1989, Mora published a advertisement in French newspapers requesting that any person who has been prisoner in German camps in the north of France between 1943 and 1944 makes contact.
He didn’t expect not much but he received three letters, three now elderly women who said they had been in a place that no one would believe. Morau traveled to meet them and what they told confirmed everything. The first was Simone Lefèvre, years old, resident of Lille. She was captured in 1943 in 21 years old, accused of helping members resistance.
She was taken to the old factory and spent 8 months there. When Morau showed him the pages of notebooks, she began to tremble. “I I remember this order,” she said pointing to an annotation. “Remove your clothes and get on your knees. I heard this every day. All days. She told about the vats of water frozen, injections, women who were taken away and never returned.
And then she says something that restaurant. The worst part wasn’t the pain, it was to know that no one cares would care. Simon described how women tried to support each other mutually in cells, how they whispered prayers together in the dark, how she shared the meager bread rations mold that were given to them once per day, how they stood there hand when one of them was taken away, knowing that she would never return maybe not.
These small acts of solidarity was all that remained of humanity in a place designed to take it from them. She also remembered sounds, the noise of boots in the corridors, the squeak metal doors, orders shouted in German, the silence which followed and sometimes very rarely a cry, a cry that stopped abruptly and then nothing more.
This silence was worse than any cry because it meant that someone had stopped struggle, that someone had given up or worse than someone was dead. The second witness was Marguerite Blanc, 75 years old, who lived in a hospice arouant. She was very fragile, but still lucid. She described Vulker like a man who never shouted. He was calm, always calm and it was worse than any scream.
She remembered a German nurse who cried silently while holding a tray surgical instruments. “She was prisoner there as much as we are,” said Marguerite. “my she was too scared to disobey.” Marguerite also recounted a detail which Morau froze. She remembered a young woman, perhaps 18 years old, who had was brought to the unit in March 1944.
She was pregnant, about 5 months. Vulker was fascinated by her. He wanted observe how extreme cold affected the fetus. He subjected her to repeated hypothermia tests. The young woman begged, she cried. She shouted that she would bear the child until the end, that she would do everything that he wanted after, but that he spares the baby. Felker did not respond.
He simply noted. Two weeks later, she made a miscarriage. The fetus was removed and preserved in a jar of formalin and young woman died of hemorrhage three days later. Marguerite remembered his face, but not his name. Nobody knew his name. The third was Hélène Girard, 69 years old, who had emigrated to Canada after the war.
She had never spoken about her experience, not even to one’s own family. I tried to forget,” she told Morau. But these things are not forgotten not. They just stay buried and when someone touches it, they come back as if it were yesterday. She confirmed the existence of the cellar. We knew there were bodies below. We smelled it. But we never talked about it because speaking meant admitting that we would be next.
Helene was literature professor before war. She was arrested for refusing to remove books banned from the sound library school. She remembered reciting Baudler’s poems in his head during the experiments. It was his way to escape, to remain human, to remember that there was something something beyond this pain. She says in Morau that even now, almost 50 years later she couldn’t read Baudau without trembling.
With his testimonies, Morau succeeds in building a complete story. He passed ten more years of research, interview former German soldiers, to search for records in military archives. And finally, in 1999, he published a book entitled The Silence women from Pas de Calais. The book caused an immense impact. For the first time, the history of the unit medical field 19 was told publicly and the reaction was shock.
Not because people didn’t know not that the Nazis had committed atrocities, this was already known. But because this specific story had been completely erased, these women had died without a name, without register, without memory. And if it wasn’t for these notebooks found by chance, it would never have existed.
The book was translated into several languages. He was debated in universities. Of documentaries were produced, exhibitions were organized and suddenly these forgotten women began to find their name. Families contacted Moraux, saying that their grandmother, their aunt, their mother had disappeared during the war and was not never came back.
Some were finally able put a name to a number. Some were finally able to mourn someone they had lost without ever knowing how. But there was still one unanswered question. What happened to Fulker? He disappeared after the evacuation of the unit in 1944. There is no arrest record, of judgment, of death. Some speculate that he fled to South America like other Nazi criminals.
Others believe he assumed a new identity and lived quietly in West Germany until his death old age. But the truth is what no one knows and this impunity can be as terrifying as the crimes themselves. Morau spent years look for traces of Vulker. He consulted lists of trials of Nuremberg. He searched the archives of Mossade who had hunted down Nazis fugitives.
He told investigators in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay. But he found nothing. Vulker had evaporated as if it had never existed and somewhere perhaps he lived until an advanced and peaceful age without never be confronted with what he had done, without ever paying, without ever answer. But the story doesn’t end not there because decades later Later, one of the survivors did something something that would change everything.
She decided to come back. Spring 2003. Simone Le Fèvre was one year old. She had passed sixty years trying to forget this place, but she couldn’t do it. The images came back in his dreams. The voices reasoned when she was alone. And the more time passed, the more she felt she had to go back. Not for revenge, not for face ghosts, but to close a cycle that had never closed.
For years she had pushed back this idea. She said to herself that it was useless, that it wouldn’t change anything, that the dead were dead and that stirring up the past would only reopen injuries. But something in she refused to let go. It was like an unpaid debt, a promise not held.
She had survived so much others don’t. And she felt that she owed them something, that she had to testify, that she had to come back where it all happened and say “I remember. You existed, you are not forgotten.” She invited Morau to accompany him. He accepted and together on a cold April morning, they traveled to the Pas de Calais, on the land where once stood the old textile factory.
The parking lot built in the 80s was still there. The asphalt was cracking. A few empty seats, no plaque, no memorial, no sign that he something terrible had happened here. Simon remained motionless in the middle of the parking lot, looking around, trying to recognize something. “It was here,” she said. “I’m sure of it. The journey to this place had been difficult for her.
On the train, she remained silent, looking out the window, hands clenched on its knees. Mora had not tried to speak. He knew that certain things could not be expressed with words. When they arrived at the nearest station, she hesitated before going down. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she whispered, but she still came down because she knew she had to do.
Morau had brought photos old ones, maps, documents. He managed to identify the exact location where was the entrance to the factory. And Simon walked there slowly leaning on a cane. When she arrived at the place, she knelt down and she started to cry. It wasn’t recent pain, it was pain old, kept, compressed for decades.
And now she could finally let her out. His hands trembled, his body bent under the weight of memories. She touched the asphalt as if she could smell through the layers of concrete and time the land where so many women had been buried. She closed her eyes and saw them. Elise, Marguerite, Anne, Claire, Isabelle, Jeanne, faces blurs, muffled voices, ghosts who never left her side.
They don’t didn’t deserve this, she said between the sobs. None of us deserved it, but they even less, because at at least I survived. She doesn’t. She stood there for almost an hour silence, just breathing as if she was saying goodbye. And then she did something unexpected. She took out of his bag a small list of names.
Names that she had memorized over the years, women she had known in this place. women who never came back and she began to read the names aloud by one: Élise, Marguerite, Anne, Claire, Isabelle, Jeanne. It was names without surnames, without dates, faceless, but she remembered and now at last they were spoken out loud, in the same place where they had been silenced.
Morau recorded everything. He filmed with a small camera he had brought. He knew this moment was historic, not just for Simon, but for all these women whose names were being recited. It was an act of resurrection, an act of resistance against oblivion and he knew he had to preserve it. After reading all names, Simon took out a small envelope from his bag.
Inside there was a lock of hair. His own hair cut in 1943 when she was arrival at the unit. She had kept them for six years. She didn’t know why. Perhaps as proof, perhaps as a link with the young woman that she had been. Maybe just because she couldn’t get away separate. But now she knew what what she had to do.
She buried the strand of hair in a small crack asphalt. “You are finally free”, she whispered. “E me too.” Morau used this material to put pressure on the French authorities in order to create a memorial. It took bureaucracy, discussion, budget, resistance from some who did not want not bring up the past.
But Morau did not let go not. He wrote articles, he gave lectures, he recounted politicians, he mobilized survivor associations. And finally in 2008, a small plate of bronze was inaugurated on the site. She says: “Here, between 1943 and 1944, dozens of French women were tortured and killed under the command Nazi occupation forces.
That their name, even if forgotten, never be deleted.” The inauguration of the memorial was a moment full of emotions. Of dozens of people were present. Families of victims, historians, students, journalists and Simone. She was sitting in the front row, very upright despite his age, his eyes fixed on the plate.
When the mayor of the town removed the veil that covered her, she closed your eyes and whispered something that no one heard. But Morau, who was next to her, saw her lips move. She said: “Thank you!” After the ceremony, several people approached Simone. Some were descendants of victims who disappeared during the war. Others were just people touched by its history.
A young woman, maybe 25, shook his hand hand and said: “My grandmother has disappeared in 1943. Her name was Claire.” Claire du Bois. I don’t know if she was here, but thanks for remembering. Simon squeezed his hand back. Claire, she repeated. Yes, I knew one Claire. She even sang in darkness, she sang. The young woman started to cry and Simon hugged.
Simon died in 2011 at 29 years old. But before dying, she gave one last interview. She said “I don’t want people to have pity me. I want them understand what happened. Because that it was not just about us. It was about what’s happening when humanity is thrown to the trash, when ordinary people accept orders without question.
When silence becomes complicity and I need you to know, it can reproduce at any time, no matter where, if we are not vigilant. This interview was broadcast on French television. She touched million people. Schools began to invite morals to talk about the history of unit 19. school textbooks were updated to include this story.
And slowly, very slowly, these women forgotten began to find their place in the collective memory. But the story doesn’t end with Simone. In 2015, another survivor manifested. Her name was Louise Martin. She was 91 years old and lived in a small village in Brittany. She had read Morau’s book and seen the interview with Simon and she decided that she too had to speak.
She contacted Morau and told him his story. She had been prisoner in the unit for six months in she had survived, but she had not never spoken. Never, not even to his husband, deceased 20 years ago, not even her children, not even to herself really. Louise had buried her memories so deeply that she had almost managed to forget them. Almost.
But he came back in nightmares, in moments of silence, in smells that reminded him of disinfectant. in sounds that recalled the boots in the corridors. And now, at 91, she knew she didn’t have much left time. If she didn’t speak now she would never speak and his women would remain forgotten. She told Morau details that he had never heard before.
She remembered a German nurse who had slipped him a piece of bread in the hand in secret late in the night. She remembered a woman who had sung a lullaby before die. She remembered the face of Vulker, always calm, always impassive, as if he were watching insects under a microscope. And she remembered the sentence, this sentence “Take off your clothes and get down to knee.
” She still heard it, even now, even years later. Morau recorded everything and added the Louise’s testimony to the second edition of his book published in 2016. This edition also contained letters from victims’ families, photos found, documents newly discovered. The book became even more complete, even more powerful and he continued to touch people all over the world.
Today, the history of the medical unit campaign 19 is taught in some French schools within the framework of program on war crimes, but it still remains little known and many of victims remain unnamed. There exists historian projects trying to identify more women by crossing lists of the missing with the records found.
But it’s a slow work because at the time these women did not count and erase someone from history is easy. The bringing back is almost impossible. Of history students at the University of Lille have created a digital project called the forgotten voices of the footsteps Calais. He collects testimonies, scan documents, create archives accessible online.
They have contacted families all over France, in Belgium, Switzerland. They found letters written by fair women before their arrest, photos of marriage, birth certificates, little fragments of a life that existed before the horror. One of his students, Thomas Lerou, devoted his doctoral thesis in unit 19. He passed five years doing research in military archives in Germany, France, Poland.
He questioned descendants of German soldiers. He looked for traces of Fker. He doesn’t never found. But he found something else thing. He found evidence that the unit 19 was not an isolated case, that it there were other similar places, other hidden laboratories, other missing women and that the scale of these crimes were much greater than this that we had imagined.
But the book of Morau continues to be read. The letters of Greta Hoffman, the German nurse, were published and the notebooks Felker are archived at the Museum of resistance in Paris available for consultation. These are testimonies, reminders, open scars that cannot be ignored. In 2019, a special ceremony was organized at memorial.
Candles were lit, names were read and a news plaque was added with the names of 23 women who had been identified thanks to to the work of historians. 23 names among dozens. But it was a start. It was a victory against oblivion and the phrase that was repeated on the walls, in newspapers, in memories, “Take off your clothes and get down to knees” is no longer just an order.
It is a silent cry, a cry that has passed through decades, which has been buried, forgotten, but who reasons now because these women had no voice. But today, we have it. And if we don’t tell not their stories, who will tell them? If we don’t remember their name, who will remember it? And if we don’t let’s not fight so that this doesn’t happen never reproduce, who will fight? The truth is hard, it is brutal, it is uncomfortable, but it is necessary because forgetting is the second death and these women are already
died once. We cannot let it die again. There is a few years, a primary school Lille adopted the name Élise Rousseau, one of the identified victims of unit 19. Each year, students organize a ceremony commemoration. They read poems, they plant flowers, they learn her story and thus Élise continues to live not like a number, not like a nameless victim, but like a person, like a teacher who loved poetry, like a woman who existed, who had dreams, who was loved, who deserves to be remembered.
It’s maybe this is finally the real one victory against horror. Not the revenge, not punishment of the guilty who escaped justice, but the memory, the preservation of its names, the transmission of its stories, the recognition that each victim was a person with a life, an identity, a dignity that could not be erased, even by the worst barbarity.
Simone understood it, Louise had it understood and now thousands others understand it too. These women are no longer forgotten. They are present in books, in memorials, in classrooms, in the hearts of those who heard their stories and who chose not to don’t forget. Because in the end, it’s our choice.
To forget or to remember, stay silent or speak, accept injustice or fighting for the truth. And every time we choose to remember, every time we let’s choose to tell these stories, we give back to these women a little of the dignity that was stolen from them. We let’s say: “You existed, you counted and you will never be forgotten.
” And this is how the history of the unit field medical 19 continues to live not as a relic of past, but as a warning for the present. not like a story closed, but as a reminder that the vigilance is eternal, that humanity is fragile and that we all must, each of us, make the choice to protect this humanity today, tomorrow, always.
I told this story because it doesn’t belong to me more. She belongs to the one we have wanted to erase, from the women that the world has chose to forget, but whose voices still reason in silence. For years what happened there remained buried under the snow and the shame. But every time someone listen, comment or share, part of them wakes up.
A memory, a name, a breath that refuses to die. If this story touched you, don’t let not silence win. Once again, write something in the comments, even a single word. A gesture simple but full of meaning. A word for her, for every missing woman without justice, for every life reduced to one number.
Because by writing, by speaking, you tell the world that they existed, that they still count. Subscribe to this channel, no for me, but for her, because every new story told here is an act of resistance against oblivion. It is a way of reminding us that evil does not begin with screaming, but with silence. Every voice that joined to ours rekindles a light in the night, a flame that nothing remains cannot turn off.
That these voices continue to live in schools, in homes, in conversations for that no one ever relives this that they endured. The story of humanity is made of choices. Some chose to remain silent, others to obey and a few chose to memory. Be of that. Do not divert not the look. Don’t let fear erase the truth. Share this history.
Let her travel, let her reaches other hearts, other consciousness. Because as long as he remains someone to remember, as long as he there will be someone left to tell, the darkness will never win completely. Thanks for listening until the end. Thank you for being there, to feel, to give importance to which should never be forgotten.
Today, more than ever, the world has need people who remember because that forgetting is a second death.
