“God no longer protects you”: Shocking atrocities committed by German soldiers against nuns.

He chose us for our purity, not for our strength, not for information, not for our benefit, for our purity, as if we were rare trophies in a war that devoured everything on his passage. My name is Jeanne Vain. I am 86 years old and have spent more than six decades of trying to erase from my memory what the German soldiers made the nuns prisoner during the Second World War.

I never succeeded. The memory is engraved in my flesh, in the smells, in the sounds that reason again. I was young, I was 24 years old. I wore my outfit with pride and I I believed that my faith would be enough to get through any darkness. I was deeply mistaken. In this prison camp in the north of France, I learned that there are violence that leaves no mark visible, but which destroy everything believe to be.

I saw sisters lose their voice before losing their body. I have seen holy women reduced to perverted objects of desire, treated like experiments, like toys reserved for bored officers. and I survived. I was the only one fifteen to return. I carried this burden alone all my life. But now, before dying, I decided to speak because what they have us fact cannot be forgotten.

Because when we erase these stories, the violence finds space to return. It was the end of October 1943 and autumn arrived cold and wet in the interior of France, near Clermontferrand, where our convent is found hidden between hills covered in mists and dense forests who seemed to protect us from the world exterior. We lived there for years in 15 nuns of the order of Notre-Dame de Mercy, devoted to the care of forgotten, orphaned children of war, abandoned elderly people by families who had fled to south, sick people that no one wanted

no longer touched out of fear or poverty. We did not have weapons, we did not let’s not hide any resistance fighters. We don’t do not transmit secret messages. We were just women who prayed, who worked and who believed that religious neutrality would make us invisible to the eyes of the occupation Nazi. pure naivety.

The war was devastating already Europe for 4 years. But in this mountainous region, we lived still a kind of fragile illusion, as if the prayers created a invisible shield around our walls ancient stone. I woke up every day before dawn. I went down the narrow stairs to the chapel icy where the smell in old is mixed with the mold on the walls.

And there, kneeling on the worn wooden bench, I asked for divine protection for all of us. I believed that God saw, that our dedication would be rewarded. I thought the clothes we wore made us untouchable. But the truth is that he marked, he distinguished us, he transformed us into something rare and therefore desirable for men who had lost everything concept of humanity.

On the morning of October, I heard the noise of military trucks which went up the narrow road leading to the convent. It was a deep noise, mechanics that broke the silence morning like a blade. I was in the kitchen preparing bread for the children when Sister Marguerite came running. The pale face, eyes wide with terror.

She didn’t need to say a word. The noise grew, got closer and we all knew what that meant. We gave up everything. We ran upstairs where found the children’s dormitories and we tried to hide them in the cupboards, under the beds behind the heavy curtains that smelled of the month and naftaline. But there was no time.

The main door was smashed in a crash that made shake the whole building and in a few seconds they were inside. Of German soldiers from Vermarthe, mostly young. Some didn’t even have a full beard, but they wore uniforms impeccable and held their rifle like we hold work tools. He shouted orders in German, a a language that none of us mastered completely.

But the tone was clear, universal. It was the language of institutionalized violence. We all went down to the large room, the fifteen nuns, and we were lined up against the wall of cold stone, while an officer, older, with graying hair and meticulous looks, walked slowly in front of us observing each face like inspecting livestock.

He got stopped in front of me, tilted slightly head and said something German to the soldier next to him. The soldier laughed. It was a short, dry laugh, devoid of humanity. And at this moment, without yet completely understanding what what was happening, I felt for the first time in my life what it was like to be seen not as a person, but as an object.

We all have were arrested, without formal accusation, without judgment, without right to contact whoever it is. They pushed us in military trucks covered with dirty tarpaulins that completely blocked daylight. And we traveled for hours under conditions that we never imagined possible. The smell was unbearable, a mixture of sweat, fear, die and of something indefinable that I later identified as the collective despair.

We were pressed against each other others, tossed violently at each hole in the road, trying to pray to low voice, but the vibration of the engine choked everything. Sister Cécile, the oldest among us, was 62 years old and suffered from problems cardiac. She started to feel hurt during the journey.

She was breathing with difficulty, she was sweating cold. But when we asked for water to the soldiers who escorted us, they laughed again. This laugh, I I will never forget that laugh. It was not not explosive cruelty, it was automated bureaucratic cruelty, as if our pain was a detail unimportant in a process more wide that they executed without question.

We arrived at the camp prisoners late in the afternoon. It was an improvised military installation in the north of France, near the Belgian border, surrounded by barbelets and of guai towers where soldiers armed with machine guns monitored each movement. It was not an extermination camp like what we discovered years later.

It was something different, less known, less documented. It was a center of detention for prisoners considered as special. where violence was not not industrialized but personalized. They immediately separated us from common prisoners. We have been taken to an isolated hut back of the complex, far from others buildings, hidden behind a row trees that seemed to have been planted purposely to block the view.

To inside, the smell was that of wood wet, clay and some chemical thing that stung the eyes. There were fifteen rusty iron beds, thin mattresses, stained with urine and old blood, a jump in the corner that served as collective toilets, no windows, only one metal door locked from the outside. And there, in this almost total darkness, while that we are trying to understand what was happening to us, we heard for the first time what was going to happen repeat every night during following months. The heavy footsteps that

were approaching, the key turning in the lock, the door that opened slowly and against the weak light of corridor, the silhouette of an officer German who watched us all like we choose something in a showcase. He entered slowly, closed the door behind him and said in French broken but understandable as we now had to understand our new function, that we were not no longer nuns, than God was not there, that purity was some something that only existed as long as it allowed.

And then he chose, he pointed out Sister Marie-Thérèse, the youngest among us, 19 years old, blonde hair that had never been cut, an angelic face which seemed carved to represent holiness. She was dragged outside for that she screamed, struggled, implored mercy. We tried to hold her back, but other soldiers came in and told us pushed against the walls with the butts of their rifles.

The door was closed and we stayed there in the black to hear the cries that came from a nearby place, screams that started strong, desperate and who diminished to sobs suffocated. Then silence. If you’ve made it this far, let a like on this video and in the comments, tell us where you look. Stories like those of Jeanne must be remembered.

They must be shared because when we forget, we open space so that violence returns and because that certain truths, too painful as they may be, they cannot be buried. Marie-Thérèse returned hours later. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t cry. She walked to her bed, lay down on the side facing the wall and remained motionless until daybreak.

His body was there, but something in her had been erased. I learned that night that he there are deaths that occur without that the heart stops beating. And this was only the beginning because what they did to him, they repeated it with us all. Night after night. They chose one, sometimes two. They took away, they brought back.

And we, who spent our whole lives praying for purity, for dedication divine, for the love of our neighbor, we we are seen transformed into experience of perverted pleasure for men who used our faith against us. The outfit we wore, the symbol that we represent, all this is become part of the ritual of humiliation. He wanted to break the sacred.

He wanted prove that nothing was untouchable, that not even God could protect us there. I remember the first time I understood that we were not ordinary prisoners, that our condition of nun placed us in a particular category, some something precious and contemptible times. It was during the second week of captivity, an evening when the rain drummed against the tin roof wavy barracks creating noise dull and monotonous which almost covered all other sounds.

An officer superior had entered accompanied by three younger soldiers who followed like apprentices observing a master at work. He wore an impeccable uniform, polished boots that shined even in the darkness and these gestures were slow, calculated as if he savored every moment of absolute power that he exercised on us.

He stopped in the center of the room to light a cigarette whose acrid smoke mingled with the smell of moldy and fear that already permeated the air. And he started talking French with a heavy accent but understandable. He explained to us that our presence in this camp was not by chance, that we had been selected precisely because we were nuns, because we represented something pure in a world in decay and that this purity had to be tested, proven, destroyed if necessary.

He said the war changed rules, which God himself seemed to have abandoned Europe and if God had given up, so we belonged now to those who have the power to decide our fate. These words fell like stones into a well bottomless, reasoning in silence terrified that we were all holding on. And as he spoke, his gaze slowly passed through each of us, lingering on faces, bodies hidden under torn clothes, like if he was evaluating a commodity.

That night they took three of us at the same time. Sister Bernadette who was 32 years old and came from a peasant family from Brittany, sister Élise, 26 years old, former teacher who had joined the order after the death of her fiancé in the first months of war. and me, they took us out in the night cold and damp, led us to through a maze of barracks dimly lit by lamps oil that cast shadows caves on the warped wooden walls up to a larger building, more solid which apparently served as officers’ quarters. Inside,

it was surprisingly warm, almost stifling, a violent contrast with the bitter cold from outside. There was a wood pile in a corner, furniture stolen from French houses, a dark red velvet sofa that swears with the rest of the military decor, wine bottles lined up on a shelf and on the wall a portrait of fury who observed us with his gaze and fanatic.

Four officers were there, sitting around a table where people were hanging out playing cards, half worms empty, overflowing ashtrays. They looked at us entered as we look an expected spectacle. And one of them, one man in his forties with scars on the face and huge hands, slowly got up and walked towards me smiling. That smile was worse than anything what a verbal threat.

It was a smile of owner, of someone who knows he can do absolutely this that he wants without consequence. He reached out his hand, to touch my face, to run his rough fingers across it along my cheek and whisper something thing in German that I don’t have understood but whose tone was sufficiently clear.

What happened then I only told it once times in my life to a psychiatrist American military in 1946, just after my liberation. And even to him, I didn’t couldn’t say everything. There are words that do not exist to describe certain experiences. There is violence which escape language because they precisely destroy the ability to to name, to structure, to give meaning.

What I can say is that I have learned that night that the body can survive things that mind refuses to accept, that the soul can fragment into pieces to protect this that remains of oneself and that prayer sometimes becomes a form of madness necessary to avoid sinking completely. I recited the Our Father over and over in my head, eyes closed so tight that I saw stars dancing in the inner darkness of my eyelids and I imagined myself elsewhere in the convent chapel kneeling in front the hotel, smelling of the child

Gregorian field which reasoned against the stone vaults. But the reality always came back brutal, inevitable, in the form of physical pain, weight on the body, of alcoholic breath against the face, of muffled laughter other officers who observed smoking and drinking as if they were witnessing banal entertainment.

When they were done with me, they started with Bernadette then Élise. We stayed there until dawn and when they finally took us back to barracks, the sun was already rising, pale and cold, illuminating a world that does not looked more like the one I had known. The following days were turned into a routine nightmarish where time lost everything sense, where nights and days confused in an infinite succession of methodical humiliation.

We have learned to recognize signals, times when they would come, the guys of officers who preferred this or that among us. Some liked the most young, others older. Some wanted resistance to have the excuse to hit. Others preferred total submission which gave them the illusion of consent. There was twisted logic to everything this, an invisible hierarchy that we we finally understood to try to survive.

Sister Marguerite who had 40 years old and a severe face marked by years of hard work has become the target of a particularly captain sadist who seemed to enjoy breaking this which he perceived as pride. He made her come every night, sometimes just to watch her undress and complaining over and over again for hours, forcing her to recite prayers while he was making fun of her, he spat on her, hit her with a belt when she hesitated.

Daisy lasted three weeks before losing completely the reason. One morning we found her squatting in a corner of the barracks, naked, swinging back and forth muttering fragments of Latin which do not no longer formed any coherent sentences. She no longer recognized us, responded more to our attempts to comfort and a few days later, they took him away.

We never have it reviewed. We learned from a guard who spoke a little French that she had been transferred to an asylum military psychiatric somewhere in Germany. Dead or alive, we we never knew. Dehumanization was progressive, methodical, almost scientific in its application. He doesn’t gave us almost nothing to eat, just enough to keep us alive, but in a constant state of weakness which made all physical resistance impossible.

hard black bread stone, a clear soup where floated there sometimes pieces of rotten vegetables, murky water which gave us stomach cramps. We all have lost a lot of weight in just a few weeks. Our clothes become too big hung on our bodies and masses. Our faces dug took on the appearance skulls covered with thin skins and gray.

But the worst wasn’t the end physical, it was destruction systematic of our identity, of everything what defined us before. He us prohibited praying together, sing, to comfort us mutually. When he surprised us pray the rosary or hold our hands hand in the darkness, he separated us, hit us, deprived us of the meager the next day’s food ration.

The objective was clear: to break us, no only physically but spiritually, tear away this faith which was our last dignity, our last refuge. And for some of us, they succeeded. Sister Cécile, the oldest, died in December, officially from pneumonia, but in reality of despair, of this form particular form of death where the body ceases simply to struggle because the mind has already given up.

She passed away one night during her sleep and the next morning they have threw his body in a false commune without ceremony, without prayer, as one throws away trash. The winter of 1943 was longest and coldest I have never known, not only because temperatures dropping well below zero, transforming our barracks in the freezer where we would be against each other to not to die of cold during the night, but mostly because of this feeling that time itself had stopped, that we were trapped in a loop hellish that would never end.

The days were all the same gray, endless, rhythmic only by hunger, fear and nocturnal visits which continued without release. Some officers became regulars, developed preferences, always demanded the even among us as we order our favorite dish in a restaurant. This regularity made things easier somehow even more unbearable because it transformed horror in routine, in banality, in something expected and therefore inevitable.

I remember a young lieutenant, maybe years, blond, eye, blue, who could have passed for the incarnation perfect Arian propaganda and which chose me almost every week. He never spoke, never looked at me never in the eyes, accomplished this that he came to do with efficiency mechanic then left immediately as if he were performing a task administrative.

This coldness was somehow more terrifying than open cruelty, because it revealed how far we were become non-persons, objects functional without interiority, without soul. But there were also rare moments and precious where something human survived despite everything. Sister Anne-Marie, who was 28 years old and came from a family bourgeois from Lyon, had succeeded in hide a very small wooden crucifi which she kept sewn into the hem of his clothes.

Every night, after the guards had made their last round and that we were certain to be alone, she delicately took it out and we love it from hand to hand in darkness, each holding him a few seconds, hugging him to her chest, murmuring a silent prayer. This simple gesture, this little piece of wood carved that was worthless materially became our anchor, our proof that we still existed as a spiritual being, that whatever something in us resisted despite everything.

One evening in January 1944, a guard discovered the crucifi during an excavation surprise. They returned everything barracks, tore up the mattresses, videos our meager possessions and have ended up finding this tiny object that Anne-Marie was desperately trying to conceal in his closed hand. The guard tore it off roughly, looked at it with a mixture of disgust and curiosity, then threw it on the ground and crushed under his boot until he Only fragments of wood remain.

Then he hit Anne-Marie with a such violence that she lost two teeth and remained unconscious for several hours. When she awake, the first word she says pronounced was pardon. And this forgiveness was addressed not to his executioners, but to us, as if she felt guilty for endangering our last link with God.

The weeks passed and we were less and less numerous. Sister Hélène, 35 years old, tried to escape in February, enjoying a moment of confusion during a transfer of prisoners. She ran through the camp barefoot in the snow, screaming prayers Latin and almost reached the fence before a machine gun burst the mowing.

I saw him fall, his body projected forward by the impact of balls. Bright red blood spilling on the pristine snow, creating an image of a horrible beauty that I have never could erase from my memory. They left his body there for three days as a warning and we had to pass by every time we went out to do chores. Sister Gabrielle, the quietest among us, the one who never cried even during the worst tortures, hanged in March with a piece of rope that she had patiently braided from of Phils torn from his coat.

We discovered it in the early morning, hanging from a beam, the face of a waxy pallor them and this time even the guards seemed troubled as if suicide was a form of victory for us. A choice that he couldn’t control. Spring 1944 made subtle changes but perceptible. Allied bombings were becoming more frequent.

We heard the sirens, the explosions distant that made the ground tremble and we perceived in the attitude of keep a growing nervousness, a fear that he could no longer hide completely. The officers came less often and when they came, they were more brutal, more urgent like if they knew their time was counted and wanted to extract until the last drop of power before everything collapses.

In June 1944, after the landing ally in Normandy, of which we have no learned of the existence that several weeks later the camp entered in a chaotic phase where the strict military organization has started to disintegrate. The guards were fewer and fewer. Many had been sent to the front and those who remained seemed lost, unsure of what to do with us.

Some prisoners began to be transferred eastwards, towards Germany, under conditions still more terrible, crammed into trains of merchandise without food or water. We, the few nuns who remained, there were only six of us left that time we were left in the barracks with surveillance minimal. It was both a blessing and new anguish, because we did not know if this abandonment relative meant he would forget us or if he was planning something worse before leaving.

One evening in August, an SS officer we never seen before arrived to camp with a small unit. He was different from the others, more cold, more methodical, with this look emptiness characteristic of those who have participated in the worst atrocities and for who death has become a simple administrative formality.

He gathered all the prisoners remaining, lined us up in the courtyard central and started a selection. Man on one side, woman on the other, then subdivision by age, by state of health, by potential utility. The nuns were set aside once again always this special category which followed us like a curse. The SS officer approached us consult a register and announced that we would be transferred the next day to an unspecified destination.

That night was the longest of my life because we knew everything mean these mysterious transfers. We had heard the rumors about extermination camps, on the rooms gas disguised as a shower, on the false communes where the bodies were burned by the thousands. The next morning never came, at least not like planned.

Around 4 o’clock, when it was dark still black and thick, only darkness seemed to weigh on us like a physical presence, explosions shook the camp with incredible violence. The Allies bombarded the area, targeting probably the infrastructure German military, but touching also the prison camp in their relentless progress towards liberation.

The chaos was instantaneous and total, a sudden collapse of military order who held us captive. The barracks collapsed under the direct impacts. Entire structures disintegrate in seconds in sheaves of shattered wood and twisted metal. Fires broke out everywhere, creating an orange light and dancing that transformed the night into a surrealist painting of hell.

And the guards were running in all directions shouting contradictory orders, their legendary discipline completely evaporated in the face of the threat coming from the sky. In the middle of this apocalypse where the earth trembled under our feet every time new explosion, where the air itself seemed to burn our lungs, prisoners tried to flee, to hide, to survive these few minutes that separated life from dead.

Our barracks were hit by a indirect shot, probably a missed target his main target and who fell to just a few meters from our wooden prison. The shock wave was so powerful that I felt my tymans explode. A sharp whistle invaded my head and didn’t leave me for weeks. Part of the roof was collapsed in a crash of broken wood and twisted metal sheets which tore everything in its path, the old beams cracking like giant waters beneath the pressure.

The dust and smoke immediately invaded the space, we blinding, suffocating us, transforming our breathing in a struggle desperate to even suck only a little air that is not saturated of particles. In total confusion, while we coughed and fumbled for our companions in the darkness become even more opaque, the door which held prisoner was blown away by the shock wave, torn from its arms as if she were just a piece of cardboard.

We were free, but free in a hell of fire and death where every second could be the last, where freedom itself seemed to be than a cruel illusion before final annihilation. Sister Louise who was with me since start of this ordeal, which had shared every moment of terror and of humiliation, grabbed my hand with it a surprising strength for someone in his state of exhaustion and created me something I haven’t heard cause of the ringing in my ears.

But I understood, seeing his arm point north she wanted we ran towards the forest which bordered the camp. We ran, barefoot on the ground which alternated between icy mud and shards of glass and metal, stumbling over debris, bodies of undifferentiated soldiers and prisoners in death, bomb craters still smoking which exhaled heat intense when we passed too close.

My heart was beating so hard that I had felt like it was going to explode out from my chest. My lungs were burning as if I were inhaling pure fire. But the fear, this primitive fear of survival pushed us forward. Behind us, the camp burned in a destructive symphony, illuminating the night sky with an orange glow and red that looked like the paintings medieval paintings representing hell.

And we heard the screams, the explosions continuous, the crackle of ammunition which exploded in warehouses, creating an apocalypse background sound that seemed like it would never stop. We have reached the edge of the forest just when a new series of explosions ravaged what remained of the camp. The trees have us welcomed into their darkness protective, their branches forming a natural roof above our heads which hid from us planes which continued their work of destruction.

We sank into the undergrowth, running without looking back despite the exhaustion that was beginning to weigh on our legs like lead melted, guided only by the instinct of put as much distance as possible between us and this cursed place. The branches scratched our faces and the arms. The brambles tore what remained of our clothes.

The roots we tripped in the dark almost total. But we continue, driven by this fierce desire, to survive after enduring so much of horror. We ran during this which seemed like hours to me. Good that it was probably only a few tens of minutes until that our legs literally cannot no longer carry us and we collapses in a small clearing where the light of the moon shines through faintly through the foliage.

We we stayed there lying on the ground wet and cold, our bodies trembling with uncontrollable way. Not only to because of the cold, but because of the shock, the adrenaline that was starting to take over dissipate and leave room for realization of what had just happened pass. We were free after months of captivity, humiliation, torture psychological and physical, we were free.

But this freedom did not bring joy that one could have imagined. She brought fear, uncertainty, acute awareness that there were two of us women alone, weakened, without resources, in a territory still largely controlled by the Germans, without knowing where to go or who could help us. Louise stood up first, his emaciated face lit by the faint moonlight and she said in a quiet voice that we had to keep moving forward, let us rest too long would be fatal, that the German survivors of the bombing would certainly organize

lobe search patrols for capture escaped prisoners. She was right of course, but our bodies violently protested against the idea of get back in motion. We have walked for days which melted into each other in a fog of exhaustion and hunger. Maybe weeks, I don’t know anymore exactly, because time had wasted all meaning, become an infinite succession sunrise and sunset we watched through the trees.

We carefully avoided the roads, the villages, everything that could shelter German soldiers or French collaborators who would denounce immediately. France was still largely occupied in August 1944 and move across the territory was extremely dangerous. We fed on what the forest offered, bays of which we We weren’t even sure of the edibility but that we ate anyway because the alternative was to die of hunger.

Roots that we let’s tear it up from the ground with our bare hands, mushrooms that made us sometimes sick but allowed us to continue one more day. water stream that we drank directly to the source, praying that it does not is not contaminated. We slept hidden in barns abandoned when we found some, buried in the hay which kept us a little warm and hid us from view or under bridges where the sound of water covered our difficult breathing and our occasional sobs when the The pressure was becoming too great.

At night, nightmares visited us with a relentless regularity. I woke up screaming, thinking he still felt the hands on my body, hear the laughter officers, see the faces of my missing sisters who looked at me with accusing eyes as if I were responsible for their death. Louise woke me up gently, pressed against her despite her own weakness, whispered prayers fragmented which no longer had much of meaning, but whose familiar rhythm brought some comfort.

We don’t we hardly ever talk about what had happened in the camp. It was as if the words themselves had been contaminated by this experience, as if we say out loud what we had lived risked making it again more real, even more permanent in our memories, already saturated with horror. A morning, about two weeks after our escape, as we walked the along a forest path barely Visibly, Louise collapsed.

She didn’t trip, she didn’t slip, she just collapsed as if the invisible threads that held his moving body had been cut suddenly. I knelt next to of her. I tried to pick her up, but she was burning with fever. His body was shaking uncontrollably and his eyes no longer recognized me really. She probably had contracted pneumonia or other infection than his immune system weakened could no longer fight.

I tried to carry her, to drag her, but I was so weak myself that I could only move it a few meters before having to stop at the tent. I found a relatively sheltered place under a large chain whose roots formed a kind of natural niche and I have it installed as best I could, covering his body shivering with leaves dead bodies and branches to keep it safe hot.

I spent three days nearby of her, refusing to abandon him. trying to make her drink, holding her hand while she was delirious, talking to people who didn’t exist more, reliving moments of our captivity in a disjointed flow of words which broke my heart. The third morning, at sunrise, she opened eyes with a sudden clarity that gave me a brief hope.

She told me looked directly and said in a voice surprisingly firm that it would not continue, that his body had reached its limit, but that I had to continue, that I had to survive to to bear witness, so that what was to us arrived not be forgotten. She closed eyes, a slight smile on the lips and she left slowly, her breathing becoming more and more superficial until it stops completely.

I stood there, holding his hand which gradually became cold. Unable to cry because he I had no tears left. Unable to move because I didn’t want to accept that she was gone, that I was now completely alone. I buried his body the best I could could with my bare hands digging into the loose earth of the forest until my nails break and my fingers bleed in a clearing where the sun peeked through the trees and created patterns of light and shadow who were dancing on the ground.

I recited the funeral prayers that I knew still by heart, my voice broken, reasoning strangely in silence of the forest. And I marked the spot with stones arranged in a cross to that maybe one day someone can find her and give her a burial decent. Then I continued alone, now carrying the weight no only of my own survival, but also the promise I had to him made to testify.

The weeks following became a nightmare hallucinatory where I was no longer certain of what was real and what which was the product of my mind which began to fragment under the pressure. I was talking to people who did not exist. I saw soldiers Germans who turned out to be tree shadows. I heard voices who called me but who were only the wind in the leaves.

Hunger was become a constant presence, a dull pain that never left me and my body was losing weight day by day until I look more like one walking skeleton than a human being. My clothes, already in tatters, hung on my body like on a scarecrow. And when I saw my reflection in the water of streams, I do not I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

It is in this status in September4 that I was finally found by French resistance fighters who operated in this forest region. I had reached the limits of my strengths. I was collapsed at the foot of a tree unable to continue, waiting simply the death that seemed to me now the only possible outcome. They found me by chance during a patrol and at first they thought that I was already dead, but one of them noticed that I was still breathing weakly.

They carried me to their hidden camp deep in the forest and there a female doctor who worked with them tried to save me. I was skeletal, covered in sores infected who were suppurating, delirious fever and for several weeks, I oscillated between life and death in medical conditions extremely precarious with little medications and even less of equipment.

The female doctor I never knew about the real name, but who called himself simply Marie, treated me with a remarkable determination, changing my infected thoughts, forcing me to drink, even when I was unconscious, constantly talking during my moments of delirium to keep me clinging to life. When I finally regained consciousness in a stable way, it was already the end September, the war was coming to an end, even if no one knew it yet with certainty.

Hitler was still life, Germany was still fighting, but the front was inexorably approaching. The allies were making progress on all fronts and even in our hiding place forest, we could feel that something fundamental was in changing. The resistance gave me kept with them until the region be released in October by the forces American.

And that’s when I was transferred to a field hospital American who had settled in a recently liberated city. There, for the first time in over a year, I slept in a real bed. I ate some real food. I was treated by doctors who had access to antibiotics and other medications modern people who finally conquered infections that consumed me the interior.

But healing the body was one thing. Healing the mind was another completely different. The nightmares continued even more intense now that I was no longer in a constant state of survival which deleted out of necessity. I woke up screaming every night, terrorizing other patients and nurses who did not understand this that happened to me.

A military psychiatrist American was called a man of a fifty years old on the face caring who spoke French correct and he tried to make me talk of what I had experienced. I tried, I really tried but the words fell stuck in my throat. He refused to come out as if my body itself resisted the verbalization of the horror. I told him fragments, scattered pieces of history, but never the whole thing.

never the details the darkest ones that remained buried deep inside me where no one could reach them. He has diagnose what they called for war neurosis era, a term inadequate to describe the destruction complete psychological that represented what we had experienced. Today, as I near the end of my life, I look back and I asks what’s left of a person after everything was taken from him.

My body still bears the scars, some visible, others invisible, but all as deep. I could never have children, no only because of physical damage suffered, but above all because the idea even intimacy, vulnerability, of touch, terrified me beyond belief any expression. I never knew romantic love, never shared my life with someone, never had this family that so many people consider like normal.

My life has been a lonely existence marked by work, silence and this constant vigilance, this unable to relax completely, even in the most difficult moments safer. But I survived. And this survival, however painful it may be, is a form of resistance. Every day that I lived after the war, every morning I awake, every breath I take taken was a victory against those who wanted to completely erase us.

They took so much, they destroyed so much of what I was, but they didn’t failed to completely annihilate me. A small part of me, tiny but indestructible, continued to exist despite everything. Faith, this central pillar of my life before the war, was never really recovered from the way she existed before.

I can’t anymore believe in a God who intervenes directly, who protects the innocent, which rewards virtue. This God is died for me in this dark barracks where we pray without being heard. But a different form of spirituality has emerged over the years. Something more humble, more earthly, a recognition of the human capacity to both for absolute evil and for extraordinary compassion.

I saw the two extremes, I experienced the most systematic cruelty and I also sometimes known as small gestures of unexpected kindness. A guard who looked away to let us steal a piece of bread, a prisoner who shared his meager ration. A nurse after the war who held my hand during nightmares without posing of questions.

These tiny moments of light in total darkness are what which allowed me to continue. To believe that humanity despite everything was worth something. I often think of my missing sisters, to their face, their voice, their laughter from before. Sister Marie- Thérèse who sang so beautifully during services. Sister Bernadette who told funny stories make orphaned children laugh.

Sister Marguerite who was strict but fair, who taught us discipline and dignity. She deserved to live long, to have full lives, to grow old in peace, surrounded by respect and of love. Instead, they were broken, thrown away, forgotten. Their only crime was to wear clothing that identified as religious, to embody a purity that was disturbing, which had to be defiled to prove that no value was sacred in this world at war.

The years that followed the war saw the emergence of numerous testimonies about the camps concentration, on the gas chambers, on medical experiences, on all the horrors that the Nazi regime had perpetrated. But certain categories of victims remained in the shadows. Their stories deemed too embarrassing, too specific, too disturbing for be integrated into the grand narrative of collective memory.

Women systematically raped, nuns used as objects sexual, prisoners whose suffering was neither industrialized nor documented with precision bureaucracy of other atrocities. We remained low notes of page, anecdotes mentioned briefly then quickly forgotten. This silence was a second violence, a negation of our experience, a message implicit that what had happened to us was not as important.

not too worthy of memory than others suffering. And yet, our history is an integral part of the understanding of what the war, of the way in which power absolute corrupts absolutely, in the way whose dehumanization allows all crimes. By testifying today, if late in life, I hope to contribute even modestly to fill this gap historical, to make visible those which have been erased, to give a voice to those who no longer have the possibility of speak.

There is a question that people ask me often ask when they learn my history. Have I forgiven? This is a complex loaded question moral and religious expectations. We expects a former nun to forgive, that his faith transcends hatred, may mercy prevail revenge. But forgiveness, as I understand it now, is not a button that we press, a simple choice that we make once and for all.

It’s a process, a daily struggle, a balance precarious between the recognition of fundamental humanity, even among executioners, and the absolute refusal to excuse the inexcusable. I don’t forgive actions, ever, because the forgiven would be the diminished, would be suggested that they were acceptable or understandable in their context.

But I learned very slowly and painfully not to let hatred consume the little life that I had left. I learned that to wear hatred forever is allowing to the executioners to continue destroying me decades after the fact. So, I chose as much as possible to focus on survival, on reconstruction, on the transmission of memory rather than revenge.

It’s not forgiveness, it’s self-preservation. When I die soon now, because my body is worn and tired, I will take all this with me pain, all this memory, all these ghosts who accompanied me during more than six decades. But I will let also this testimony, these words recorded, this story told finally without filter or censorship.

I hope that it will be useful for something, that it will perhaps prevent someone part of believing that war is glorious, that the dehumanization of the other is never justifiable, that some people may be treated as less than human without catastrophic moral consequences. History tends to repeat itself when we don’t study it honestly.

When we forget the embarrassing details, when you prefers simple stories to truths complex, my story is not simple. It offers no resolution satisfactory. It doesn’t end by a clear triumph of good over bad. It ends with an old single woman who survived but did not never really healed, which continued to live but never found joy innocent girl she knew before.

It’s an honest ending. And in this honesty lies perhaps the only form of truth that I can offer. War not only creates dead, it also creates survivors broken who bear their wounds invisible to the grave. And these injuries are also part of the real cost conflicts that humanity continues to face trigger with regularity depressing.

My last thought, the one I want leave to those who will listen to this history, it’s a question rather than an answer. How long does it take to a society to completely forget the lessons of the past, to start again dehumanize certain groups, to justify violence in the name of ideology who promise a better world in eliminating those who are deemed unclean, dangerous or simply different.

The answer, if history teaches us something is that it takes a lot less time than you think. A generation, sometimes two. And the same psychological mechanisms that allowed the horrors of the Second War world are starting to operate again under new forms in new contexts. This is why testifying, remember, tell, even when it is painfully difficult, is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.

Because that silence, forgetting, negation are the best allies of those who would like to repeat history. And because every voice that rises to say no, it happened, I have it lived, it was real is a shield fragile but essential against the return of barbarism. The story of Jeanne Vlerin is not does not end with his survival.

She continues in every word you come to hear, in every image that your spirit has created, in every moment of silence that settled while you did the unthinkable. It’s not just the story of a woman who survived hell. It is the story of fifteen women who were chosen, marked, destroyed simply because they represented something that cruel men wanted to desecrate.

It’s the story of thousands of others victims we will never know the names, whose voices have been reduced in silence forever, whose experiences were buried by what post-war society preferred forget rather than face the truth full details of what happened. Jeanne spent sixty-two years carry this burden alone, living in the silence, hiding his scars invisible while the world around of her rebuilding herself and celebrating the victory.

She had no family, she has not known love. She doesn’t have experienced the peace that all deserve after surviving the unimaginable. His only victory was to continue to to breathe, to continue to exist, to refuse to let his tormentors have the last word. And at the end of his life, when her fragile body no longer had strength, but his memory remained intact and implacable, she decided to speak.

Not out of revenge, not out of hatred, but because she knew that the silence would be their last victory. Because she knew that when we let’s erase these stories, when we we prefer comfortable stories to uncomfortable truths, we create space for violence to return in new forms. If this story touched you, if it made you stop and think about what human beings are capable of doing to each other when the civilizational structure collapses, then you have a responsibility.

The responsibility not to forget, to don’t leave stories like those of Jeanne be buried at again in the comfort of oblivion collective. Leave a like on this video, subscribe to the channel and activate it notification bell to receive more stories that need to be told. Stories that challenge, who disturb, who force us to confront the full reality of the human experience in these moments the darkest.

Share this documentary with people including you think they have the strength emotional to listen to it. Because these stories are not easy but they are necessary. In the comments below, tell us where you’re looking from. But more importantly, share your reflections. What is this story awakened in you? What question she raised about human nature, on power, on the fragility of structures that protect us from barbarism? How can we as that company guarantee that we know the full story, not only the ascepted versions which are comfortable to consume? Jane

is no longer here to read your comments. She died in 2010 taking with her so many others stories that never found words. But his courage to speak to us inspire everyone not to turn away look, not to choose the comfort of ignorance rather than the pain of consciousness. Each viewing of this video, every comment, every share is an act of resistance against oblivion.

It is a way of honoring not only Jeanne, but all the victims anonymous people whose stories will not be never told, whose names are lost in the chaos of war, of which the experiments were deliberately deleted because they revealed too disturbing truths about what is happening passes when absolute power systematic dehumanization.

In supporting this channel, you support the memory preservation work historical, to give a voice to the reduced in silence, to illuminate the corners dark history that many would prefer to leave it in the shadows. The last question that Jeanne left reasons beyond his death, demanding that each generation responds to it new.

How long does it take for a society to completely forget the lessons from the past and start repeating same errors under new flags, with news justifications, but with the same destructive logic of dehumanization ? The answer is in our hands. She lies in our choice to remember or forget, confront or to ignore, to pass on these stories to the next generations or let him die with us.

Jeanne has done her part. She spoke when it was easier to stay silent. She testified when the testimony cost to relive each moment of torment. Now it is up to us to guarantee that his testimony was not vain, that the words which have so much cost to pronounce do not get lost in the infinite noise of digital air, but find ears willing to listen and hearts willing to bear forward the sacred weight of memory.

Mr.