“The Next One”: The terrifying sorting of French female prisoners by German soldiers

There is a sound that has haunted my memory for almost seven decades.  It’s not the shouts, it’s not the boots hitting the stone ground, it’s something quieter, sharper .  It’s the dry voice of a man saying “next” in German.  The next one.  I was 19 years old when I first heard that phrase and at that moment, I understood that my name, my history, my dignity, all of that had ceased to exist.

I was now just one among many .  Another young French woman dragged down a narrow corridor where the fate of hundreds of women was decided in a matter of seconds.  My name is Josette Aumont. I was born in 1924 in a small village called Saintom in northern France near the Belgian border.  My father was a blacksmith.  My mother sewed clothes for families in the area.

We led a simple but dignified life.  I grew up helping in the workshop, carrying tools, learning to calculate prices, dreaming of one day opening my own fabric shop.  Dreams of young girls, dreams that the war erased as if blowing out a candle.  In June 1940, when the Germans crossed the border and occupied our region, everything changed.

At first, we tried to continue living.  My father was still striking the hammer on the anvil.  My mother was still sewing, but the tension was rising.  Soldiers were passing through the streets, posters were being pasted on the walls.  Curfew, rationing, fear.  Little by little, our village ceased to belong to us.

I remember the autumn of 1942 as the moment when the occupation became personal. Rumors began circulating about young women being taken away.  At first, we thought it was just stories to scare us.  Then a neighbor disappeared.  Two weeks later, another one.  No one explained anything, no one asked any questions. Silence was safer than the truth.

It was a morning in March 1943 when they knocked on our door.  I was helping my mother hang the laundry in the yard when I heard the sharp sound of boots at the entrance to the house.  Three German soldiers, one of them very young, were holding a list.  He read my name aloud, mispronouncing it, as if I were simply an item in an inventory.

My mother tried to argue.  My father took a step forward.  The oldest soldier raised his hand unhappily and said something in German that I didn’t understand.  But the tone needed no translation.  They gave me five minutes to gather what I could take.  I put on a coat.  I took a small leather bag that my grandmother had given me.

I kissed my mother.  She didn’t cry in front of me, but I felt her hands tremble.  My father remained motionless on the doorstep, his eyes downcast, unable to protect me. And I was taken away.  If you are listening to this story right now, you may be wondering how it was possible for this to happen in broad daylight without anyone reacting?  The answer is simple and terrible.

Fear makes people more terrified than any weapon, and deep down we knew that reacting meant dying.  So many of us simply obeyed. Watching this video and commenting from where you are watching it helps us keep alive the memory of those who were unable to tell their story.  Because this isn’t just my story, it’s the story of thousands of people.

We were taken, myself and six other young girls from my village and neighboring villages, in a military truck covered with a tarpaulin. Inside, there was no bench. We sat on the cold metal floor.  No one was speaking. The truck rolled for hours. I tried to keep track of the time by looking through the slits in the tarpaulin, seeing the light change, but I lost count.

When we finally stopped, it was already dark.  We went down into a sort of courtyard surrounded by a high wall. There was a powerful electric light coming from a pole.  I blinked, trying to adjust to the brightness.  I then saw the building in front of us, a wide, dark brick construction with narrow windows and bars.

It looked like an abandoned school or perhaps an old hospital.  But the smell emanating from it was not that of an ordinary place. It was acidic, chemical, mixed with something I couldn’t identify, but it immediately made me feel nauseous.  We were led inside. The corridor was long and poorly lit.  with wooden doors on each side.

There were other women there, dozens, maybe a hundred.  All young, all frightened.  Some were crying softly, others stared into space.  I tried to look for familiar faces, but I couldn’t find any.  A German woman in a grey uniform, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, made us stop in line.

She didn’t scream, she didn’t need to.  Her voice was cold, mechanical, as if she were reading instructions from a manual.  She said we were going to go through a vale increase, a selection.  She said we had to obey all orders.  She said that any resistance would be severely punished.  And then, with a brief gesture, she indicated that we should wait.

And it was there , in that icy corridor, that I heard it for the first time. In the next one, you can’t yet imagine what happened next, but if you continue listening, you will understand why this story had to be told. Because what I saw in that place forever changed what I believed was possible for human beings.  The first door opened.

A young woman entered.  She was perhaps 20 years old.  Brown hair, pale face.  She was trembling.  Two minutes later, she came out again, her eyes blank, heading towards another door on the left.  Then another girl came in.  Then another one .  DX Dx, die next.  The pace 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 happened behind that door would decide everything.  When my turn came, I felt my legs buckle. A hand pushed me from behind.  I entered a room lit by a lamp hanging from the ceiling.  There were three men, two in military uniform, one in a white coat who wore round glasses and was holding a notebook.

They didn’t look me in the eyes. They looked at me the way one looks at an object that one is evaluating.  The man in the lab coat gestured for me to take off my coat. I obeyed, then my dress.  I hesitated.  He repeated the order louder.  I took off my dress and then my underwear.  I stood naked in front of three men I didn’t know in a cold room that smelled of alcohol and metal.

The man in the lab coat approached.  He examined my teeth like one examines a horse.  He felt my arms, my shoulders, my stomach.  He wrote something down in his notebook.  Then he turned to the two soldiers and said a few words in German.  One of them nodded .  The other one wrote a number on a piece of paper.

I was told to get dressed again .  I was led to another door.  Not the one on the left, not the one on the right, the one at the back.  I didn’t know what that meant yet.  I learned about it later. Within this center, there were three possible destinations.  Three doors, three destinies.  The door on the left led to the medical wing.

That’s where they sent women they considered interesting for their experiments. Years after the war, I heard testimonies from survivors who spoke of forced sterilization, injections, and tests carried out without anesthesia. Some women died, others returned.  Broken, unable to bear children, scarred for life.  The door on the right led to the soldiers’ wing.

Women deemed desirable, young, beautiful, and healthy were sent there to serve the officers and troops.  They were locked in tiny rooms, raped daily, treated like disposable meat.  Many did not survive more than a few months.  Those who survived lost all light in their eyes.  The back door, the one I was sent to, 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 workbenches.  It was brutal, it was exhausting, but it was a chance for survival. Why was I sent there and not somewhere else?  I never knew. Maybe because I was thin, maybe because I had a small scar on my cheek, a souvenir of a childhood fall.

Perhaps simply because on that day they needed labor and not guinea pigs .  Chance, [music] absurdity, horror.  In the factory, there were about fifty of us women, all French, all young. Some came from Paris, others from Brittany, Normandy, the South.  We shared the same fate but we spoke little.  Fatigue rendered us speechless.

The end too.  In the morning, we were woken up at five o’clock.  We were given a piece of black bread and a sort of greyish soup.  [music] Then they took us to the factory.  There, we had to assemble detonators for shells.  A meticulous, dangerous job.  If we made a mistake, the room could explode.

I saw two women lose fingers.  Another one lost her right eye.  In the evening, we were taken back to the barracks.  We were given another soup, sometimes with a piece of potato.  Then we would lie down, huddled together so as not to die of cold.  Some were praying, others were crying.  I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember my mother’s face.

After 6 months, I started losing my hair.  My skin turned grey, my teeth loosened, my body was slowly decomposing and I could feel it. But I held on because, deep down , I refused to give them that victory.  I refused to die in that place.  One day, a new woman arrived at our barracks.  Her name was Marguerite. She came from Lyon.

She was 23 years old.  She was captured while distributing resistance leaflets.  He had gone through the same sorting room as me.  But she had been sent first to the soldiers’ wing .  Then when it became useless, that’s the word they used, we transferred it to the factory. Marguerite hardly spoke.  But one night, as we lay side by side, she whispered to me: “He treats us like cattle, but we are not cattle.

We are women, and one day they will have to.” She died three weeks later. Pneumonia, or perhaps simply exhaustion. They took her away one morning; they never saw her again . There was an implacable logic to that center, a dehumanizing mechanism that operated with terrifying precision. The men who examined us did not see us as human beings.

We were resources, objects to be sorted, categorized, used. This reality struck me with brutal force the day I understood that our lives did not depend on our choices, our courage, or our faith, but on a cold stare, an entry in a notebook, a bureaucratic gesture that assigned us to one of three doors. This sorting room was not unique.

After the war, I learned that dozens of centers existed. Similar places existed throughout occupied France: secret locations hidden behind the facades of schools, abandoned hospitals, and repurposed administrative buildings— places where thousands of French, Belgian, Polish, and Dutch women were assessed, sorted, and sent toward fates they hadn’t chosen.

Some centers were located in Paris, in neighborhoods I knew. Others were tucked away in remote villages, far from prying eyes, but all operated on the same principle: transforming human beings into statistics. Some historians estimate that between 1940 and 1944, more than 200,000 women were deported, imprisoned, and exploited in these centers.

But this figure is probably much lower than the reality. Many were never registered. Many died without anyone knowing their names. Many survived but never spoke. Silence after the war was often the only way to go on living. I survived. But for a long time, I wondered if  It was truly a stroke of luck because surviving meant carrying the weight of all those who hadn’t had that opportunity.

Surviving meant waking up every morning with their faces etched in my memory. Surviving meant living with a guilt I couldn’t name. In the factory where I was sent, life followed a mechanical and merciless rhythm. Each day was like the last. Every movement was calculated to extract maximum productivity from us before our bodies gave out.

The German foremen didn’t shout often. They didn’t need to. Their presence was enough. Their silence was more menacing than any shouted order. In the morning, we were woken at 5 a.m., sometimes earlier if the air raid sirens sounded. We were given a piece of black bread so hard that we had to dip it in a kind 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 vegetable peelings.  Rotten. But we drank it because it was all we had. Then they took us to the factory. The walk took about twenty minutes, whatever the weather. Rain, snow, icy wind. We marched in a column escorted by armed guards.

Some women fell along the way. Exhaustion, [music] malnutrition. Sometimes she got up, sometimes she stayed on the ground. And we kept walking because stopping would have been risky, like reaching the one who couldn’t get up anymore. The factory itself was a massive building of red brick blackened by smoke. Inside, the air was unbreathable.

Suffocating heat in the summer, biting cold in the winter. The machines ran constantly , producing a deafening noise that prevented us from thinking. Maybe it was intentional? Maybe he wanted us to become automatons, incapable of thinking, incapable of feeling. There, we had to assemble detonators for shells.

A job Meticulous, dangerous. Each part had to be handled with absolute precision. If you made a mistake, if you applied too much pressure, if you inserted a pin incorrectly, the part could explode. I saw two women lose fingers in accidents. One of them, a young Parisian woman named Hélène, lost three fingers on her right hand.

She continued working the next day. Her hand bandaged, her face ashen. Because being injured didn’t mean you could rest. It simply meant you became less useful. And becoming less useful meant getting closer to the end. Another woman, whose name I never learned, lost her right eye when a metal fragment ricocheted.

She screamed, then fell silent. They took her to the infirmary. I never saw her again. In the evening, they brought us back to the barracks. It was a long, low wooden structure with a roof that leaked when it rained. Inside, there were rows of straw mattresses stacked on top of thin, damp ones. No blankets, however few there were, made no difference.

We slept huddled together to keep from freezing to death. We were given another bowl of soup, sometimes with a piece of potato. It was a treasure. A whole potato meant we might have enough strength to last another day. Some women saved their potato pieces for the next day. Others ate them immediately, afraid they would be stolen during the night.

Then we lay down. Some prayed, [music] others wept. I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember my mother’s face. But with time, even her memories became blurry. As if hunger, exhaustion, and pain erased everything that wasn’t essential for immediate survival. After six months, I started losing my hair.

It fell out in clumps. I  I found myself on my straw mattress, on my shoulders, between my fingers. My skin turned gray, almost translucent. My teeth loosened. I felt my body slowly decomposing, cell by cell. And yet, I held on. Because somewhere deep inside, I refused to give them that victory. I refused to die in that place.

But the line between holding on and collapsing was thin. I saw it in other women. One day, they were there, standing, working. The next day, something inside them had broken. They kept moving, kept obeying orders, but their eyes were empty. They had become shells, and a few days later, they died [music] simply, silently, as if their will to live had been extinguished.

One day, a new woman arrived at our barracks. Her name was Marguerite. She came from Lyon. She was 18. She had been captured while distributing resistance leaflets in the streets of her city.  She had gone through the same sorting room as me. But she had been sent first to the soldiers’ wing. Then, when she became useless— that’s the word they used—she was transferred to the factory.

Marguerite hardly spoke. But one night, as we lay side by side , she whispered something to me that I’ve never forgotten. [music] She said, “He treats us like cattle, but we are not cattle.”  “We are women, and one day they will die.” I wanted to answer her, to tell her yes, that she was right, but the words wouldn’t come because at that moment, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

I wasn’t sure that justice existed. I wasn’t sure there would be an aftermath. Marguerite died three weeks later. Pneumonia, or perhaps simply exhaustion. They took her away one morning. We never saw her again. But those words remained. One day they will die. I clung to that phrase: Even though I didn’t truly believe it, even though I knew that many of them never died.

There was a cruelty in this system that went beyond physical violence. It was a calculated psychological cruelty , designed to break us from the inside out. It knew that keeping us hungry, exhausted, and sick wasn’t enough. It also wanted to make us lose our humanity, to make us forget that we were individuals with names, with stories,  Families.

In the factory, we were called by numbers. No names, never names. I was number 247. And after a while, I began to see myself that way. Not as Josette Aumont, not as the blacksmith’s daughter from Saint-Homère, but as a unit of production, a pair of hands, a body assembling parts until it couldn’t go on anymore. And perhaps that’s the most terrible thing I learned in that place.

You can steal someone’s freedom, their health, their life, but you can also steal their identity. And when you lose your identity, you also lose part of your will to survive. But there were rare, fleeting moments when that humanity resurfaced. One evening, a woman older than us, maybe 40, began to sing softly. A French song I’d known since childhood.

The other women joined her one by one. Soon, everyone  The barracks were singing. The voices were weak, broken, but they were there. And for a few minutes, we were no longer numbers. We were women again. The guards arrived, they shouted, they threatened, but they didn’t shoot. Perhaps because they knew that breaking us completely also meant losing their workforce.

Or perhaps because even for them, there was a limit to barbarity. That night, I fell asleep with a strange feeling, something like hope, or perhaps simply the awareness that as long as we could still sing, we weren’t completely lost. The weeks turned inside me. Winter 1943 gave way to spring 1944, then to summer.

The seasons passed, but nothing changed. We worked, we barely ate, we slept poorly, and every morning we wondered if it would be our last. But something was beginning to change outside. We  We could hear it in the guards’ whispers, in their growing nervousness. The Allies were advancing, the bombings were getting closer.

Sometimes at night, we heard the distant rumble of planes and prayed they would come , that they would destroy everything, even if it meant dying under the bombs, because dying like that was liberation. In August 1944, the Germans began evacuating the centers. One morning, we were told to gather our belongings. We had almost nothing.

A scrap of cloth, a piece of stale bread. That was all we had left. We were loaded onto trucks. Some women thought they were going to kill us. Others hoped they were going to liberate us. I didn’t think anything anymore. I was too tired to hope, too empty to be afraid. We were taken to another camp further east.

Then a few weeks later, that camp too was evacuated, and so on. We were moved like packages from one place to another.  From one to the other, depending on the advance of the Allied troops. Each transfer brought us closer to death because the Germans knew they were losing the war, and they also knew they had to erase all traces of what they had done.

In November 1944, I was liberated by American soldiers. They found our abandoned convoy near the German border. There were about thirty of us women still alive. Skeletal, sick, and dull. An American soldier gave me a blanket. He spoke to me in English. I didn’t understand a word, but I understood his gaze.

It was a look of horror. He saw in us something he would never have 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 surviving, I would later understand, was only the beginning of another kind of suffering. I returned to Saintomer in December 1944.

The return journey lasted several weeks. The railway infrastructure had been destroyed by bombing. The roads were clogged with refugees, soldiers, and military convoys. I traveled in Red Cross trucks, then on overcrowded trains where we were crammed together standing for hours. But I felt nothing anymore.

Not the fatigue, not the cold, not the hunger. My body was there, but my mind floated elsewhere in a gray zone between life and death. When I arrived in my village, it was night. The streets were deserted. Many houses had been damaged during the occupation. Some had been requisitioned by the Germans and then abandoned. Others were simply empty, their occupants having fled or perished.

I walked slowly, as if in a dream, trying to recognize the places of my childhood. But everything seemed foreign, as if I were returning to a place I had never truly known. My mother was still alive. My father had died six months earlier of a heart attack. When I crossed the threshold of our  At home, my mother froze.

She stared at me for a long time as if she didn’t recognize me. And then suddenly, she understood. She rushed towards me. She hugged me tightly and she cried. She cried for hours without being able to stop. Her tears streamed down my shoulders, wet my hair, soaked my dress. But I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. Something inside me had gone out .

Something I’ve never been able to fully rekindle. The first few weeks were strange. My mother tried to feed me, to care for me, to help me regain my strength. She made soups, stews, anything she could find with the meager supplies available. But I couldn’t eat normally. My stomach, used to months of Casifamine, could no longer tolerate normal portions.

I vomited often, I lost even more weight, and my mother looked at me with worry.  that she was trying to hide. She didn’t ask me any questions. She sensed I wasn’t ready to talk. And I wouldn’t have known where to begin. How do you explain the inexplicable? How do you describe what cannot be described with ordinary words? So, I remained silent.

I spent my days sitting by the window, watching the street, observing the people passing by, trying to convince myself that I had really come home. Sometimes, neighbors came to see my mother. They brought a little food, news from the village, condolences for my father. They gave me furtive, curious, embarrassed glances.

She didn’t know what to say to me, and I didn’t know what to say to them either . So, I looked down . I looked away, and she left, relieved not to have to bring it up . For months, I lived in a kind of fog. I got up in the morning because I had to . I ate because  that I had to eat. I breathed because I had to breathe. But I wasn’t really living.

I simply existed like an automaton, performing actions without thinking, without putting any soul into them. At night, the nightmares returned. I would wake with a start, my heart pounding, my body drenched in sweat. I would see the sorting room, the three [music] men, the hands that groped me. I would see the corridor, the women waiting.

I heard that voice again and again, even in the silence of my room, and I would stay awake for trembling hours, unable to fall back asleep. My mother finally realized this. One night, she came into my room. She sat on the edge of my bed. She took my hand in hers and said in a soft but firm voice, “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 the memories that wouldn’t leave me, through the images that kept returning , through this constant feeling of still being there in that icy corridor, waiting for my fate to be decided.

In 1946, life began to return to normal in the village. The men gradually came home from the front or the camps. The shops reopened. People tried 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 forget, and I felt that this inability to forget separated me from others.

People wanted to talk about the future, about rebuilding, about hope. I remained a prisoner of the past and felt increasingly isolated. It was around this time that I met Henry. He was 27 years old. He had just returned from captivity in Germany where  He had spent three years in a prisoner-of- war camp.

We bumped into each other at the bakery. He smiled at me. I looked away. But a few days later, we saw each other again, and little by little, we started talking. Henry was different from the others. He didn’t ask intrusive questions. He didn’t try to find out what had happened to me . He rarely spoke of his own captivity, but I sensed that he understood, that he knew what it meant to carry within you things you can’t share.

And this silent understanding drew me closer to him. We married in 1950, a small, unpretentious ceremony with a few close friends and family. I was 26. I wore a simple white dress that my mother had sewn. Henry held my hand, and for the first time in years, I felt something akin to peace. But even in this new life, the past never left me .

Henry and I had two children, a boy and then a girl. I  I loved with all my heart. I tried to be a good mother, but there were times when I felt absent, as if a part of me had stayed there in that center and would never return. My children knew nothing of what had happened to me . I never told them about the war, the deportation, the factory.

When they asked me questions, “Mom, what did you do during the war?” I answered vaguely. “I worked.” And I changed the subject. Henry, on the other hand, didn’t ask me questions. He respected my silence, but I knew he worried. Sometimes at night when I woke up screaming, he would take me in his arms and wait for me to calm down . He didn’t say anything.

He was simply there. And that was enough. For years, I didn’t tell anyone what had happened to me . Not my mother, not my friends, not even Henry. I kept everything locked away, like  If, by not uttering the words, I could have escaped reality. But the memories remained. They returned at night.

They returned in moments of silence. They returned when I saw a young girl walking carefree down the street and wondered if she knew how cruel the world could be. I remember one day in particular, it was in 1958. I was at the market with my daughter, who was five years old at the time. We were doing our shopping when suddenly I heard a voice behind me.

A man’s voice with a German accent. He was speaking French, but the accent was there. Unmistakable. My heart stopped, my body froze. I felt panic rising, uncontrollable. I turned around. It was an elderly man, probably a tourist, asking a shopkeeper for directions. He wasn’t threatening at all, but for me, that accent was enough.

I grabbed my daughter’s hand. I left the market.  I ran and came home trembling, unable to explain what had just happened. [music] My daughter looked at me, frightened. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” I tried to smile. I said, “Nothing, darling, nothing.” But she knew it wasn’t true, and so did I.  Years passed. My children grew up and left home.

Henry retired. We had grandchildren. Life went on. But I was still a prisoner of 1943. In 1985, I read an article in a local newspaper. A historian was looking for testimonies from women who had been deported during the war. He wanted to document what he called the forgotten women of the occupation— women whose stories had never been told because they were considered less important than those of the resistance fighters or political deportees. I cut out the article.

I kept it in a drawer for three years. I  I would sometimes go out. I would read it. I would wonder if I should reply. But each time, I would put the article back in the drawer and close it because speaking meant reliving it, and reliving it meant suffering again. One day in 1988, I wrote a short, simple letter.

I simply said that I had been taken to  a sorting center, that I had worked in an ammunition factory, that I had survived. I didn’t give any details. I did n’t describe the room, the doors, the men in white coats. Not yet. The historian replied quickly. He thanked me for my courage. He asked if I would agree to give a more detailed account.

Perhaps in a recorded interview. I read his letter several times and then replied no, I wasn’t ready. For another year, I refused to speak. I refused all requests from historians, journalists, and…  documentary filmmakers. They all wanted me to tell my story, they all thought my testimony was important.

But I couldn’t bring myself to take the plunge. Henry died in 2003. A long illness. I was with him until the end, and when he passed away, I felt an immense void settle inside me, a void different from the one I had carried since 1943 because this time it was the void of absence, the absence of the only person who had understood my silence without ever judging me.

After his death, I began to think differently. I told myself, “You have kept silent all your life.”  You did it to protect yourself.  But who did this benefit? Not for me, because silence had not protected me.  He had just locked me further into my solitude, and certainly not into the solitude of the one who had not survived.

Because she no longer had a voice, and if I continued to remain silent , their stories would disappear with me.  But even with this realization, it still took me 8 years to find the courage to speak out.  I saw a report on television. It was about the last survivors of the Holocaust who were testifying before they died. Very old men and women, some in wheelchairs, others hooked up to machines, but all determined to tell their story before it’s too late.

And I thought to myself , if I don’t speak up now, who will?  I was 87 years old at the time.  My health was declining.  I knew I didn’t have much time left.  So, I contacted a historical archives center in Paris.  I said I was ready to testify, that I had something to say, and that it needed to be recorded before I disappeared.

A team of French historians came to my home in Saintomer. They set up a camera, they prepared questions, and they asked me to tell the story.  I told the story for three days, three whole days with breaks because my voice was breaking, because my strength was leaving me.  But I told them everything I had kept inside for 68 years.

I described the sorting room, the three men who examined me like an object : the acidic smell, the cold, the forced nudity.  I told the story of the three doors. The medical wing where women served as guinea pigs, the soldiers’ wing where bodies were violated until exhaustion. the factory where we assembled munitions for a war we no longer understood.

I told Marguerite about her voice in the night.  One day, they bridged.  I told of the women who died in silence, the bodies that faded away, the names that no one spoke anymore.  And when I had finished, when there was nothing left to say, I cried.  For the first time since 194, I cried.  Tears I had held back for almost seven decades.

Tears for all those who couldn’t get back in.  For all those whose voices had been silenced forever. This testimony has been deposited in the French national archives.  It is part of a collective memory project about women deported during the Second World War.  Hundreds of testimonies like mine have been collected.

Some are public, others remain sealed at the request of the families.  I asked that mine be made public after my death because I wanted people to know.  Because I owed it to all those who were never able to tell their stories. Because ultimately, silence only amplified the suffering.  I died in 2015 at the age of 91.  But before I left, I told my granddaughter, “Never let anyone forget, never let anyone say it wasn’t so bad because it was bad and it was real.

” And she kept her promise. Today, if you’re listening to this testimony, it’s because my granddaughter kept her promise. She had the recording digitized. She shared it with researchers, teachers, documentary filmmakers, and now she’s sharing it with you. There’s a question I was often asked during her interviews with historians: How did you manage to survive? I always gave the same answer .

I don’t know, because the truth is, I didn’t do anything heroic. I didn’t resist. I didn’t fight. I simply obeyed, I simply held on, day after day, hour after hour. And maybe that’s what survival is. Not an act of bravery, just stubbornness.  Silent, not to disappear. But there’s another question no one has ever asked me, and that I still ask myself today.

Why me? Why was I sent to the factory and not the medical wing? Why was I spared while Marguerite died? Why did I return to Sainthomer when so many others never saw their families again? I have no answer, and perhaps that’s the heaviest burden. Knowing that I survived by chance, by a roll of the dice, by an arbitrary decision made by a man in a white coat who didn’t even know my name.

For all these years, I carried a guilt I couldn’t name. The guilt of having survived. The guilt of being the next one who was lucky. But as I grew older, I understood something. It’s not me who should carry this guilt. It’s them, those who built these centers, those who organized these triages, those who decided that some  Some lives are worth more than others.

And if I tell this story today, it’s not so that people pity me, it’s so that we remember. Because barbarity doesn’t begin with the gas chambers. It doesn’t begin with the death camps. It begins with a sentence, a simple, bureaucratic, almost banal sentence. “Dinest, the next one.” [music] It begins when we stop seeing the other as a human being, when we reduce them to a number, a category, a utility.

It begins when we accept silence, when we look away , when we tell ourselves, “It’s not my problem.” So today, I ask you this question. If you had been there in that corridor in 1943, what would you have done? Would you have resisted? Would you have obeyed? Would you have looked away? I’m not judging you because I myself don’t know what I would have done if I had been there.

in the place of those who were watching over us. But I know one thing: we all have a responsibility to ask ourselves this question today, now, before it’s too late, because history repeats itself, it always repeats itself in other forms, in other places, with other words, but the mechanism is the same.

And if we don’t remain vigilant, if we don’t defend the dignity of every human being, then one day, somewhere, someone else will hear the phrase ” say next,” and it will be too late. My name is Josette Aumont. I was 19 years old in 1943. I survived. But I will never forget . And now it’s up to you to remember. Josette Aumont’s story is not simply a testimony of the past.

It is a warning for the present. Every word she spoke before she died carries the weight of thousands of silenced voices, thousands of lives shattered in the shadow of this war. By listening to her story to the end, you have done more.  What a story to hear. You have honored the memory of all those who were never able to return home , who were never able to tell what they went through.

You have become the guardian of their memory, and this role doesn’t end here. If this testimony has touched you, if these words have resonated within you, then take a moment to reflect. How do you feel now ? What have you learned about the fragility of human dignity? About the barbarity that begins with a simple filing, with a bureaucratic phrase from an ex-officer? Leave a comment below.

Share your thoughts, your emotions, your reflections. Tell us where you are watching this video from, what impact this story has had on you? Because every comment is proof that Josette’s story lives on, that her courage was not in vain. Supporting this channel means choosing not to forget.

It means refusing to let these stories disappear into silence. By subscribing, by turning on notifications, by sharing this video with your loved ones, you are contributing to ensuring that  Testimonies like Josette’s continue to be heard, preserved, and passed on to future generations. You become an essential link in the chain of collective memory.

Because as long as we tell the story, as long as we listen, as long as we remember, they have not won. And now, ask yourself the question that Joseph herself asked before she passed away. If you had been there in that corridor in 1943, what would you have done? This question doesn’t have an easy answer. It forces us to look within ourselves, to acknowledge our own humanity, our own vulnerability.

It reminds us that vigilance is never optional, that defending the dignity of every human being is a daily struggle. So, don’t let this testimony end here. Keep it alive. Share it, remember it, because history always repeats itself until we decide together to stop it.