I was sixteen years old when I learned that survival
could feel heavier than death. My name is Jeanne Lemoine. I am seventy-eight
now, and for more than six decades I remained silent—not because I lacked
courage, but because the world was not ready to listen. When wars end, nations
prefer stories of victory and resistance. They do not want to hear about the
young girls who survived by enduring what could never be spoken aloud.
Today, in a quiet house on the outskirts of Dijon, I
speak for the first time because time has become my enemy. I am one of the last
witnesses. If my voice disappears, so does the truth.
Occupied France, 1943
By October
1943, France had lived under German occupation for three long years. My village
near Beaune had grown used to hunger, curfews, and fear disguised as routine.
My father had been killed during the early days of the invasion in 1940. My
mother, my younger brother, and I survived by farming what little the soil
would allow.
I still went
to school when I could. I wanted to become a teacher. War does not negotiate
with dreams.
One morning,
two German soldiers arrived at our door. They were calm. Polite. They said I
needed to accompany them for a document check. My mother held my hand tightly.
She did not cry. She understood something I did not.
I never saw
her again.
A Place That Officially Never
Existed
I was
transported to a German detention facility located roughly twenty-five miles
north of Dijon. It does not appear in French records. It does not appear in
German archives recovered after the war. Yet it existed.
The property
had once belonged to a wine-growing family. The Germans seized it in 1942, surrounded
it with barbed wire, added wooden barracks, and installed floodlights that
burned through the night. Officially, the site did not exist. That was the
point.
When I
arrived, there were around seventy female prisoners. Most were between fifteen
and twenty-five years old. Some were accused of resistance activities. Many,
like me, had never been accused of anything at all.
For the first
days, I believed the arrest was a mistake.
Then I met
Simone.
She was
twenty-two and had been held there for nearly a year. She explained the rules
quietly, carefully.
“You are no
longer a person here,” she told me. “You are a number. Accept it quickly if you
want to survive.”
My number was
forty-eight.
Life as an “Object”
Every morning
began at five with roll call. Then came work: cleaning military uniforms,
preparing food, carrying heavy loads. The labor itself was not the worst part.
The worst part was being watched.
Some guards
looked at us with a fixation that stripped away identity. They selected
favorites. Those girls were called away at night. They returned changed—or did
not return at all.
A
seventeen-year-old named Hélène came back before dawn one night barely able to
stand. Simone whispered that she had been “chosen” by an officer. From that
moment on, Hélène no longer belonged to herself.
That was when
I realized I was being watched too.
A young
soldier named Klaus began appearing wherever I worked. He never spoke at first.
He only watched. Simone warned me not to meet his eyes. Attention could be as
dangerous as punishment.
Soon, small
items began to appear near me: a piece of white bread, an apple. These gestures
were not kindness. They were possession.
Obsession Disguised as Affection
In December
1943, Klaus summoned me at night. He took me to a stone cellar that had once
been a wine vault. There was a table, two chairs, and a single lamp.
He showed me a
photograph of his sister, who was my age.
“You look like
her,” he said.
What followed
was not love, and it was not mercy. It was obsession. I was forced to listen to
stories of his family, his childhood, his fear of death. I existed only as a
mirror for his loss.
Simone told me
to endure. “Survival,” she said, “sometimes means becoming invisible.”
Each night I
lost another piece of myself.
When Fantasy Turned Dangerous
In February
1944, Klaus learned that his sister had been killed during an Allied bombing in
Berlin. Something inside him broke.
He began
calling me by her name. He demanded I wear clothes he brought from Germany. He
ordered me to sing songs she had loved. I was no longer Jeanne. I was a
replacement for someone who no longer existed.
He even forced
staged photographs, insisting I smile beside a porcelain doll that resembled a
child. The images were meant to preserve an illusion, not reality.
By April, the
illusion collapsed. He became volatile, furious that I could never truly become
who he wanted. One night he screamed that I was nothing, just a prisoner. That
was the last time he called for me.
Escape and the Silence That
Followed
On April 24,
1944, during Allied bombings that disrupted rail lines nearby, Simone and I
escaped into the woods. We walked for three days before reaching a village
connected to the Resistance.
We were free.
But freedom
did not erase what remained inside us.
After the war,
France celebrated heroes. Survivors like us did not fit the narrative. No one
wanted to hear about secret detention centers or girls who survived through
endurance rather than defiance.
Simone took
her own life in 1953.
I married. I
raised children. I lived quietly. But every night, I returned to that cellar.
Why These Stories Matter Now
In 2003, I
read a historical study by Laurent Mercier on undocumented German detention
sites in occupied France. For the first time, I understood that what happened
to us was not isolated.
It was
systematic.
These places
existed outside the law, designed to erase evidence and accountability. The
women held there were treated as tools, leverage, and silence.
I finally
testified—not for myself, but for Simone, for Hélène, and for the others whose
names were never recorded.
Survival is
not shame. Silence is.
My name is
Jeanne Lemoine. I was sixteen when they took me. I am speaking now so history
cannot pretend it did not happen.
Because behind every war statistic is a human life—and some truths only survive if we dare to tell them.
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