I am seventy-four now, seated in a quiet apartment in
Strasbourg, yet the winter of 1944 has never truly ended for me. When the wind
sweeps down from the Vosges Mountains, I am no longer an old woman in an
armchair. I am once again twenty-nine years old, standing in the frozen yard of
the Schirmeck re-education camp, my body shaking from cold, fear, and a
punishment designed to humiliate rather than merely hurt.
My name is Claire Duret. I survived Schirmeck, a Nazi
detention camp in occupied Alsace, where French women accused of resistance
activity were systematically broken through psychological terror, forced labor,
and a form of torture rarely discussed in history books. It was a punishment
meant to target us as women, to turn our own bodies into instruments of shame.
Arrest and Erasure
In October
1943, I was a schoolteacher by profession and a courier for the French
Resistance by necessity. Like many women, I was underestimated. I carried coded
messages sewn into the lining of my coat, moved between villages, and memorized
names I could never write down. That invisibility was my protection—until it
failed.
The Gestapo
arrested me in a convent near Strasbourg. They found the documents. Within
days, my name was replaced by a number. My hair was shaved. My identity was
stripped away. I was transported to Schirmeck, officially labeled a
“re-education camp,” though everyone inside knew it was a place of controlled
cruelty.
There were
about two hundred women when I arrived. Teachers, nurses, factory workers,
teenagers. Some were accused of sabotage. Others of hiding Jewish families. A
few were guilty only of being related to someone the Nazis wanted.
Interrogation as Punishment
The
interrogations began immediately. An SS officer named Klaus Richter conducted
them in flawless French, which made his calm voice even more terrifying. He
wanted information about my brother Étienne, a resistance organizer, and the
location of a radio transmitter. I said nothing.
Silence had
consequences.
Rather than
beatings that left visible marks, the camp relied on methods that destroyed
endurance and dignity. One punishment in particular became infamous among the
women. It involved a specially prepared chair or board, altered to cause pain
without leaving obvious external injuries. Victims were forced to remain seated
for long periods while guards applied pressure from above.
The pain was
immediate, deep, and relentless. It did not fade when the punishment ended.
Sitting, walking, sleeping—everything became difficult. Medical care was
nonexistent. Other prisoners did what they could with cold water, scraps of
cloth, and stolen salt.
The goal was
not information. It was domination.
Solidarity Under Terror
What the camp
authorities never fully understood was the strength created by shared
suffering. I survived because of the women around me.
Marguerite, a
former nurse, became my anchor. She taught me how to hide pain, how to conserve
strength, how not to give our captors the satisfaction of visible fear. Anne, a
factory worker, shared every scrap of bread with her sixteen-year-old daughter
Louise, the youngest among us.
One day,
Richter tried to use Louise to break me. He punished her in front of my eyes,
not because she had done anything, but because cruelty was his tool. The
message was clear: resistance would cost not only your life, but the lives of
those you loved.
It nearly
worked. What stopped me was the knowledge that compliance would not save her—or
anyone. Terror does not negotiate.
Life Inside Schirmeck
Daily life was
a cycle of exhaustion. Roll call before dawn. Twelve hours of forced labor
hauling military supplies. Hunger that hollowed out the body and the mind. Winter
temperatures that burned the skin.
And yet, in
whispered conversations at night, we shared memories of home, recipes we could
no longer cook, lessons we once taught. These small acts of humanity were a
form of resistance.
I secretly
kept notes whenever I could—names, dates, fragments of conversations overheard
during interrogations. I hid them in scraps of cloth, in seams, in places
guards never thought to search. I knew that if I survived, evidence would
matter.
Escape and Testimony
On April 2,
1944, an Allied bombing raid struck nearby targets. The camp descended into
chaos. Smoke, shouting, guards running in every direction. I found a weakness
in the perimeter fencing and ran.
For six days,
I moved through snow and forest, surviving on almost nothing. A farmer
eventually took me in. Through resistance contacts, I reached my brother
Étienne. Against all odds, he was still alive.
The notes I
carried were sent onward—to networks that reached London. They became part of
the documentary record of Nazi crimes in occupied France.
After the War: The Long Silence
After
liberation, I returned to Strasbourg. I taught again. I married. I raised
children. On the surface, life resumed.
Inside,
silence took hold.
I could not
explain why sitting caused pain years later. I could not describe the
humiliation without reliving it. Like many survivors, I learned that society
preferred victory stories to uncomfortable truths.
It was not
until 1964, when a journalist uncovered my wartime notes in an attic, that the
past demanded to be spoken aloud. I began to testify—in schools, in interviews,
in quiet rooms where young people listened without judgment.
I told them
that hatred does not begin with camps. It begins with indifference.
Legacy and Memory
I died in 1989
knowing that the evidence survived even if many of the perpetrators did not
face justice. Today, my records are preserved at the Resistance Museum in
Strasbourg. They stand alongside thousands of other testimonies that prove
women were not passive victims of World War II, but active participants in
resistance—and deliberate targets of repression.
What happened
at Schirmeck was not an aberration. It was policy. Gendered punishment,
psychological torture, and systematic humiliation were tools of authoritarian
control.
Remembering
this matters.
Not because it
is easy to hear—but because forgetting makes repetition possible.
We were not
just prisoners. We were witnesses. And as long as our stories are told, even
the pain that never fully fades becomes part of something larger than
suffering.
As long as you remember Marguerite, Louise, and the countless others, we remain standing—no matter how much it still hurts to sit.
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