I was eighteen when I learned that war does not only
redraw borders. It redraws bodies, identities, and bloodlines.
My name is Maëis Duroc. I was born in 1924 in
Saint-Rémy-sur-Loire, a village so small it barely appeared on regional maps of
central France. Vineyards stretched behind our home. Wheat fields moved like
water when the wind passed. My father repaired clocks. My mother baked bread
before sunrise. My sisters—Aurore and Séverine—were my entire world.
We were not
political. We were not activists. We were not part of the Resistance.
We were simply
young, French, and living under occupation during the Second World War.
In June 1942,
everything changed.
The Arrest No One
Recorded
At dawn, German soldiers arrived with an officer
attached to the regional command structure under the broader authority of the Wehrmacht. There were no charges. No
warrants. No formal accusations. Just instructions.
We were taken
for “administrative relocation.”
The term
sounded bureaucratic. Harmless. Temporary.
It was
neither.
We were
transported to a controlled labor facility—distinct from extermination centers
such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or Dachau—but no less governed by fear. It
was a labor and administrative detention camp overseen not by a rotating
commandant but by a single high-ranking German officer with broad discretionary
authority.
His name was
General Friedrich von Steiner.
He was
forty-two. Educated. Impeccably composed. His boots were polished. His voice
was measured. He rarely raised it.
Absolute power
does not require shouting.
The Structure of
Control
The camp functioned like a private estate.
Work
assignments were distributed directly from the general’s office:
·
Kitchen
staff
·
Uniform
mending
·
Barracks
cleaning
·
Administrative
clerks
·
“Special
duties”
No one
explained what “special duties” meant.
No one needed
to.
Von Steiner
conducted morning inspections himself. He walked slowly between rows of
detainees, observing faces the way a landowner evaluates livestock.
There was no
visible brutality in public. No chaotic violence. No drunken rage.
What existed
instead was administrative domination.
The kind that
leaves no visible bruises.
The Night Summons
One evening, Séverine’s name was called.
Two guards
escorted her away.
She returned
at dawn.
She did not
speak.
Three weeks
later, Aurore’s name was called.
Then mine.
I will not
describe what happened during those nights. There are experiences that resist
language not because they are forbidden, but because they fracture something
too deep.
Physical
violence was not necessary.
Authority was
enough.
The Pregnancies
By winter 1943, all three of us were pregnant.
Three sisters.
One father.
The silence
across the camp became suffocating.
Other
detainees avoided our eyes. Guards avoided ours.
Von Steiner
summoned us in February.
“You will give
birth here,” he said in fluent French. “The children will be registered as war
orphans and placed with approved German families. You will resume work when
medically cleared.”
It was
presented as policy. As logistics.
But it was
something more calculated.
This was not
impulse. It was programmatic.
The Hidden
Adoption Apparatus
After the war, historians would uncover fragments of
forced population transfer programs linked to racial ideology and demographic engineering.
Some records referenced coordination with structures associated with the Schutzstaffel and broader population
policies influenced by initiatives like the Lebensborn
program.
Officially,
our camp was not listed as part of those operations.
Unofficially,
documentation suggests overlap in record-keeping methods.
Birth
registries were precise:
·
Mother’s
name
·
Date
of birth
·
Child’s
sex
·
Transfer
date
·
Assigned
adoptive household
It was
bureaucracy weaponized.
The Births
Séverine gave birth first. A daughter.
The child was
removed almost immediately.
Séverine
deteriorated rapidly. Official cause of death: typhus.
Aurore
delivered a son weeks later. She held him for several hours before he too was
taken.
I gave birth
in June 1943.
A boy. Dark
hair. Small fingers that gripped mine with startling strength.
He was taken
the following morning.
No signatures
were requested from us. No consent forms. No appeals process.
Paperwork
existed—but not for the mothers.
After the
Collapse of the Third Reich
In 1945, as Allied forces advanced and the regime
fell, von Steiner disappeared before capture. Unlike officials tried at the Nuremberg Trials, he was never formally
prosecuted.
Rumors
suggested escape through Southern Europe. Others claimed internal execution.
There are no
confirmed records.
I returned to
Saint-Rémy-sur-Loire.
My mother had
died. My father barely recognized me.
France was
rebuilding. Public memory focused on heroism, liberation, reconstruction. Women
like us did not fit the narrative.
We were
inconvenient reminders of occupation’s intimate consequences.
The Letter from
Munich
In 1953, I received an unsigned letter postmarked
Munich.
“If you want
to know what happened to your child, come.”
I traveled to
Germany for the first time since the war.
There, a
former nurse—Greta Hoffmann—presented preserved camp documents she had secretly
kept. Inside one registry:
Male child.
Born June 18, 1943.
Transferred June 20, 1943.
Assigned to the Adler family.
My son had not
disappeared into abstraction.
He had an
address once.
The Twenty-Year
Search
The search consumed decades.
·
Requests
to German civil registries
·
Appeals
to church baptismal archives
·
Inquiries
to war victims’ aid groups
·
Petitions
through the International Committee of the Red
Cross
Records had
been destroyed, sealed, or lost in administrative reshuffling.
Families
relocated. Names changed. Borders shifted.
This was not
merely personal tragedy.
It was a
structural erasure of lineage.
Salzburg, 1972
Nearly thirty years after his birth, I found a
listing: Hans Adler, Salzburg.
I rang the
bell of a quiet house with climbing roses.
A man in his
thirties opened the door.
Dark hair.
Familiar eyes.
I knew before
he spoke.
When I told
him who I was, he went pale.
“They told me
my parents died in a bombing,” he said later. “They said I was an orphan.”
He had a name:
Mathias.
He had a wife.
Children. A life.
We never
formed the bond stories promise in reunion narratives. Too much time had
passed. Too many identities had solidified around a fiction.
But he knew.
That mattered.
The Broader
Pattern
Archival research since the 1990s has identified
thousands of cases involving children removed under occupation and reassigned
across borders under racial or political criteria.
Many files
remain classified or incomplete.
Some scholars
estimate that recovery and reunification efforts addressed only a fraction of
total cases tied to wartime population engineering.
The
psychological aftermath for mothers and children is still being studied within
trauma research and transgenerational memory studies.
Why These Stories
Matter Now
The Second World War is often remembered through:
·
Military
campaigns
·
Political
leaders
·
Battlefield
strategy
·
War
crime tribunals
But there
exists another layer—one involving reproductive control, coerced maternity,
identity reassignment, and administrative disappearance.
These were not
isolated acts of cruelty.
They were
systems.
Systems built
on paperwork, signatures, and silence.
The Final Years
Mathias and I corresponded for several years.
He died of
cancer in 2005.
I attended his
funeral quietly, standing at the back of the church.
He had built a
full life.
Despite the
camp.
Despite the lie.
Despite me.
In 2010, I
agreed to record my testimony for a historical memory archive documenting
forgotten civilian experiences of the war.
I was asked if
I regretted searching.
No.
Silence erases
faster than time.
I died in 2015
at ninety-one.
Von Steiner
was never tried.
The camp’s
births were never formally acknowledged in national records.
No reparations
were issued.
But testimony
remains.
The Unanswered
Questions
How many other camps operated under similar
administrative autonomy?
How many children were reassigned through unregistered wartime adoption
networks?
How many mothers searched in silence?
How many identities today rest on altered documents from 1943?
These are not
questions of vengeance.
They are
questions of historical accountability, archival transparency, and memory
preservation.
Because war
does not end when treaties are signed.
Sometimes it
continues in bloodlines.
And sometimes, the most powerful resistance against erasure is simply telling the story.
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