The history of the 20th century is often written in the broad strokes of troop movements and political treaties, but the truest, most agonizing accounts are found in the quiet consulting rooms of doctors, decades after the guns have fallen silent.
In 1972, Dr. Michel Fournier, a general practitioner in Lyon, France, encountered a mystery that would haunt his medical career. A 58-year-old patient arrived complaining of chronic, debilitating pain in his lower back, pelvis, and hips. The man moved with a fragile stiffness; he could not sit normally, struggled to climb stairs, and found the simple act of squatting to be an exercise in agony.
When Dr. Fournier examined the patient’s pelvic region, he found a landscape of old malformations. There were no clean breaks from a single accident, but rather repeated lesion marks—evidence of a body that had been systematically and deliberately damaged over a long period. When asked what had happened, the patient fell into a long, heavy silence. Finally, he whispered a sentence that served as a summary of his adult life:
“It hurts when I squat. It has been hurting since 1943.”
The man eventually whispered a term that Dr. Fournier did not recognize: Das Reiten—The Ride. It was a word that described a specific, calculated method of physical destruction designed not just to punish, but to permanently mark the human body.
The Invisible Scars of the Pink Triangle
Intrigued and disturbed, Dr. Fournier began a quiet investigation. Over the next three years, he identified ten other men across France—all of a certain age, all survivors of the concentration camps, and all bearing the “Pink Triangle” designation. They all shared the same physical signature: chronic pelvic pain, hip deterioration, and the inability to perform basic movements without intense suffering.
When Fournier tried to publish his findings in a medical journal, he was met with a wall of silence. In the 1970s, the plight of those persecuted for their identity remained a taboo subject, even in the scientific community. His notes were relegated to a drawer for twenty years. It was only in 1998, after his death, that his daughter discovered the files and brought the story of Fernand Leclerc and the torture of Das Reiten to light.
The Dancer of Pigalle
Fernand Leclerc was a man built for grace. In the early 1940s, he lived in Paris, working as a cabaret dancer in the small theaters of Pigalle and Montmartre. He was lean, supple, and possessed the disciplined posture of an athlete.
His life changed in February 1943 due to a moment of perceived connection. After a performance, Fernand smiled at a man in the street. In the paranoid atmosphere of occupied Paris, that man turned out to be an informant for the authorities. The smile was interpreted as a “signal.” The next morning, Fernand was arrested. By March, he had been deported to the Flossenbürg camp in Bavaria.
Flossenbürg was a site of brutal forced labor, primarily focused on granite extraction. While the conditions were lethal for all, those marked with the Pink Triangle were subjected to the additional cruelty of Hans Schreber, an SS officer and former doctor who viewed his prisoners not as humans, but as subjects for a perverse “rehabilitation” program he called Umerziehung durch Schmerz—re-education through pain.
The Mechanism of “The Ride”
Three weeks into his arrival, Fernand was taken to a secluded building known among the prisoners as Das Reithaus—The Riding House. Inside was a concrete floor and a single, horrific device: a horizontal wooden beam, roughly two meters long, mounted on supports.
The top of the beam was not flat. It had been carved into a sharp, narrow edge, forming a wooden crest. It resembled a gymnastics pommel horse, but sharpened into a blade.
Officer Schreber approached the young dancer. “You are a dancer, it seems,” Schreber remarked with a cold smile. “I see a body that is supple and graceful. This device is a tool for men like you. We call it Das Holzpferd—The Wooden Horse.”
The torture was methodically simple. The prisoner was forced to sit astride the sharpened beam. Their entire body weight, even in a state of malnutrition, created an unbearable pressure as the wooden edge sank into the most sensitive tissues of the pelvic floor and the base of the spine.
A Program of Systematic Destruction
Fernand’s testimony, recorded late in his life, described the experience with agonizing precision.
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Duration: The sessions lasted for hours. If a prisoner tried to lift themselves to relieve the pressure, weights were attached to their ankles.
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Frequency: It was not a one-time punishment. Under Schreber’s “program,” prisoners were subjected to the horse regularly.
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Escalation: Over time, the wooden beam might be replaced with a metal one, or the device would be moved to create agonizing friction.
Schreber sat in a chair opposite the victims, often reading a book, meticulously timing how long a man could endure the pressure before losing consciousness. When Fernand fainted, he was revived with cold water and forced back onto the crest.
After his first session, Fernand was left unable to close his legs or sit. A prisoner-doctor who examined him later told him the truth: “You will be in pain your whole life. That is what they want. They want you to remember what they did every time you sit or squat.”
The Mental Stage
Fernand underwent the torture of the wooden horse seven times during his first year at Flossenbürg. As his body became increasingly fragile—his pelvic bones warping and his muscles tearing—he developed a singular form of mental resistance.
During the hours of agony on the beam, Fernand would close his eyes and retreat into his mind. He was no longer a prisoner in Bavaria; he was back on a stage in Paris. He would mentally perform entire dance routines, feeling the music and the imaginary lights. His muscles, though immobilized and screaming in pain, “remembered” the grace of his former life.
One day, Schreber noticed the serene expression on Fernand’s face. He struck him and demanded to know where his mind was. “Somewhere where you can’t reach me,” Fernand replied. It was the only time he openly challenged his captor, and it resulted in the session being extended by two hours. But in that moment, Fernand realized that while they could destroy his skeleton, they had failed to break his identity.
The Mirror of Self-Hatred
In late 1944, as the Reich began to crumble, the atmosphere in the camp became more erratic. Fernand befriended an older German prisoner named Klaus, a former music teacher.
Klaus offered a chilling perspective on Schreber’s obsession with the “rehabilitation” of homosexual prisoners. He claimed that Schreber had been seen visiting the barracks at night, simply watching the men sleep with a look of profound, tortured recognition.
“He hates us because he is like us,” Klaus whispered. “He chose to hate what he is, and he tries to destroy it in us because he cannot destroy it in himself. He wants us to be ashamed so he can feel less shame.”
This insight transformed Schreber from an inexplicable monster into a tragic one—though it did nothing to lessen the horror of his actions. It suggested that the torture of Das Reiten was a physical manifestation of a man trying to crush his own nature by breaking the bodies of others.
The Long Silence of 1945
Flossenbürg was liberated by American troops on April 23, 1945. Fernand was still alive—a 43-kilogram skeleton who could barely walk. When American doctors examined him, they were stunned by the state of his pelvis. The bones were distorted, the nerves permanently damaged, and the scar tissue was extensive. The medical report simply noted: “Repeated pelvic trauma; permanent disability.”
Fernand returned to a France that was not ready to receive him. In 1945, the persecution of those with the Pink Triangle was not recognized as a legitimate category of war crime. There were no veterans’ associations for men like him. In fact, many survivors were re-arrested or remained under police surveillance, as the laws used by the occupiers often remained on the books in various forms after the war.
He lived a life of quiet anonymity in Paris and later Lyon. He took jobs that allowed him to stand, as sitting remained an ordeal. Most cruelly, he could never dance again. The body that had been his instrument of art was now a prison of chronic pain.
Breaking the Silence
For over fifty years, Fernand Leclerc lived with the secret of “The Ride.” He was ashamed—not of who he was, but of what had been done to him. He felt as though the torture was his fault, a psychological victory that the camp’s command had intended to last a lifetime.
However, as the 1990s approached, the world began to change. The history of the “forgotten” victims of the camps began to be documented. In 1999, at the age of 81, Fernand finally agreed to give a full testimony to historians.
“If I die without speaking,” he said, “they will have won. They wanted me to carry their secret to the grave. I refuse to give them that satisfaction.”
He described the loss of his dance as the cruelest act of all. “They took the thing I loved most. I survived by dancing in my head for two years, but when I was released, I realized my body would never allow me to dance again. They didn’t just hurt my bones; they destroyed my identity.”
The Legacy of the Wooden Horse
Fernand Leclerc died in November 1999, just four months after completing his testimony. His story, alongside those of other survivors found through Dr. Fournier’s files, was published in 2002 in a collection titled The Wooden Horse: A Forgotten Torture.
In 2008, a commemorative plaque was placed at the site of the former “Riding House” at Flossenbürg. It honors those who were targeted for their identity and who carried the physical traces of that cruelty until their final breath.
The sentence “It hurts when I squat” remains a haunting testament to a specific form of cruelty. It was a torture designed to be permanent—to ensure that every time a man performed a basic human movement, he would be forced to remember his dehumanization.
By speaking out, Fernand Leclerc and others like him transformed their pain into truth. They proved that while a body can be broken, the spirit—much like a dancer’s performance—can remain untouchable, even in the darkest of times. Their legacy is a reminder that the recognition of history, in all its painful detail, is the only way to ensure that such “rehabilitation through pain” never finds a place in the world again.