There is a sound that has haunted my memory for nearly seven decades. It is not the sound of screams, nor the heavy thud of boots on stone floors. It is something quieter, yet much sharper. It is the dry, mechanical voice of a man saying in German, “Nächste.” The next one.
I was nineteen years old when I heard that command for the first time. In that moment, I realized that my name, my history, and my dignity had ceased to exist. I was no longer a person; I was merely a number in a narrow corridor where the fates of hundreds of women were decided in mere seconds.
My name is Josette Aumont. I was born in 1924 in Saint-Omer, a small village in northern France near the Belgian border. My father was a blacksmith, and my mother sewed clothing for families in the region. We led a simple, worthy life. I grew up helping in the workshop, learning the value of hard work while dreaming of one day opening my own fabric boutique. Those were the dreams of a young girl—dreams that the war extinguished like a candle caught in a draft.
The Shadow of Occupation
In June 1940, when the German forces crossed the border and occupied our region, everything changed. At first, we tried to continue living. My father’s hammer still struck the anvil, and my mother continued her sewing, but the tension grew daily. Soldiers filled the streets, and posters were plastered onto every wall: curfews, rationing, and the creeping presence of fear. Little by little, our village ceased to belong to us.
I remember the fall of 1942 as the moment the occupation became deeply personal. Rumors circulated about young women being taken away. At first, we thought these were just stories meant to frighten us. Then, a neighbor disappeared. Two weeks later, another vanished. No one explained anything; no one asked questions. Silence was safer than the truth.
On a cold morning in March 1943, the reality arrived at our door. I was helping my mother hang laundry in the yard when the sharp sound of boots echoed at the entrance. Three soldiers stood there. One of them, quite young, held a clipboard. He read my name aloud, mispronouncing it as if I were simply a line item in an inventory.
My mother tried to argue. My father took a step forward, his face tight with helplessness. The oldest soldier raised his hand calmly and spoke in German. The tone required no translation. They gave me five minutes. I put on my heaviest coat and grabbed a small leather bag my grandmother had given me. I kissed my mother; she didn’t cry in front of me, but I felt her hands trembling with a terror she couldn’t hide. My father remained motionless on the threshold, his eyes downcast. I was taken away.
The Sorting Room
I and six other young girls from our village were loaded into a military truck covered with a heavy tarpaulin. Inside, there were no benches. We sat on the cold metal floor in total silence. The truck lurched for hours. When we finally stopped, it was night. We were unloaded into a courtyard surrounded by high walls, illuminated by the harsh glare of searchlights.
In front of us stood a large, dark brick building with narrow, barred windows. It looked like an abandoned school or perhaps an old hospital. But the smell was wrong. It was acidic and chemical, a scent that immediately caused a wave of nausea.
Inside, the corridors were long and poorly lit. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women were already there—all young, all terrified. A female guard in a gray uniform, her hair pulled into a tight, severe bun, lined us up. Her voice was cold and mechanical as she explained that we were to undergo a “selection.”
This was the sorting room. It was a place where human beings were categorized into three distinct destinies, represented by three doors.
The First Door (Medical Wing): This door led to a wing where women were used as subjects for medical experimentation. Years after the war, I heard testimonies from survivors of this wing who spoke of forced procedures and tests carried out without any regard for human life. Many died; those who returned were broken, marked forever by the violation of their bodies.
The Second Door (Soldiers’ Wing): The women considered “desirable”—those who were young and healthy—were sent to this wing. They were treated as disposable property, subjected to daily violations by the occupying troops. Many did not survive more than a few months. Those who did lost all light in their eyes.
The Third Door (Forced Labor): This was the back door. It led to a munitions factory a few miles away. This was my destination. It meant working twelve hours a day, breathing toxic fumes, and sleeping on damp benches. It was brutal, but in the twisted logic of that place, it offered the only real chance of survival.
The Factory of Shadows
In the factory, there were about fifty of us, all French and all young. Fatigue made us mute. Hunger kept us hollow. We woke at five in the morning to a piece of hard black bread and a grayish soup that tasted of little more than dirty water and rotten vegetable peelings.
Our task was to assemble detonators for shells. It was meticulous, dangerous work. If we made a mistake—if we applied too much pressure or inserted a pin incorrectly—the part could explode. I saw women lose fingers; I saw one girl lose an eye to a metal fragment. Injury didn’t mean rest; it simply meant you were becoming “less useful,” a state that brought you dangerously close to the end.
After six months, my body began to fail. My hair fell out in clumps. My skin turned a translucent gray. My teeth grew loose. I could feel myself decomposing cell by cell. Yet, I held on. Somewhere deep inside, I refused to give them the victory of my death.
One day, a new woman named Marguerite arrived. She was twenty-three and had been captured for distributing resistance leaflets in Lyon. She had been sent first to the soldiers’ wing, then transferred to the factory when they deemed her “useless.” One night, as we lay side-by-side on the wooden bunks, she whispered to me: “They treat us like cattle, but we are not cattle. We are women, and one day they will pay.”
Marguerite died three weeks later of pneumonia. We never saw her again, but her words remained with me.
Liberation and the Weight of Survival
In August 1944, as the Allies advanced, the Germans began to evacuate the centers. We were moved like parcels from one place to another as the front lines shifted. Each transfer was a gamble with death. In November 1944, we were finally liberated by American soldiers who found our convoy abandoned near the German border.
I remember the look an American soldier gave me as he handed me a blanket. It was a look of pure horror. He saw in us something he never imagined possible. That look made me realize for the first time in months that we were still human—that we weren’t just numbers.
Returning to Saint-Omer was a surreal experience. My father had died of a heart attack months earlier. My mother held me and cried for hours, but I couldn’t cry. Something in me had gone out.
The Long Silence
For decades, I lived in a kind of fog. I married a man named Henry, a fellow survivor of captivity who understood the weight of things that cannot be said. We had children, and I loved them with all my strength, but I never told them the truth. When they asked what I did during the war, I simply said, “I worked,” and changed the subject.
I was a prisoner of the past. I would wake up screaming at night, hearing the voice in the corridor saying “Nächste.” I avoided the sound of German accents in the street, which triggered uncontrollable panic. I felt isolated from a world that wanted to move on, to rebuild, and to forget.
In 1988, I finally wrote a short letter to a historian looking for testimonies. It took another twenty years to find the courage to speak in detail. I realized that by staying silent, I wasn’t protecting myself—I was allowing the stories of women like Marguerite to disappear.
I finally gave my testimony to the national archives. I told them everything: the sorting room, the forced nudity, the cold, the toxic fumes, and the three doors. And when I was done, I finally cried. I cried for the seven decades of held breath, and for all those whose voices were extinguished in those dark corridors.
I am Josette Aumont. I was number 247. But before that, and ever since, I was a woman who refused to be forgotten.