Thanks for coming from Facebook. We know we left the story at a difficult moment to process. What you’re about to read is the complete continuation of what this experienced. The truth behind it all.
That night, alone in the house stone that had belonged to my parents, I felt for the first time times the real fear. Not the fear of dying, but the fear of live without purpose, without hope, without anything other than emptiness. Two months later, I discovered that I was pregnant. This was not planned. It was an accident or maybe a miracle depending on how we see the things.
Étienne and I had spent our last night together embraced under heavy blankets, shivering with cold and despair, trying to keep in remember each other’s warmth before May war separate us always. When I realized my period wasn’t didn’t come, when I felt the morning sickness and sensitivity in my breasts, I knew immediately.
I have cried that morning. I cried because that I was alone. I cried because I didn’t know if Étienne was alive. I cried because put a child in the world in the middle of this war seemed to be the best decision cruel and selfish that someone could take. But I also cried relief because for the first times since yours left, I had something to live for, something beyond myself, something that still pulsed with life in a world that smelled of death.
I have protected this pregnancy with everything I had. I hid my stomach under wide coats and thick shawls. I avoided leaving my house for the day. I ate little to save the food, but I made sure my baby got what he needed he needed. At night, alone in the black, I put my hands on my stomach and whispered promises to this life invisible. I will protect you.
Little no matter what happens, I will protect. This October morning, the sky was heavy and low, laden with clouds gray which seemed to impress the earth. The wind blew cold and sharp, tearing off the last leaves of trees and scattering them on the ground like ashes. I was in the kitchen, sifting flour into a cracked ceramic bowl, trying to make bread with the little that was left.
My hands were shaking, not from the cold but of hunger. I wasn’t eating properly for days, but in me, my son moved, kicked my ribs as if fighting for have space and that made me smile, even in the midst of fear. That’s when I heard the sound, a low, distant rumble coming from the dirt road that went up the mountain military trucks.
My heart went packed. I dropped the bowl on the table, flour spilling on the floor of worn wood and I ran towards the window. Three green trucks were slowly going up the road, their wheels, crushing the stones and raising dust. Of German soldiers, many of them, I hid the bag of flour under the sink. The food was contraband and being caught with meant immediate arrest.
I put on my widest coat, the one in brown wool which had belonged to my father and I tried to hide my month-old belly. But when I heard the boots being knocked front door, I knew it was useless. I opened the front door that he doesn’t smash her. Three soldiers fit in my garden. One of them, the taller, with empty blue eyes and a thin scar crossing the eyebrow straight, pointed directly at me and said in broken French with a heavy accent: “You pregnant, come.
” I tried to ask why. I have tried to say I didn’t do anything. But before any words come out of my mouth mouth, he grabbed my arm and pulled me forcefully. I screamed. I have tried to resist but another soldier grabbed my other arm and together they dragged me to the truck parked in the street.
Other women are already inside sitting on the floor frozen metal clinging to each other others with wide-eyed terror. I immediately recognized it a few. Hélène Rouselle who worked at the bakery and had a sweet smile that lit up anything what a room. Jeanne Baumont, the teacher who taught children to read even when there was no book.
Claire Delonet, the nurse who took care of the sick without charging anything because she knew that no one had any money. all young, all pregnant, some more advanced than me, with huge bellies that barely held together under the torn dresses, others early pregnancy, still trying to hide. But they were all there, all captured, all condemned to something we didn’t understand not yet, but that we could already smell in the air.
Something terrible, something without return. I sat next to Héline. She was shaking violently. Teeth slammed, his hands clenched, his belly as if it could protect the baby by the force of the spark. I gave him whispered: “Everything will be fine, but my voice came out weak, without conviction, because I didn’t believe it and she.
” The truck started to move. We we went up the mountain for hours. Following dirt roads narrow and dangerous tossed violently at every turn. Some women vomited, others cried softly. I held just my belly and felt my son kicking like he he also knew that something Something horrible was going to happen. When we we finally stopped, it was in front of a compound surrounded by barbed wire and guard tours.
It was not a concentration camp like Auschwitz or Dacho. It was smaller, more isolated, hidden between mountains covered with mists. I later learned that this place was called the Vertors camp south, an experimental camp created specifically to study women enclosures captured in the area. The existence of this place has been erased official records after the war.
The Germans burned the documents, They destroyed the evidence, but I was. I saw what they did and I never forgot. If you listen to this now, wherever you are, at you, at work, on the way to back, stop for a moment. Breathe. Look around you and realize that the world around you has was built on the houses of people who never had the chance to tell their stories.
It’s not just a story is a testimony. It’s blood, sweat and tears transformed into words. And if something something inside you moves when you hear that, leave a sign, a comment, a word so that these women are not forgotten, so that their name is not lost not in silence. We were taken out of the truck under the screams.
The soldiers pushed us, we pulling our arms, insulting us in German with words that we don’t we didn’t understand but whose hatred was perfectly clear. My right leg has hit the metal side of the truck and started bleeding, but no one cared. They lined us up in front of a German officer who held a briefcase. He walked slowly along the line, stopping in front every woman, observing our belly with clinical attention, noting something on paper.
When he arrived in front of me, he stopped. He looked at my stomach, then my face. He lifted my head from the tips of fingers, forcing me to look at him in the eyes. His eyes were brown, cold, emotionless. He noted something thing on the briefcase and continued. After that we were taken to a long barracks and dark, divided into compartments separated by wooden planks.
There is no had no bed, just straw ground, damp and musty smelling. The cold was penetrating, a cold which enters the bones and never comes out. The smell was unbearable, a mixture urine, sweat and despair accumulated. I sat in a corner. I hugged my knees close to me and I felt my son moving again. I whispered to him quietly like a prayer.
Hold on, please hold on good. The first night in this barracks was the longest of my life. I didn’t sleep. None of them we didn’t really sleep. We stayed lying on the straw, wet, trembling with cold and fear, listening the noises outside. Boot that clap, shout order in German, sometimes muffled cries coming other buildings.
Helene was in bed near me. She was 26, pregnant of this month. His face was swollen, his hands too. She suffered from retention water, but here, no one cares worried. She whispered to me the darkness. Madeleine, do you think they will let us give birth? I don’t didn’t answer because I didn’t know. But deep inside me, a cold voice was already whispering the truth.
He didn’t let us not brought here to leave us live. He brought us here to observe, to experiment, to test how far is the body of a pregnant woman could be pushed before giving way. The next morning, before dawn, the doors of the barracks opened brutally. Three soldiers entered and shouted numbers in German. I don’t didn’t understand it right away.
Then I live that he read the numbers sewn on our clothes, the numbers that had us been assigned the day before. I was the number 83, Hélène was 81, Jeanne was 79. They called six numbers including mine. We were taken outside in the rain thin and icy up to a building adjacent gray concrete. Inside, a narrow windowless corridor, a single electric bulb hanging from the flashing ceiling and at the end of the hallway three painted metal doors in gray numbered 1 2 3.
Nothing else, no indication, no explanation. A German officer stood in front the doors. He was big in the quarantine with round glasses and an impassive expression. He us looked at one by one then said in French slowly as if he were speaking to children. You will choose a door, each of you, one door. You can’t go back. You can’t change your mind.
You choose now. My heart stopped. I looked at the doors. They all looked the same, metallic, cold, identical. But I knew, with icy certainty, that behind each one was hidden something something different, something terrible. Helene was called first. She moved forward, trembling, her hands protecting his enormous belly.
The officer pointed to the three doors and repeated: “Choose!” She looked at the doors for what seemed like an eternity, then whispered in a barely audible voice. The first. The officer shook his head. Two soldiers came forward, opened the door number 1 and pushed Hélène to the interior. The door closed behind her with a snap metallic.
I didn’t hear anything after this. No screams, no noise, just the silence. A thick, heavy silence which weighed on my shoulders like a stone. Jeanne was called next. She chooses door number 3. Same process, same silence. Then it was my turn. The officer looked at me and said, “Number 83, choose.” I stared at the doors, at my legs were trembling.
My son was moving in my stomach as if it sensed my fear. I thought of Étienne, of our last moments together, with all the promises that I had made to myself and I whispered second. The officer shook his head. The soldiers opened door number 2 and I was pushed inside. Behind the door, there was a small room approximately 3 m on tr.
No window, one cold concrete floor, a jump in a corner and in the center a wooden chair. It was everything. The door closed behind me and I heard the bolt turn. I stood still, trying to understand what that meant, what what they were going to do to me. During several minutes, nothing happened. Then slowly I began to feel something.
Light heat at first, then more and more intense. The ground beneath me feet were starting to get hot. The walls too. The temperature was rising gradually, inexorably. It wasn’t a fire, it was something controlled, calculated. The room had been heated since the exterior. I understood immediately. He wanted to see how long a pregnant woman could withstand extreme heat before collapsing.
My heart accelerated, I removed my coat, then my jacket, then my vest. But the heat continued to increase. My skin was starting to burn, my lips were cracking, my mouth was dry like paper. In my belly, my son was moving frantically as if he was looking for a way out, an escape. I screamed, I banged on the door, I begged to be let out, but no one came.
I don’t know how long I was in there. Maybe an hour, maybe less. But every second seemed to last a eternity. At one point my legs gave way and I I collapsed onto the burning ground. I felt my skin blistering contact with concrete. I screamed in pain, but I had no more strength. I thought I was going to die there in this metal box heated with my son still alive inside me.
Then suddenly, the door opened. From fresh air entered. Two soldiers pulled me by the arms and dragged me out of the room. I could barely breathe. My skin was red, covered in blisters. My clothes remained soaked of sweat. They threw me into the hallway like a sack of potatoes. The officer stood over me, writing notes on his clipboard.
He didn’t even look at me. For him, I was just a number, an experience, a result to be recorded. Later, I learned what was hidden behind the two other doors. Behind the door number 1, the one that élène had chosen, there was a room identical to the mine. But instead of heat, she was exposed to extreme cold.
The walls were frozen. The temperature fell below zero. Helene, seven months pregnant, already weakened by water retention, does not dye long time. She collapsed in less than 30 minutes. When they took her out, she was unconscious. Her baby was dead inside her. She survived a few more days before dying of a generalized infection.
Behind door number 3, the one Jeanne had chosen, there was something something different. No heat, no of cold. but a gas, an odorless gas which slowly diffused in the room affecting the respiratory system. Jeanne started to cough then suffocate, then spit blood. When they took her out, she was still alive but her baby was dead.
She gave birth three days later to a lifeless child. She died a week afterwards, the lungs destroyed. I don’t know not why I survived. Maybe because that I was younger, perhaps because that my body was stronger or maybe just by luck. But I survived and so did my son the moment. The days that followed were a fog of pain and fear.
I was taken back to the barracks where I remained lying on the straw, unable to move. My skin was covered in burns. My lips were They were split and bleeding. I didn’t have almost no more votes because of having shouted. But in my belly, my son kept moving. Every shot of foot was a promise, a reason to to hold on, a reason not to give up. The other women looked at me with mixture of pity and terror.
They knew what had happened to me could happen to them too. Some were taken away the next day, others the next day. Every morning, the soldiers entered, shouted numbers and took women who did not never came back or who came back broken, gutted half dead. Claire from Lenet, the nurse, was taken away week after me.
She was pregnant of five months. When she returned, she spoke more. His eyes were empty, his hands were constantly shaking. I asked him what he had done to her, but she did not answer. She just shook his head again and again, as if she was trying to do get something out of your mind. Tr days later she made a false layer.
The baby came out in the middle of the night without a sound. Claire dyes it in his arms for hours, cradling this little lifeless body, singing a lullaby that his own mother had for him learned. Then she gently put him down in a corner of the barracks and lay down next to him. She didn’t wake up never. I don’t know if she died sorrow or infection, but I know that she chooses to leave.
She didn’t have nothing left to hold on to. Food was scarce. We once a day gave a bowl of clear, almost transparent soup, with a few pieces of potatoes floating on the surface. No bread, no meat, nothing that can give us strength. Pregnant women, especially those whose pregnancy was more advanced, started to lose weight.
Their rounded bellies, but their faces were digging. Their arms became branches. Some lost their teeth. Others developed skin infections that spread quickly. and the soldiers were always observing. They took notes, measured our bellies, checked our heartbeats. He treated us like animals in a laboratory, as objects to be studied, not as human beings.
One evening, while I was lying in the dark, I heard a faint voice coming from neighboring compartment. She was a young woman I had never seen previously. Her name was Marguerite. She was four months pregnant. She had been captured in a village near Grenoble. She whispered to me: “Madeleine, Do you think we’re going to get out of here one day? ?” I didn’t know what to answer.
I wanted to lie to him, tell him that yes, that everything would be fine, that the war would end soon and we would return at our place. But I couldn’t because that I didn’t believe it myself. So, I just tell him, “We’ll try, we are going to fight. As long as we still breathe, we fight. She didn’t answer, but I heard her cry softly in the darkness.
The weeks passed, my stomach grew up, my son became more strong, more active. Every kick me reminded why I had to survive. But my body was weakening, my legs were swelling, my hands were trembling. I had constant dizziness. A morning, as I tried to get up to get my ration of soup, my legs sedate.
I collapsed on the ground, unable to get up. A older woman, a widow named Simone, helped me sit back down. She looked at me sadly and said: “You don’t have much time left, little one. Your body is giving up.” I knew it, I felt it, but I refused to accept it because accepting it was abandoned and abandoned it was condemned my son.
Then one morning December, as the snow began to fall outside, I felt something different, a pain dullness in the lower back, a pressure intense in my stomach. I am immediately what that meant. The work began. I was pregnant with h month. My baby came too soon, much too soon. I was screaming for call for help, but no one came.
The soldiers don’t care. For them, a birth in the barracks was just a given additional information to be recorded. Simon and two other women gathered around me. They tried to help me as best they could, but she had no equipment, no clean scissors, no sterile tissue, no hot water, nothing, just their hands and their courage.
The work lasted all day. The pain was unsustainable. Every contraction was torn from the inside. I screamed, I cried. I begged for this stops, but it didn’t stop. Simon held my hand and whispered prayers. Another woman supported me back and slowly, inexorably, my son started to go out. When he was born finally at dusk, while the sun descended behind the mountains and the barracks were immersed in a gray darkness, he did not cry.
He was so small, so fragile. His skin was blue, her eyes were closed. During a terrible moment, I thought he was dead. But then Simone took it, turned him around and gently patted him on the back. And suddenly a little cry escaped from his lips. Weak, fragile, but alive. My son was alive. I pr in my arms, trembling, exhausted, half conscious.
I looked at him, this little tiny being who had survived all this. And I cried. I was crying of relief. I was crying in pain. I cried because I knew that The fight had only just begun. I I called him Lucien because that meant light. And it was exactly what it was for me in this hell. A little fragile light, vacillating, but refusing to turn off.
The days following his birth were the most difficult of my life. Lucien was so small that he held in both my hands. He doesn’t almost didn’t cry. He didn’t have any strength. I didn’t have any milk. My body, weakened by months of malnutrition and torture, produced almost nothing. Simon and the other women tried to help me. They shared their meager ration of soup, giving me the apple pieces of land so that I have a little more strength. But it wasn’t enough.
Lucien lost weight. His skin became translucent, her lips became blue. I knew he was to die and I couldn’t do anything. One evening, as I held him against my chest, trying to keep it in hot with my own body, a woman approached me. I didn’t know her not. She was older, maybe 40 years old, with gray hair and eyes deeply sad.
She handed me a small piece of rolled up fabric. To inside there was a small piece of dry bread and a few pieces of raw potatoes. She whispered: “Chew this then give it to him with your fingers. That’s all I can do.” I thanked her with tears in the eyes. She shook her head and left. I never saw her again. I don’t I don’t know what happened to him.
But thanks to she, Lucien survived that night, then the next one and the one after that. The soldiers don’t care about Lucien. To them he was just another number, another experimental result. They don’t gave us no medical help, no care, nothing. But they continued to observe us, to take notes, to measure, to record.
One day, one officer entered the barracks and pointed out. He ordered me to follow him with Lucien. My heart sank. I thought that they were going to separate us or worse. But I had no choice. I pr Lucien in my arms and followed the officer outside. He led me to a building that I didn’t have never seen before. Inside he there was a room with a table metal and medical instruments lined up on a tray.
A doctor German stood there, dressed in a blouse white. He looked at me, then looked Lucien and said coldly: “Post the child on the table.” I hugged Lucien against me. I refused. Two soldiers grabbed me by the arms and took my son away from me. I screamed, I I was struggling, but they were too strong.
They placed Lucien on the table metallic. He started to cry weakly. The doctor examined him as if he was an object. He measured his head, his chest, his limbs. He listened heart. He took notes, then he raised looked at the officer and said something thing in German. The officer nodded head. Then they returned Lucien to me. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t didn’t ask any questions.
I took my son and got out as quickly as possible. The months passed. The winter of 1943 left place in the spring of 1944. News of the war began to circulate. Even in the camp, Allies were progressing, the Germans were retreating. hope, this feeling that I had almost forgotten, began to be reborn. But with hope also came fear.
We knew that if the Germans lose the war, they would destroy all evidence of this that they had made them here. And we were the evidence. One morning in June, we heard explosions in the distance, then gunshots, then screams. The soldiers were running in all the sense, panicked. The doors of barracks opened and an officer shouted: “Raous! Raus! Get out! Get out! We left trembling, without knowing what awaited us.
But instead of line us up for an execution, he push towards the exit of the camp. He us hunted. He was abandoning us. Maybe because he no longer had time to kill us. Maybe because he thought that we die. Anyway, we walking for days without food, without water. Some women collapsed at the side of the road and never got up.
Others disappeared into the night, but I continued Lucien pressed against my chest because I promised, I promised to protect him and I I will keep this promise until my last breath. Finally we reached a village liberated by French forces. Of soldiers found us, gave us water, food, blankets. We were free. After months hell, we were finally free.
But freedom had a bitter taste because so many women were not there for the live. Hélène, Jeanne, Claire, Marguerite, all these women who were forced to choose between three doors, all these women who never had a real choice. I returned to Vieux en Vercorp with Lucien. My parents’ house was still there, although partly destroyed.
I’m slowly rebuilding it. Lucien grows. He became strong, intelligent, nice. He never really knew what had happened during his first months. I never tell him how would I could? How to explain to a child that he had survived something no one should ever have to confront? Étienne never returned. I received a letter informing me that he was died in a munitions factory in Germany.
An explosion, accident or maybe not an accident. I don’t I’ll never know. I wore his mourning, I I cried for him and I continued to live because that was all I could do. For years I kept silent. I wasn’t talking to no one knows what happened in this camp. Not to Lucien, not to my neighbors, not to the authorities. Because no one wanted to hear.
After the war, the people wanted to forget. They wanted rebuild, move forward. He didn’t want not hear about pregnant women tortured in secret camps. It was too dark, too disturbing, too real. But in 2004, when I was very old and I felt my life fading away slowly, I decided to speak. I told a historian who worked on the forgotten camps of the Second War worldwide.
He came to my house with a camera and I told everything. Each detail, every pain, every name. He cried while listening to me. He told me that no one knew that this camp, the southern vertors, had existed, that it had been erased from the archives, that the Germans had burned all the documents before fleeing, that I was probably one of the last survivors still alive.
He asked me why I had waited so long. I answered him simply because no one was ready to listen. But now it becomes knowledge. 6x years later, in 2010, I sadly in my sleep. Lucien was at my sides, he held my hand and I walked away knowing that I had kept my promise. I had protected him. I gave him a life.
a life that so many others had never had. But before leaving, I let this story, these words, this testimony so that the world knows, so that names of Hélène, Jeanne, Claire, Marguerite and all the others are not forgotten so that no one can say “I didn’t know.” Because now you know and with this knowledge comes responsibility, that of remembering, that of never letting this happen reproduce.
Today, while you listen to these words, I want you to ask one question, just one. If you had been there in front of these three doors, what would you have chosen? Door number 1 Where the Cold Slowly Freezes You until your heart stops beat. Door number 2 where the heat burns you alive, where your skin bours soouffle, where your child burns inside you, where door number 3 where an invisible gas destroys your lungs, leaving you to suffocate for that your baby dies silently in your stomach.
Which door would you have chosen? And above all, how would you have lived with this choice for the rest of your life? Because that’s the real thing legacy of the war. It’s not just the dead, it’s are not just the ruins, it are the survivors, those who carry the weight of the choices they were forced to make do.
Those who wake up every sweaty night wondering if they could have done differently. Those who live with the guilt of having survived while others died. I died in 2010, but part of me died long before. Part of me died in this hallway outside these three doors. A part of me died in this heated room when I felt my skin burning and my son struggling in my belly.
A part of me died every time I looked at Lucien and remembered all the mothers who never had the chance to hold their children in their arms. But one other part of me survived. The part that refused to give up. The part that continued to breathe, to to beat, to protect. The part that said “No, you won’t have me. You won’t won’t have it.
This part remained alive until my last breath and now she lives through these words, through this testimony, through you. So, I ask you, will you make of this story? Will you just move on thing? Carry on with your day as if nothing was? Or are you going memory? Are you going to talk about Helene, of Jeanne, of Claire, of Marguerite? Are you going to say their name out loud so that it does not disappear in the silence? Because that’s all that they now have names, stories, memories carried by strangers who have never known them but who can honor them by refusing
to forget. The war does not end when the guns fall silent. It ends when the last survivor dies and even afterwards, she continues through the stories that we choose to tell or shut up. I chose to tell and now it’s your turn to choose. Will you listen? Are you going to remember or will you turn away eyes like so many others have done because forgetting is also a choice and sometimes it is the cruelest of all.
This story you just heard is not fiction. It’s not a scenario invented to thrill. This is the real life of Madeleine Fournier and thousands of women whose names have been erased, whose bodies were used as objects of experience, whose children were sacrificed in the name of a monstrous ideology. As you listened to these words, maybe you felt something thing? An oath in the chest, an lump in the throat, dull anger which rises. It’s normal, it’s human.
This is proof that you are not indifferent to the suffering of others and it is exactly this feeling that we must keep alive. Madeleine waited decades before to speak, 61 years of silence with the weight of these three doors, of his choices impossible, of these women who are not never returned.
She didn’t speak ease. She did not speak for glory. She spoke because she knew that if she didn’t, no one would do it. 6x years later having given this testimony, she is part carrying with her details that we will never know, faces we will never see, names we will never hear. But she left us the essential, the truth.
A raw, painful truth, unbearable, a truth which must not never be forgotten. This documentary exists for a simple reason. Honor the memory of these women Hélène Roussell, Jeanne Baumont, Claire Deonet, Daisy and all the others whose names are are lost in the ashes of the story. Each of them deserved to live.
Each of them deserved to see her child grow up. Each of them deserved to grow old in peace, surrounded of those she loved. But the war took this chance away from them. And today, all they have left, it is our memory, our ability to to say their name, to tell their history, to refuse that their suffering be reduced to a simple footnote of page in a history book dusty.
If this story touched you, if something in you has broken listening to Madeleine’s story, then do something. Don’t let this moment pass in indifference. Subscribe to this channel so that these testimonies continue to exist. so that other forgotten stories be told. So that collective memory does not does not transform into collective amnesia, activate the notification bell to don’t miss any new documentaries because every view, every share, every comment is an act of resistance against forgetting.
It’s a way of saying “I remember, I testify, I refuse that this disappear.” And above all let a comment, say where you are listening to this from documentary. Say what you felt. Say if you knew this story before today. Share your thoughts, your emotions, your questions because every comment is proof that these women did not suffer in vain.
Every word you write is a stone placed on the invisible monument of their memory. Every testimony that you leave is a way of prolonging their life beyond death. Never underestimate the power of simple comment. In a world that forget quickly, your words are important capital. Madeleine said something profound before leaving.
Forgetting is also a choice and sometimes it is the cruelest of all. So today, make the opposite choice. Choose to remember. Choose to speak. Choose to transmit. Because as long as we tell their stories stories, they are not really dead. As long as we pronounce their name, they continue to exist. As long as we refuse to divert the look, their sacrifice retains meaning.
And it is perhaps the only justice that we can still offer them, the promise that they will never be forgotten. Thanks for listening to the end. Thanks for having the courage to watch facing this dark part of our history. Thanks for being here now bringing this testimony with us. If you want support this work of memory, subscribe, share this video and above all, talk about it around you because that stories like those of Madeleine must not stay locked in darkness.
They must be shouted, broadcast, passed down from generation to generation so that never, never again will humanity cannot say “We didn’t know”. Now you know, and with this knowledge comes responsibility, that of never forgetting.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.