He chose us for our purity, not for our strength, not for information, not for our benefit, for our purity, as if we were rare trophies in a war that devoured everything on his passage. My name is Jeanne Vain. I am 86 years old and have spent more than six decades of trying to erase from my memory what the German soldiers made the nuns prisoner during the Second World War.
I never succeeded. The memory is engraved in my flesh, in the smells, in the sounds that reason again. I was young, I was 24 years old. I wore my outfit with pride and I I believed that my faith would be enough to get through any darkness. I was deeply mistaken. In this prison camp in the north of France, I learned that there are violence that leaves no mark visible, but which destroy everything believe to be.
I saw sisters lose their voice before losing their body. I have seen holy women reduced to perverted objects of desire, treated like experiments, like toys reserved for bored officers. and I survived. I was the only one fifteen to return. I carried this burden alone all my life. But now, before dying, I decided to speak because what they have us fact cannot be forgotten.
Because when we erase these stories, the violence finds space to return. It was the end of October 1943 and autumn arrived cold and wet in the interior of France, near Clermontferrand, where our convent is found hidden between hills covered in mists and dense forests who seemed to protect us from the world exterior. We lived there for years in 15 nuns of the order of Notre-Dame de Mercy, devoted to the care of forgotten, orphaned children of war, abandoned elderly people by families who had fled to south, sick people that no one wanted
no longer touched out of fear or poverty. We did not have weapons, we did not let’s not hide any resistance fighters. We don’t do not transmit secret messages. We were just women who prayed, who worked and who believed that religious neutrality would make us invisible to the eyes of the occupation Nazi. pure naivety.
The war was devastating already Europe for 4 years. But in this mountainous region, we lived still a kind of fragile illusion, as if the prayers created a invisible shield around our walls ancient stone. I woke up every day before dawn. I went down the narrow stairs to the chapel icy where the smell in old is mixed with the mold on the walls.
And there, kneeling on the worn wooden bench, I asked for divine protection for all of us. I believed that God saw, that our dedication would be rewarded. I thought the clothes we wore made us untouchable. But the truth is that he marked, he distinguished us, he transformed us into something rare and therefore desirable for men who had lost everything concept of humanity.
On the morning of October, I heard the noise of military trucks which went up the narrow road leading to the convent. It was a deep noise, mechanics that broke the silence morning like a blade. I was in the kitchen preparing bread for the children when Sister Marguerite came running. The pale face, eyes wide with terror.
She didn’t need to say a word. The noise grew, got closer and we all knew what that meant. We gave up everything. We ran upstairs where found the children’s dormitories and we tried to hide them in the cupboards, under the beds behind the heavy curtains that smelled of the month and naftaline. But there was no time.
The main door was smashed in a crash that made shake the whole building and in a few seconds they were inside. Of German soldiers from Vermarthe, mostly young. Some didn’t even have a full beard, but they wore uniforms impeccable and held their rifle like we hold work tools. He shouted orders in German, a a language that none of us mastered completely.
But the tone was clear, universal. It was the language of institutionalized violence. We all went down to the large room, the fifteen nuns, and we were lined up against the wall of cold stone, while an officer, older, with graying hair and meticulous looks, walked slowly in front of us observing each face like inspecting livestock.
He got stopped in front of me, tilted slightly head and said something German to the soldier next to him. The soldier laughed. It was a short, dry laugh, devoid of humanity. And at this moment, without yet completely understanding what what was happening, I felt for the first time in my life what it was like to be seen not as a person, but as an object.
We all have were arrested, without formal accusation, without judgment, without right to contact whoever it is. They pushed us in military trucks covered with dirty tarpaulins that completely blocked daylight. And we traveled for hours under conditions that we never imagined possible. The smell was unbearable, a mixture of sweat, fear, die and of something indefinable that I later identified as the collective despair.
We were pressed against each other others, tossed violently at each hole in the road, trying to pray to low voice, but the vibration of the engine choked everything. Sister Cécile, the oldest among us, was 62 years old and suffered from problems cardiac. She started to feel hurt during the journey.
She was breathing with difficulty, she was sweating cold. But when we asked for water to the soldiers who escorted us, they laughed again. This laugh, I I will never forget that laugh. It was not not explosive cruelty, it was automated bureaucratic cruelty, as if our pain was a detail unimportant in a process more wide that they executed without question.
We arrived at the camp prisoners late in the afternoon. It was an improvised military installation in the north of France, near the Belgian border, surrounded by barbelets and of guai towers where soldiers armed with machine guns monitored each movement. It was not an extermination camp like what we discovered years later.
It was something different, less known, less documented. It was a center of detention for prisoners considered as special. where violence was not not industrialized but personalized. They immediately separated us from common prisoners. We have been taken to an isolated hut back of the complex, far from others buildings, hidden behind a row trees that seemed to have been planted purposely to block the view.
To inside, the smell was that of wood wet, clay and some chemical thing that stung the eyes. There were fifteen rusty iron beds, thin mattresses, stained with urine and old blood, a jump in the corner that served as collective toilets, no windows, only one metal door locked from the outside. And there, in this almost total darkness, while that we are trying to understand what was happening to us, we heard for the first time what was going to happen repeat every night during following months. The heavy footsteps that
were approaching, the key turning in the lock, the door that opened slowly and against the weak light of corridor, the silhouette of an officer German who watched us all like we choose something in a showcase. He entered slowly, closed the door behind him and said in French broken but understandable as we now had to understand our new function, that we were not no longer nuns, than God was not there, that purity was some something that only existed as long as it allowed.
And then he chose, he pointed out Sister Marie-Thérèse, the youngest among us, 19 years old, blonde hair that had never been cut, an angelic face which seemed carved to represent holiness. She was dragged outside for that she screamed, struggled, implored mercy. We tried to hold her back, but other soldiers came in and told us pushed against the walls with the butts of their rifles.
The door was closed and we stayed there in the black to hear the cries that came from a nearby place, screams that started strong, desperate and who diminished to sobs suffocated. Then silence. If you’ve made it this far, let a like on this video and in the comments, tell us where you look. Stories like those of Jeanne must be remembered.
They must be shared because when we forget, we open space so that violence returns and because that certain truths, too painful as they may be, they cannot be buried. Marie-Thérèse returned hours later. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t cry. She walked to her bed, lay down on the side facing the wall and remained motionless until daybreak.
His body was there, but something in her had been erased. I learned that night that he there are deaths that occur without that the heart stops beating. And this was only the beginning because what they did to him, they repeated it with us all. Night after night. They chose one, sometimes two. They took away, they brought back.
And we, who spent our whole lives praying for purity, for dedication divine, for the love of our neighbor, we we are seen transformed into experience of perverted pleasure for men who used our faith against us. The outfit we wore, the symbol that we represent, all this is become part of the ritual of humiliation. He wanted to break the sacred.
He wanted prove that nothing was untouchable, that not even God could protect us there. I remember the first time I understood that we were not ordinary prisoners, that our condition of nun placed us in a particular category, some something precious and contemptible times. It was during the second week of captivity, an evening when the rain drummed against the tin roof wavy barracks creating noise dull and monotonous which almost covered all other sounds.
An officer superior had entered accompanied by three younger soldiers who followed like apprentices observing a master at work. He wore an impeccable uniform, polished boots that shined even in the darkness and these gestures were slow, calculated as if he savored every moment of absolute power that he exercised on us.
He stopped in the center of the room to light a cigarette whose acrid smoke mingled with the smell of moldy and fear that already permeated the air. And he started talking French with a heavy accent but understandable. He explained to us that our presence in this camp was not by chance, that we had been selected precisely because we were nuns, because we represented something pure in a world in decay and that this purity had to be tested, proven, destroyed if necessary.
He said the war changed rules, which God himself seemed to have abandoned Europe and if God had given up, so we belonged now to those who have the power to decide our fate. These words fell like stones into a well bottomless, reasoning in silence terrified that we were all holding on. And as he spoke, his gaze slowly passed through each of us, lingering on faces, bodies hidden under torn clothes, like if he was evaluating a commodity.
That night they took three of us at the same time. Sister Bernadette who was 32 years old and came from a peasant family from Brittany, sister Élise, 26 years old, former teacher who had joined the order after the death of her fiancé in the first months of war. and me, they took us out in the night cold and damp, led us to through a maze of barracks dimly lit by lamps oil that cast shadows caves on the warped wooden walls up to a larger building, more solid which apparently served as officers’ quarters. Inside,
it was surprisingly warm, almost stifling, a violent contrast with the bitter cold from outside. There was a wood pile in a corner, furniture stolen from French houses, a dark red velvet sofa that swears with the rest of the military decor, wine bottles lined up on a shelf and on the wall a portrait of fury who observed us with his gaze and fanatic.
Four officers were there, sitting around a table where people were hanging out playing cards, half worms empty, overflowing ashtrays. They looked at us entered as we look an expected spectacle. And one of them, one man in his forties with scars on the face and huge hands, slowly got up and walked towards me smiling. That smile was worse than anything what a verbal threat.
It was a smile of owner, of someone who knows he can do absolutely this that he wants without consequence. He reached out his hand, to touch my face, to run his rough fingers across it along my cheek and whisper something thing in German that I don’t have understood but whose tone was sufficiently clear.
What happened then I only told it once times in my life to a psychiatrist American military in 1946, just after my liberation. And even to him, I didn’t couldn’t say everything. There are words that do not exist to describe certain experiences. There is violence which escape language because they precisely destroy the ability to to name, to structure, to give meaning.
What I can say is that I have learned that night that the body can survive things that mind refuses to accept, that the soul can fragment into pieces to protect this that remains of oneself and that prayer sometimes becomes a form of madness necessary to avoid sinking completely. I recited the Our Father over and over in my head, eyes closed so tight that I saw stars dancing in the inner darkness of my eyelids and I imagined myself elsewhere in the convent chapel kneeling in front the hotel, smelling of the child
Gregorian field which reasoned against the stone vaults. But the reality always came back brutal, inevitable, in the form of physical pain, weight on the body, of alcoholic breath against the face, of muffled laughter other officers who observed smoking and drinking as if they were witnessing banal entertainment.
When they were done with me, they started with Bernadette then Élise. We stayed there until dawn and when they finally took us back to barracks, the sun was already rising, pale and cold, illuminating a world that does not looked more like the one I had known. The following days were turned into a routine nightmarish where time lost everything sense, where nights and days confused in an infinite succession of methodical humiliation.
We have learned to recognize signals, times when they would come, the guys of officers who preferred this or that among us. Some liked the most young, others older. Some wanted resistance to have the excuse to hit. Others preferred total submission which gave them the illusion of consent. There was twisted logic to everything this, an invisible hierarchy that we we finally understood to try to survive.
Sister Marguerite who had 40 years old and a severe face marked by years of hard work has become the target of a particularly captain sadist who seemed to enjoy breaking this which he perceived as pride. He made her come every night, sometimes just to watch her undress and complaining over and over again for hours, forcing her to recite prayers while he was making fun of her, he spat on her, hit her with a belt when she hesitated.
Daisy lasted three weeks before losing completely the reason. One morning we found her squatting in a corner of the barracks, naked, swinging back and forth muttering fragments of Latin which do not no longer formed any coherent sentences. She no longer recognized us, responded more to our attempts to comfort and a few days later, they took him away.
We never have it reviewed. We learned from a guard who spoke a little French that she had been transferred to an asylum military psychiatric somewhere in Germany. Dead or alive, we we never knew. Dehumanization was progressive, methodical, almost scientific in its application. He doesn’t gave us almost nothing to eat, just enough to keep us alive, but in a constant state of weakness which made all physical resistance impossible.
hard black bread stone, a clear soup where floated there sometimes pieces of rotten vegetables, murky water which gave us stomach cramps. We all have lost a lot of weight in just a few weeks. Our clothes become too big hung on our bodies and masses. Our faces dug took on the appearance skulls covered with thin skins and gray.
But the worst wasn’t the end physical, it was destruction systematic of our identity, of everything what defined us before. He us prohibited praying together, sing, to comfort us mutually. When he surprised us pray the rosary or hold our hands hand in the darkness, he separated us, hit us, deprived us of the meager the next day’s food ration.
The objective was clear: to break us, no only physically but spiritually, tear away this faith which was our last dignity, our last refuge. And for some of us, they succeeded. Sister Cécile, the oldest, died in December, officially from pneumonia, but in reality of despair, of this form particular form of death where the body ceases simply to struggle because the mind has already given up.
She passed away one night during her sleep and the next morning they have threw his body in a false commune without ceremony, without prayer, as one throws away trash. The winter of 1943 was longest and coldest I have never known, not only because temperatures dropping well below zero, transforming our barracks in the freezer where we would be against each other to not to die of cold during the night, but mostly because of this feeling that time itself had stopped, that we were trapped in a loop hellish that would never end.
The days were all the same gray, endless, rhythmic only by hunger, fear and nocturnal visits which continued without release. Some officers became regulars, developed preferences, always demanded the even among us as we order our favorite dish in a restaurant. This regularity made things easier somehow even more unbearable because it transformed horror in routine, in banality, in something expected and therefore inevitable.
I remember a young lieutenant, maybe years, blond, eye, blue, who could have passed for the incarnation perfect Arian propaganda and which chose me almost every week. He never spoke, never looked at me never in the eyes, accomplished this that he came to do with efficiency mechanic then left immediately as if he were performing a task administrative.
This coldness was somehow more terrifying than open cruelty, because it revealed how far we were become non-persons, objects functional without interiority, without soul. But there were also rare moments and precious where something human survived despite everything. Sister Anne-Marie, who was 28 years old and came from a family bourgeois from Lyon, had succeeded in hide a very small wooden crucifi which she kept sewn into the hem of his clothes.
Every night, after the guards had made their last round and that we were certain to be alone, she delicately took it out and we love it from hand to hand in darkness, each holding him a few seconds, hugging him to her chest, murmuring a silent prayer. This simple gesture, this little piece of wood carved that was worthless materially became our anchor, our proof that we still existed as a spiritual being, that whatever something in us resisted despite everything.
One evening in January 1944, a guard discovered the crucifi during an excavation surprise. They returned everything barracks, tore up the mattresses, videos our meager possessions and have ended up finding this tiny object that Anne-Marie was desperately trying to conceal in his closed hand. The guard tore it off roughly, looked at it with a mixture of disgust and curiosity, then threw it on the ground and crushed under his boot until he Only fragments of wood remain.
Then he hit Anne-Marie with a such violence that she lost two teeth and remained unconscious for several hours. When she awake, the first word she says pronounced was pardon. And this forgiveness was addressed not to his executioners, but to us, as if she felt guilty for endangering our last link with God.
The weeks passed and we were less and less numerous. Sister Hélène, 35 years old, tried to escape in February, enjoying a moment of confusion during a transfer of prisoners. She ran through the camp barefoot in the snow, screaming prayers Latin and almost reached the fence before a machine gun burst the mowing.
I saw him fall, his body projected forward by the impact of balls. Bright red blood spilling on the pristine snow, creating an image of a horrible beauty that I have never could erase from my memory. They left his body there for three days as a warning and we had to pass by every time we went out to do chores. Sister Gabrielle, the quietest among us, the one who never cried even during the worst tortures, hanged in March with a piece of rope that she had patiently braided from of Phils torn from his coat.
We discovered it in the early morning, hanging from a beam, the face of a waxy pallor them and this time even the guards seemed troubled as if suicide was a form of victory for us. A choice that he couldn’t control. Spring 1944 made subtle changes but perceptible. Allied bombings were becoming more frequent.
We heard the sirens, the explosions distant that made the ground tremble and we perceived in the attitude of keep a growing nervousness, a fear that he could no longer hide completely. The officers came less often and when they came, they were more brutal, more urgent like if they knew their time was counted and wanted to extract until the last drop of power before everything collapses.
In June 1944, after the landing ally in Normandy, of which we have no learned of the existence that several weeks later the camp entered in a chaotic phase where the strict military organization has started to disintegrate. The guards were fewer and fewer. Many had been sent to the front and those who remained seemed lost, unsure of what to do with us.
Some prisoners began to be transferred eastwards, towards Germany, under conditions still more terrible, crammed into trains of merchandise without food or water. We, the few nuns who remained, there were only six of us left that time we were left in the barracks with surveillance minimal. It was both a blessing and new anguish, because we did not know if this abandonment relative meant he would forget us or if he was planning something worse before leaving.
One evening in August, an SS officer we never seen before arrived to camp with a small unit. He was different from the others, more cold, more methodical, with this look emptiness characteristic of those who have participated in the worst atrocities and for who death has become a simple administrative formality.
He gathered all the prisoners remaining, lined us up in the courtyard central and started a selection. Man on one side, woman on the other, then subdivision by age, by state of health, by potential utility. The nuns were set aside once again always this special category which followed us like a curse. The SS officer approached us consult a register and announced that we would be transferred the next day to an unspecified destination.
That night was the longest of my life because we knew everything mean these mysterious transfers. We had heard the rumors about extermination camps, on the rooms gas disguised as a shower, on the false communes where the bodies were burned by the thousands. The next morning never came, at least not like planned.
Around 4 o’clock, when it was dark still black and thick, only darkness seemed to weigh on us like a physical presence, explosions shook the camp with incredible violence. The Allies bombarded the area, targeting probably the infrastructure German military, but touching also the prison camp in their relentless progress towards liberation.
The chaos was instantaneous and total, a sudden collapse of military order who held us captive. The barracks collapsed under the direct impacts. Entire structures disintegrate in seconds in sheaves of shattered wood and twisted metal. Fires broke out everywhere, creating an orange light and dancing that transformed the night into a surrealist painting of hell.
And the guards were running in all directions shouting contradictory orders, their legendary discipline completely evaporated in the face of the threat coming from the sky. In the middle of this apocalypse where the earth trembled under our feet every time new explosion, where the air itself seemed to burn our lungs, prisoners tried to flee, to hide, to survive these few minutes that separated life from dead.
Our barracks were hit by a indirect shot, probably a missed target his main target and who fell to just a few meters from our wooden prison. The shock wave was so powerful that I felt my tymans explode. A sharp whistle invaded my head and didn’t leave me for weeks. Part of the roof was collapsed in a crash of broken wood and twisted metal sheets which tore everything in its path, the old beams cracking like giant waters beneath the pressure.
The dust and smoke immediately invaded the space, we blinding, suffocating us, transforming our breathing in a struggle desperate to even suck only a little air that is not saturated of particles. In total confusion, while we coughed and fumbled for our companions in the darkness become even more opaque, the door which held prisoner was blown away by the shock wave, torn from its arms as if she were just a piece of cardboard.
We were free, but free in a hell of fire and death where every second could be the last, where freedom itself seemed to be than a cruel illusion before final annihilation. Sister Louise who was with me since start of this ordeal, which had shared every moment of terror and of humiliation, grabbed my hand with it a surprising strength for someone in his state of exhaustion and created me something I haven’t heard cause of the ringing in my ears.
But I understood, seeing his arm point north she wanted we ran towards the forest which bordered the camp. We ran, barefoot on the ground which alternated between icy mud and shards of glass and metal, stumbling over debris, bodies of undifferentiated soldiers and prisoners in death, bomb craters still smoking which exhaled heat intense when we passed too close.
My heart was beating so hard that I had felt like it was going to explode out from my chest. My lungs were burning as if I were inhaling pure fire. But the fear, this primitive fear of survival pushed us forward. Behind us, the camp burned in a destructive symphony, illuminating the night sky with an orange glow and red that looked like the paintings medieval paintings representing hell.