I was ten years old when an officer German came into my kitchen house, pointed at me, how we chooses a fruit at the market and declares to my father that I was requisitioned for administrative services to the Lyon prefecture. My mother squeezed my hand so hard that I felt my bones crack.
My father couldn’t look at me in the eyes. We all knew that it was a lie. We all knew that I won’t come back the same. And we all knew there was no choice. It was March France had been occupied for three years and the Third Reich did not ask for permission for nothing. He took simply. My name is Bernadette Martin, I’m 80 years old and I’m going to tell something that no history book didn’t have the courage to write clearly.
Because when we talk about the Second World War, we talk about battle, of invasion, of heroic resistance. But we rarely talk about what was happening on the upper floors of hotels requisitioned, in the rooms numbered, in beds where young people girls like me have been turned into silent fuel for the machine German war.
I haven’t been sent to a concentration camp. I did not wear the yellow star. I don’t I didn’t die in a gas chamber. But I was used in a way that for decades made me wish to have died at that time because survive what happened in the room 13 of the Grand Etoile hotel has not been a liberation. It was a life sentence inside of my own body.
They didn’t call not that rape, they call it rape service. They didn’t call us victim, they called us resources. And optan commander Klaus Richter, man of years, married, father of three children in Bavaria, did not see each other like a monster. He saw himself as someone exercising a right of conquest. He chose the youngest.
He said that fresh skin calms the pressure of war. And me, with my face of a French peasant, my long catty hair, my visible innocence in the eyes I was chosen to be to him, exclusively to him, for 8 month in room 13, every Tuesday and Friday, punctually at 9 p.m., as a medical appointment, such as bureaucratic routine, as if my body was a stamped form.
When I say this now, sitting on this chair in front of a camera, I know my voice sounds cold. I know that I seem distant, but understand one thing. After sixty years of wearing this weight alone, after decades of doing pretending it never happened product, after having built an entire life on ruins that no one wanted to see, the only way to tell this story is with the same coldness with which it was imposed on me.
Because if I let emotion in now I don’t finish and this story needs to be told. Not for me, for others. for those who have gone crazy, for those who are committed suicide, for those who have gave birth to children that she never asked to have, for those who returned home and were treated as traitors, collaborators, of German put for those who never again managed to feel their own body without taste.
This hotel was located on rue de la Republic in the heart of Lyon, a city which before the war was known for the silk, gastronomy. beauty revival of these buildings. When the Germans occupied the free zone in November 1942, they transformed Lyon as a strategic center of operations. The Guestapo has settled in the hotel Terminus.
Vertmart requisitioned dozens of buildings and the hotel big star, five-story building with an art nouveau facade and high windows overlooking the ro has become this that they called a Holungsheim tune rest home. lie. It was a military brothel disguised as a help desk. Of official German documents discovered decades later in the Nuremberg archives confirm the existence of hundreds of these houses distributed throughout occupied Europe.
He called them soldiers, brothels, brothels of soldiers. But it wasn’t ordinary brothels, they were organized, hierarchical structures, medicalized. There were files medical, established schedules, daily quotas. There were rules, there was a absolute control and there we were women, some forcibly recruited as me, others brought camps of prisoners, still others exchanged for food for protection of their family, for empty promises of future freedom.
I don’t knew none of this when I was entered for the first time in this hotel. I only knew that my life had ended when the officer had designated me. In the truck soldier who took me there, there was five other girls. None of us didn’t speak. The silence weighed like lead. It was raining. I remember it because the water was hitting the tarpaulin canvas and created a hypnotic rhythm, almost comforting, as if the world exterior was still normal.
But when the truck stopped, when the doors opened and that I saw this imposing building with Nazi flags hanging at the entrance, with armed soldiers on the sides, with this artificial elegance of a hotel which no longer served other ordinary ones, I understood that I was entering into a type different from prison.
A prison where bars were invisible. A prison where torture left no marks external. A prison where we died little by little from the inside while pretending to be alive the exterior. The first days, I tried to understand the logic of this place. He there was a French woman, Madame Colette, who managed everything.
She was not German, she was a collaborator, one of ours. It hurt more than any direct violence. Knowing that a French woman was organizing the abuse of other French women. She gave us explained the rules in a mechanical voice like someone reading a manual of instruction. Rigorous hygiene, weekly medical examinations, total obedience, no resistance, no excessive crying, no marks visible.
The officers didn’t like the drama. They wanted efficiency. He wanted quick relief. He wanted to return to war by feeling man. And we owed them provide this. Otherwise, there were punishments. She did not specify which ones. She didn’t need it. We all knew that punishment in this context could mean anything what.
Transfer to a labor camp forced, summary execution, disappearance, simply cease to exist. I have been assigned to the room. Third floor at end of hallway, door in dark wood with a golden number. Bed double with white sheets changed every week. Bedside lamp in crystal, wallpaper with flowers delicate, windows overlooking a narrow alley where the sun did not penetrate never.
There was even a painting on the wall, a French rural landscape which contrasted sharply with what was happening was going inside. As if beauty and horror could coexist in the same space, as if the decoration could soften the violation. Mama Colette told me that I had luck. Than to be chosen by only one officer was better than serving several ordinary soldiers per night.
That the optur was a distinguished man, educated, who did not hit. That I should be grateful, grateful. This word reasoned in my head for years as if there had an acceptable gradation of abuse, as if gentle rape was a favor. The first time I saw Klaus Richter, he wore a uniform impeccable. polished boots, combed back hair, glasses with fine frames which gave it an air of teacher.
He didn’t shout, he didn’t didn’t push me. He entered the room, closed the door carefully, hung his coat on the coat rack and looked at me like someone evaluating a newly acquired object. He said my name correctly, Bernadette. He has pronounced each syllable. He asked my age. He said I was pretty, I had good posture, that I would serve well.
Then he removed his glasses, placed them on the table bedside and began to unbutton his shirt. He didn’t ask, he didn’t expected consent, he simply acted like someone who had a right absolute and I stood there motionless, feeling my body disconnect from my mind. It’s something that only those who have experienced it understand.
We don’t does not leave his body. We disconnect parts of it. We just let the envelope work. The real thing flees to an inner place, a mental basement where violence does not reach not completely. At least, not to this that moment. Later, she returns. She always comes back. But during the act, we survive through dissociation, through temporary death of consciousness.
This happened twice a week for 8 months, always on Tuesdays and Friday, always at 9 p.m. Richter was punctual. Germans love punctuality. He never failed. Even when he was sick, even when there had Allied bombings on proximity, even when the French resistance blows up a German train a few kilometers away.
He came, performed his ritual and left. Sometimes he spoke, he recounted his children, the wife who sent weekly letters, the war which, according to him, was being won. Other times he remained silent. He simply used body and was leaving. There was never any violence explicit. He never hit me. He never shouted.
But the violence has not no need to be physical to destroy. Systematic violence, ritualized, bureaucratic is still more devastating because there is no explosion. There is no single moment of trauma. It’s an accumulation, it is an eion. It is the slow death of the soul. There was other girls in this hotel. We we never knew the exact number, maybe 20. maybe 30.
She doesn’t did not let us speak freely, but we we passed in the corridors, in collective baths, during exams medical and the looks said it all. Some were younger than me, 15, 16 years old, others a little older, all with the same expression, emptiness, like wax dolls. There was a daughter, Simone, who was ten years old and came from a farm near Grenoble.
She cried every night. She cried softly, but the sound passed through the thin walls. One night, the crying stopped. In the morning, Madame Colette said that Simone had been transferred. Nobody believed it. We all knew what transfer meant. This meant that she had broken, that it was no longer useful, that it had been thrown away.
We don’t have it never seen again. Once, during a weekly medical examination, doctor German, a 50 year old man with hands cold and with an indifferent look, found signs of infection in one girls. She was immediately isolated. She never came back. They had a panic fear of illness venereal. Each of us was rigorously examined at the slightest sign problem, we disappeared because we were not human.
We were tools and broken tools are replaced. As simple as that, this industrial logic applied to female body was something that the Reich executed with perfection scary. There were documents, forms, statistics. Everything was recorded. Everything was controlled like a factory, like a chain of production, like a slaughterhouse.
I don’t have not tempted to flee. Some have tried, they were caught, shot publicly at Place Bellecour as example. I didn’t want to die. Maybe that makes me one cowardly. Maybe that makes me an accomplice. I don’t know. I know only that I survived. And survive in this context required a calculation cold. requires us to disconnect what makes us human, requires accepting the unacceptable.
I became an automaton, a robot, one thing. And that’s how I through these months, one day later the other, a Tuesday after a Friday, a violation after another, until the war begins to turn, until that the allies land in Normandy, until the French resistance intensifies its attacks, until the Germans begin to retreat.
In August 1944, Lyon was liberated. The American troops entered the city. The Germans fled or were captured. And we, the girls from the hotel Big star have finally been released. But released why? For where ? I returned home. My mother gave me hugged while crying. My father didn’t say anything. He simply looked at the ground.
The neighbors were whispering. Some spat earth when I passed. He said that I had collaborated. that I had been there [__] of the Germans, whom I had betrayed France as if I had had the choice, as if there had been a choice. Others girls were shorn. They had the publicly shaved head, marked as traitor. I escaped this, but invisible mark remained for always.
The optan Klaus Richter was captured by the allies. Tried at Nurbert? No, it wasn’t important enough. He was released in 1947. He returned to Bavaria. He resumed his life. He died of old age in 1982. I know because I looked it up. I needed to know if he had paid. He didn’t pay. None of them didn’t pay because what they got us fact was not considered a war crime.
It was considered part of the war. Too bad collateral. Insignificant detail. I got married in 195. I had two children. I never said anything to my husband. He died without knowing. My children also do not know or didn’t know until this recording. I kept it like you keep a bomb disabled. With caution, with afraid that it will explode and destroy everything around.
I lived a normal life the exterior. But inside I have continued to live in this room. this hotel this Tuesday at 9 p.m. My name is Bernadette Martin and I have spent 62 years wondering if I had the right to consider myself a survivor. Because to survive is to continue, it’s moving forward, it’s rebuilding. But what I did during all these years, it was not surviving, it was exist in apnea, hold my breath, wait for someone to finally give me permission to breathe again.
This permission never came. So, I learned to live with my lungs half filled. When Lyon was liberated in August 194, church bells were rang for hours. People in the streets. The tricolor flags emerged from the windows like flowers after the rain. The soldiers Americans distributed chocolate and cigarettes.
There was music, laughter, tears of joy. The nightmare was over. This is what everyone said. The nightmare was finished. But for me it came to worth starting in another form because the visible war had taken end. But the invisible war, the one that took place in the body and the mind women like me, that one continued and continues today.
When the authorities French regained control of the city, they immediately started to identify collaborators, men who had worked for the guestapo, the officials who had signed documents, traders who had sold to the Germans and women, especially women. Because one woman who had relations with a German, whatever the reason, whatever the constraint, was automatically suspicious, automatically guilty.
There was a word for us, collaboration horizontal. As if sleeping with the enemy had been a strategic choice. As if our bodies had been political weapons. Like if we had betrayed the homeland within us causing rape. I saw women hanging out in the public square, tied up to chairs, their hair shaved in front of delirious crowds.
I saw mothers holding their babies mixed-race people in their arms while they are was mowing, the children screaming terror. I saw men spit on she, women too. Everyone wanted to punish someone. And we were the easiest targets, the most visible, the most vulnerable because we couldn’t defend.
How to explain? How to say that we had no choice? Nobody wanted to hear. Nobody wanted to know. It was more simple to turn us into the guilty, easier to direct anger towards us rather than towards the real ones officials who had already fled or who were protected by the news authorities. I escaped the tent public, not out of justice, out of luck, because Madame Colette, the one who managed to the big star, was arrested quickly and refused to give our names. I don’t know why.
Maybe by belated guilt. Maybe by fear of German reprisals if she talked too much. Maybe simply because that she knew we were innocent. She was tried, condemned at fifteen and she died in 1953 in his cell. She never spoke. Grace to her, about ten of us have could disappear into anonymity. Return home discreetly, resume our lives as if nothing had happened.
But nothing was the same. My village was small. Everyone knew everything. Even without official proof, people they spoke, they whispered, they invented. My mother begged me not to to say nothing, to confirm nothing, to pretend I just had worked in a German factory as thousands of other French women requisitioned for forced labor.
That’s what we said. This is what that I have repeated for decades. I lied. I lied to my father, to my friends, to the man I married 6 years ago later. I’ve been building my whole life adult on this lie and this lie ate me from the inside like acid. My husband’s name was Henry. I have it met in 1949. He was a carpenter, a good man, patient, gentle.
He did not pose any questions about the war. A lot no men took a step. They don’t didn’t you want to know? It was more easy that way. We got married in 1950. I was 25, he was 30. We had two children, a boy in 1951, a daughter in 1954. I was a good mother, a good marry. I cooked, I sewed, I kept the house, I smiled when he had to.
But every time Henry touched me, even with tenderness, even with love, I found myself in the quarter 13. Every time he kissed me, I smelled the cologne German. Every time he took me in his arms, I became a statue. I dissociated exactly like I did during the war. Henry didn’t understand why I was so distant, why I never felt pleasure, why I cried sometimes afterwards love.
He thought it was fault, that I didn’t really love him and maybe he was right. Maybe I never really could love no one after what happened past because love demands vulnerability, requires surrender, requires trust and all these things had been stolen from me in this damn hotel. They never got them for me rendered.
My children have grown up, they have left home, they founded their own family. Henry died in 199 of a heart attack. We had been married years and for 48 years he had slept next to a woman he didn’t really know. A woman who wore a permanent mask. A woman who died at 18 and who had spent the rest of his life pretending be alive.
I thought about suicide several times, not immediately after the war. At that time I was too numb to feel anything either. But later, in the 1960s, in the 70s, when my children were adults and I no longer had any reason to stay strong for them. When Henry was there, but elsewhere, lost in his own thoughts, in his own regrets, when I woke up at night while suffocating, certain that I was in that room again, that Richter was going to enter, that everything was going to start again, I thought this would be easier to leave, to put end to this comedy, but I never
had the courage. Or maybe I had too much. Too much courage to continue, not enough to finish. In 2005, something changed. A French documentary filmmaker who worked on the occupation found archives Germans in a museum in Berlin. Of administrative documents concerning brothel soldiers, lists of names, medical reports, statistics on the number of women used in these establishments across Europe busy. The figure was staggering.
We estimates that between and more than 34,000 women were forced to serve in these military brothels. 34000. Most have never testified. Many died during the war. Others committed suicide afterwards. Still others simply disappeared in silence like me. This documentary filmmaker Thomas Berger managed to find some survivors.
He wanted to make a film. give a voice to the one who never had one. Someone gave him my name. I don’t don’t know who. Maybe an old one daughter of the great star who had survived and who knew where I was. Thomas wrote me a letter. A letter polite, respectful where he explained his project.
He said he didn’t want exploit our pain, that he wanted just let the world know, that history knows, that this atrocity is not forgotten like so many others. It took me 3 months to respond, 3 months to weigh the pros and cons, 3 months to me ask if I had the strength to live again all this, if I had the right to destroy the image that my children had of me, if I had the courage to betray the lie that had protected me for six decades.
Finally I said yes, no for me, for others, for those who had not survived, for those who had survived but who could not speak, so that their voice through mine is finally heard. The interview took place at my home in my small urban city apartment in November 2005. Thomas came with a small team, one camera, one taker sound, no aggressive projector, just soft, natural light.
He asked me questions, never brutal, always respectful, but each answer tore me apart. Every memory came up like vomit, like poison too long held. I spoke during four hours. I said everything. The forced recruitment, the hotel, madam Colette, the Richter bus, the others girls, Simone, medical exams, routine, dissociation, liberation, shearing, silence, marriage, children, the lie, the pain that never leaves.
And when I finished, I cried for the first time since 1944. I cried like one vomits, like one expels something toxic, like we empty ourselves. Finally, Thomas thanked me. He told me I was brave. I told him that courage had no nothing to do with that, that I no longer had nothing to lose, that I was old, that my children were adults, that I I now didn’t care about the eyes of others, that I just wanted the truth exists somewhere, even if no one looked her in the face.
The documentary was released in 2007. It was called The Forgotten of War. He was broadcast on a public channel French on a Tuesday evening at 10:30 p.m. Few people have seen it, but those who saw it, understood it. Some have cried, others sent letters, letters of support, letters of anger against a system that had us abandoned, letters from other women who had experienced the same thing and who felt less alone.
My children have discovered the truth by watching this movie. They didn’t say anything to me for two weeks. Then my daughter came to me see. She was crying. She asked me why I never told them. I told him I didn’t want to that he sees me differently. Let him see me as a victim, let him carry this weight. She hugged me and said that she understood.
My son is not never came. He never spoke to me again of that. I don’t know if he’s mad at me, if he is injured. if he preferred lie, I never asked him. I’m years old now, my body is tired, my hands are trembling, my eyesight decreases, but my memory remains intact. Every detail, every smell, every sound, as if my brain had decided it was that and only that which deserved to be preserved.
As if all good things, laughter of my children, walks with Henri, family meals had been erased to leave room only to this, to quarter 13, to Richter, to this cursed room. Historians speak much of the shoa rightly so. It’s an absolute horror, an industrialization of murder, a attempted total extermination.
I don’t don’t compare, I don’t minimize. But he there were other horrors during this war. Less visible horrors, less documented, less recognized. And among them, there is what is to us arrived. To us, the women of the brothels military. We weren’t gassed, we were not shot, but we were methodically destroyed, systematically.
And after the war we were erased by shame, by guilt, by indifference. There are very few archives on soldiers in brothels in France. The German army destroyed the most of the documents before fleeing. Those who remain are scattered throughout museums, archive centers, often uncatalogued. During decades, no one has looked.
Nobody wanted to know because recognize what had happened to us would have meant recognizing that the France had let it happen, that the French authorities, even under occupation, could have done more, than some French people had collaborated actively in our operation, that French women like Madame Colette had managed its establishments.
It was easier to forget us, but history always ends up remaking surface. In the 2000s, several historians began to work on this subject. They exhumed testimonies, found survivors, analyze documents and little by little a more complete picture to emerge, a terrifying image because what happened spent in these military brothels was not anarchic.
It wasn’t the act of a few violent soldiers acting individually. It was a system, a system thought out, organized, legitimized from above command. There were rules, protocols, medical examinations mandatory, planned rotations, punishments for those who resisted. Everything was recorded, everything was controlled.
The optan Klaus Richter was not an isolated monster. He was a cog in a machine, a man ordinary which, placed in a context of total war, absolute impunity, systematic dehumanization of the enemy, did what the system told him allowed to do. He didn’t see himself like a rapist. He saw himself as a tired soldier, using a service put available to him through his hierarchy.
And That’s the scariest part, isn’t it? the existence of monsters, but the existence of systems that transform ordinary men into monsters without let them realize it. After the broadcast of the documentary in 2007, I received a letter. A letter from the daughter by Klaus Richter. Her name was Elga. She was 70 years old.
She had seen the film by chance broadcast on a channel German a few months later. She recognized his father’s name. She wrote to me to tell me that she knew nothing, that his father had not never talked about the war, that he was returned in 1947, had resumed his work a teacher, had been a loving father, a devoted grandfather, that he was dead peacefully in 1982, surrounded by his family.
She asked me for forgiveness, not in the name of his father. She knew that she did not have this right, but for herself, for not having known, for to have lived in ignorance, to have loved a man who did that. I read this letter 10 times. I cried. Not of anger, of sadness because Elga was innocent, because the children are not responsible for the crimes of their parents.
Because she too was victim in some way. victim of illusion, victim of silence, victim of a story that was told to him hidden. I answered him, I told him that I didn’t blame him, that I didn’t didn’t hold her responsible, that the only thing I wanted was that the people know, let history know, that that will never be possible again.
We we corresponded for two years, long, deep letters where we let’s try to understand. She spoke to me of her father, of the man she had known. Kind, patient, passionate about literature, adoring her grandchildren. I told him about the man I had known, cold, methodical, indifferent to my suffering.
And we try to reconcile these two images, to understand how could a man be both once, how war could create this moral schizophrenia. Elga is died in 2009. She left me a last open letter after his death by his own daughter. In this letter, she thanked me. She said that our correspondence had enabled him to make peace with your history family, which she had finally been able to see his father as a complete human being with its gray areas, which it had stopped idealizing her, that she had understood that the love she had for he did not force her to deny her
crimes, that you could love someone and admit that he had done things unforgivable. This letter upset me because that she showed something rare, something precious. The capacity to look the truth in the face without destroy. The ability to carry the weight of the story without collapsing. The capacity to transmit this memory to subsequent generations without hatred but with lucidity.
Today, in 2010, I I know I don’t have much time left. My heart is tired, my body is giving up. But before leaving, I wanted to leave this complete testimony. Not just the four hours of the documentary, but everything. Every detail, every nuance, every contradiction because the story is never simple, because that victims are not always pure, because the executioners are not always obvious monsters, because that war reveals the worst of humanity, but sometimes also, strangely the best.
There was a girl in the open sky who Her name was Marguerite. She was 22 years old. She came from Marseilles. She was arrested for having helped the resistance. Instead of the to shoot, the Germans had sent him there as punishment, as humiliation. Marguerite refused to break down. She sang softly at night when the officers were not there.
She sang French songs, songs of freedom, songs of hope. And we, the other girls, we listened to him. And for a few minutes, we were no longer objects. We were human again. Marguerite survived. She returned to Marseilles. She joined the Party communist. She became an activist union. She fought all her life for women’s rights, for victims of war, to forget them the story. She died in 1998.
I attended this funeral. There had hundreds of people, workers, activists, young people. Everyone came to pay tribute to this woman who never gave up. And I, standing at the back of the church, was thinking of the X3. I was thinking about this girl who sang in the dark. I was thinking about the strength it took to stay human in the inhuman.
If I had to summarize these 62 years in a sentence, I would say this: “I spent my life trying to become the girl again that I was before March 1943. This 18 year old girl who was running in the fields, who helped his mother to make bread, who dreamed of a simple future, a husband, children, a house.
Nothing extraordinary, just a normal life. This girl died in the quarter of the great star. And the one who came out 8 months later late was no longer her. It was someone else, someone I don’t I didn’t recognize it. For a long time, I was ashamed. Ashamed to have survived. Ashamed of not having resisted. Shame for having obeyed.
Shame of my own body which had continued to function despite everything. Because that’s the worst torture. Not what they do to us, but what it does to our relationship to ourselves. We become strangers to ourselves, we we disgust ourselves, we despise ourselves, we punish ourselves and no one understands because outside, we look normal, we smile, we work, we raise children.
But inside we are dead for a long time. It took me decades to understand that I was not guilty, that shame should change sides, that it was not up to me to carry the weight of what had me been inflicted. But it’s not something something that is easily learned, especially when all of society tells you the opposite, when people look with contempt, even though your own family prefers not to talk about it, when silence becomes the only option acceptable.
After the broadcast of documentary, I received hundreds of letters, some kind, other haters. There were people who called me a liar, who said that I invented everything for myself point out, who claimed that military brothels had never existed, that it was propaganda anti-German. These letters hurt me, but they also confirmed something to me important.
Holocaust denial not only concerns the shoa, it concerns all the atrocities that some prefer to deny because they disrupt their view of the world. Fortunately, there were also magnificent letters, letters of women who had experienced the same thing. Not necessarily in France, Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Greece, everywhere where the German armies were ironed, there had been these brothels.
And everywhere, women had been reduced in silence after the war. But now, thanks to documentaries, thanks to research historical, thanks to some voice that finally dared to speak, the silence cracked. A woman wrote to me from Warsaw. Her name was Irena. She was 82 years. She had been locked in a military brothel for 3 years. 3 years.
I had spent 8 months and I believed die. She is three years old. She told me that she had never spoken, not even to his family. But seeing me testify, she felt less alone. She thanked me for having had the courage that she did not have. I him I replied that it was not courage.
It was just that at 80 years old, we nothing left to lose, that we can finally tell the truth because fear has no no more grip. Irena and I have corresponded until his death in 2008. She sent me photos of her family, his grandchildren, his garden. She told me about her life. and me mine and we shared this strange brotherhood this brotherhood demolished survivors, ghosts alive.
It was comforting to know that we were not alone, that others understood, that others carried the same burden. One day, a young French historian, Maxime came to see me. He was preparing a thesis on sexual violence during the Second World War. He wanted to interview survivors. He was respectful, sensitive, intelligent.
He asked me questions that no one had ever dared to ask. Questions about the consequences of long term, on sexuality after trauma, on motherhood, on the couple, about silence, about guilt, about resilience. I told him everything without filter because that he needed to know, because future readers of his thesis had need to know because history does not cannot be satisfied with numbers and dates.
She needs flesh, blood, of human voices. She needs understand what war does actually to people. Not only on the moment, but after, years later, decades later. Maxime asked me if I had forgiven. It’s a question that I am often asked. As if the forgiveness was a moral obligation, like it’s the only way to heal. I told him that I didn’t know, that I didn’t know what forgive meant in this context.
Forgive Richter. He died without never having recognized what he had done, without ever having expressed the least regret. How to forgive someone who doesn’t ask for anything, who doesn’t recognize nothing? Who lived and died thinking that he had done nothing bad? Forgive the system, the Reich, the German army, they are abstractions.
We do not forgive structures, we forgive individuals. And the responsible individuals are almost all dead now. So, at who to forgive? To the French who looked down upon after the war? to the company which preferred to close the eyes maybe. But forgiveness doesn’t erase not what happened. Forgiveness does not does not heal wounds.
He makes them just a little more bearable. What I did is not forgiven. It’s accepted. Accept that it happened past. Accept that it changed me. Accept that I will never become again the girl from before. Accept that it is a part of me, even if I hate it. Accept that I can live with it, that I can continue. Not intact, not happy, but alive in my own way.
In February 2010, I felt unwell cardiac. Nothing serious, just a warning. My body told me that it It was time, the end was approaching. I don’t be afraid of death. On the contrary, sometimes I look forward to it because death will be the end of life memory, the end of nightmares, the end of this weight that I have been carrying since 1943.
But before leaving, I wanted to do something, something symbolic. I decided to return to Lyon, return to the great star. I don’t didn’t even know if it still existed. 67 years had passed. Maybe he had been destroyed. Maybe he had been transformed. Little import. I had to go. I took the train. My daughter wanted to accompany me. I refused.
It was something I had to do alone. The trip lasted two hours. I looked at the landscape passing by, the fields, the hills, the little ones villages, peaceful France, France today, so different from that of 1943. And yet, for me, nothing had really changed. Time had passed, but the past remained frozen, intact, eternal.
Arriving in Lyon, I walked to the rue de la République. My legs were trembling, my heart was beating hard. I was afraid of what I would find or what I wasn’t going to find. And then I saw it. The building still there, still standing, the art facade new, the high windows, everything was identical, except that it was no longer called big star.
It had become a building apartment. People lived there, families, children. They were sleeping. ate, laughed in rooms where we had been raped. They didn’t know anything, he didn’t suspect anything. I am left there on the sidewalk opposite for an hour just watching, thinking memory. Ghosts were everywhere. I saw the military truck park in front of the entrance.
I saw Madame Colette open the door. I saw the German soldiers enter and exit. I saw the girls at the windows, their blank look. I saw everything. as if the time did not exist, as if overlapped, a man came out of the building, fifty. He saw me standing there and asked me if I was okay, if I had need help.
I failed all of him tell him, tell him what this building had been, tell him what had happened here. But I kept quiet. What would I have won? he would have been horrified, or he wouldn’t have believed me, where it would have been hard to comfortable. So I just said that I had come to see a place of my youth.
He smiled politely and gone. I entered the hall. Nobody stopped me. I mounted the stairs slowly. My knees hurt. Each step was a eternity. Pray floor, second floor third floor corridor to the right and there at the bottom the door, the one which carried formerly number 13. Now she wore a number banal. Apartment 3C, one plate modern, a doorbell, sounds of television inside, a life normal.
I put my hand on the door, I closed my eyes and felt again all come back. The smell, the cold, dim light, bed, richness, sound breath, his weight, his voice, everything. Like siete ans did not exist, as if I was still years old, as if I were prisoner again. I cried. There, in this ordinary corridor of a building banal of Lyon, I cried every tears that I had never shed, all the tears held back for decades, all tears forbidden.
And when I had no more tears, I left. I went down the stairs. I went out and swore to myself I wouldn’t never come back. That night in my hotel room Lyon, I had a dream, a dream strange. I was in the quarter 13, but this time I was old. I was years old. Rictor entered but he too had aged. He was become a frail old man.
He me looked and for the first time I saw fear in his eyes. No arrogance, not indifference, fear. And I understood that this fear, it was that of memory. The afraid that what he had done would be never forgotten. that his name remains associated to this forever. I woke up soothed as if this dream had given me an answer.
The only possible revenge was not death, was not the prison, was not the punishment physics, it was memory, it was the testimony. It was to ensure that what had happened be known, recorded, transmitted, that the future generations know, that wealth of the whole world know that their actions do not disappear with them, that they remain engraved in history, in testimonies, in archives forever.
I am When I got home, I called Thomas documentarian. I told him that I wanted to do one last interview more long, more complete. An interview which would be archived, which would be accessible to researchers, historians, students, which would become a document official, not just a film broadcast one times on television, but something permanent, indestructible.
He accepted. We toured for 3 days. I said everything, absolutely everything. The details I had first times. Things too intimate, too painful, too shameful. I have them say because the story needs everything. Not just broad outlines, but details, nuances, contradictions of humanity in all its complexity.
This interview is now deposited in the national archives of France. It is accessible, searchable, he will exist after me. It’s my only victory, my only revenge. Richter is died in peace. I will die knowing that his memory is sullied, that his name is associated with shame, that its little ones children, if they seek, will find and will know and carry this weight.
Is it from cruelty? Maybe. But the cruelty is not canceled by forgetting. She is canceled by memory, by recognition, by justice, even late, even imperfect. And if I don’t can’t have justice for me, the less I can have it for the story. Today, as I record these last words, I know I no longer have a lot of time.
My body is giving up, my heart is tired, but my mind is clear, clearer than it has been in years decades because I did what I had to do. I spoke, I testified, I left a mark. Will listen to this in the future, women who have experienced things similar, I say this: “You are not not alone. Your pain is real. Your trauma is legitimate and you do not have not brought shame.
The shame belongs to those who made, not to those who suffered. Speak if you can, testify if you have the strength, but if you can’t, know that others have done it to you, that your silence is understood, that your survival is already a victory. to future generations, I say this: “Study history, all history, not just that of battles and treated, but that of bodies, women, invisible ones, because it is where the truth of war is found, not in military strategies, but in what she does to the most vulnerable.
And make sure it doesn’t happen again never, not in this form, not in another. To my children, if you listen to me, I asks you for forgiveness. Sorry from you having lied for so long. Sorry for not having been the mother I would have wanted to be. Sorry for being so distant, so cold, so absent sometimes. It wasn’t your fault.
It was not not for lack of love. It was just that I had nothing left to give, that everything had been taken even before you were born. And to you who listen to this testimony, whatever the reason who brought you here, I ask you one thing: don’t look away. Remember, pass it on. Because as long as we remember, victims do not die completely.
They continue to exist in the collective memory and it is the only immortality that really matters. I Calls me Bernadette Martin. I had years. I survived a quarter of the big star. I survived Klaus Richter. I survived the war. I survived to silence. And now I can finally leave in peace because my voice will remain and with it, that of all the others forever.
Bernadette Martin died in February five years after recording this testimony. She left without regret. without fear, but with certainty that his voice would continue to reason long after his last breath. She had understood something essential thing. As long as someone remembers, as long as someone listens, as long as someone testifies, the victims never die completely.
They continue to exist in the collective memory, in the hearts of those who refuse to turn away the look. This documentary is not simply a history of the past. It’s a warning for the future. It’s a reminder that behind every war, there is has broken bodies, destroyed souls, lives reduced to ashes by systems that transform humanity into machine.
If this testimony touched you, if Bernadette’s story awakened something in you, we ask not to let this moment fade into silence. Subscribe to this channel so that other forgotten voices may be heard. Activate the bell notification so you don’t miss any new testimony. Leave a like for that this algorithm, as cold as it is, understand that these stories deserve to be disseminated, shared, preserved.
And above all, leave a comment. Tell us where you’re looking at us from. Tell us what this story provoked in you. Share your thoughts, your emotions, your own connection with this story because every comment is another stone in the building of collective memory. Bernadette gave us bequeathed much more than a testimony.
She entrusted us with a responsibility, that of never forgetting, that of transmit, that of refusing that horror is normalized, trivialized, erased. So, before leaving this video, take a moment, breathe, think about what you come to hear and ask yourself that will you make this memory? How will you honor these voices who had the courage to break the silence? The The answer is yours.
But know that every share, every comment, every gesture of support brings life Bernadette a little longer and with her all the others, those who have not never been able to speak, those who wait still justice. Thanks for listening until the end. Thanks for being there. Thank you for remember.
Disclaimer: This story is fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any names, characters, places, or events are fictitious or used fictitiously. No real person or organization is intended to be portrayed.