“My name is Sister Marie-Thérèse. In 1943, I was 24 years old. Today, I am 86. I have never spoken about this. Not to my superiors, not to my sisters, not even to my confessor. But time passes, and silence weighs heavily. So, before I leave this world, I want someone to know. For someone to remember.
We were seven sisters in the small convent of Saint-Joseph, near Compiègne. We cared for the wounded. We hid Jewish families, passed messages, and prayed. One September morning at five o’clock, the trucks arrived. The soldiers knocked on the door. They shouted in German, then in French: ‘Open up — Gestapo!’ I still remember the sound of boots on the cloister tiles.
I remember the Mother Superior who stepped in front of us, arms outstretched, and said calmly: ‘My daughters, remain dignified. God sees us.’ They ordered us outside in a line. We were in our habits. The wind was cold. They shoved us into a truck. I remember the expression on the face of a young sister — Sister Claire, barely 19 years old. She was trembling. I took her hand and told her: ‘Do not be afraid. We are together.’ We did not yet know that we would never return.
We drove for hours. The truck was covered with a tarpaulin; it was dark inside. We were pressed against one another. I could feel Sister Claire’s breath against my shoulder. She was still trembling. No one spoke. From time to time, the Mother Superior would whisper: ‘Hail Mary.’ We responded in chorus, very softly. It was all we had left.
Around noon, the truck stopped. They made us get out. We were in a barracks courtyard somewhere in Germany. I no longer know exactly where. Perhaps near Cologne. There were barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and dogs barking in the distance. An SS officer looked at us. He smiled — a cold smile. He said in French, with a harsh accent: ‘Nuns! Interesting.’ They separated us from the men. There were also priests, resistance fighters, and Jews among the other prisoners. We never saw them again.
They led us to a separate barracks. Other women were already there — Polish, Belgian, French. Some had been there for months. They hardly spoke anymore. That evening, they gave us a thin soup of hot water and vegetable peelings. We ate in silence.
Then they ordered us to undress completely. I still remember the shame. We were consecrated women. We had taken vows of chastity. We had never exposed our bodies, even to one another. But the female guards — women in gray uniforms — shouted and struck with their batons. We obeyed. We stood in a line. The guards shaved our heads. Every one of us, including the Mother Superior, who was sixty-two years old. I remember the sound of the clippers, the cold on my skull, the tears running silently down my face.
Then they tattooed a number on our forearms. Mine was 5784. I still have it. It is faded now, but it is there. They issued us striped uniforms and a purple triangle — the mark for religious conscientious objectors. They had placed us in this category because we refused to participate in the war effort.
For the first few days, we prayed. A great deal. We believed that God would protect us, that our faith would be our shield. But very quickly, we understood that God, in that place, seemed very far away.
They put us to work at dawn. They counted us, they forced us to run. Anyone who fell was beaten. Then they sent us to the factory, where we were made to manufacture ammunition — shells for German rifles. Shells that would be used against our own countrymen, our own soldiers. The Mother Superior refused. She said: ‘We will not work for the killing. It is against our faith.’
For that, they beat us — every day — with sticks, with belts, with fists.
I remember one guard in particular. Her name was Irma. She was tall and fair-haired, and she laughed when she struck. She would say: ‘Your prayers cannot protect you here, my little nuns. In this place, I am your God.’
Then the abuse began in earnest — a different kind, the kind I have spent sixty years trying not to name. One evening after roll call, Irma separated Sister Claire from the rest of us. She was nineteen years old. She was led to a separate barracks used by SS officers. We waited all night. We prayed. We wept in silence.
In the morning, Sister Claire returned. She walked with difficulty. Her face was bruised, her eyes vacant and hollow. She did not speak. She did not pray. She simply stared at the ground. I took her in my arms. I whispered: ‘The Lord sees you. He knows.’ She looked at me for the first time since her return and said softly: ‘He was not there, Sister Marie-Thérèse. He was not there.’
That evening, I understood that faith could be broken.
In the weeks that followed, the officers came after dinner, drunk and laughing. They chose among us as one might select something from a shelf. The pattern became routine — one or two sisters taken each evening, returned by morning in states of profound suffering. We held one another afterward. We said nothing. There were no words.
When my own turn came, in November, I remember the cold, and the smell of alcohol on the officer’s breath, and nothing else that I am willing to carry into language. I simply left myself. My body was there, but I was elsewhere. I recited the rosary in my mind, silently, from beginning to end. When it was over, Sister Claire came and covered me with her blanket. She took my hand. She said nothing. She simply cried with me.
After that, five of us had endured what I have described. The Mother Superior and Sister Agnès were spared longer because of their age. But no one was spared forever. When the Mother Superior’s turn came — she was 62 — she returned to us broken. She ceased to speak. She ceased to pray. She stared into the void.
One evening, she took me aside and told me: ‘My daughter, if we survive this, never speak of it. Never. It is our cross. We will carry it in silence.’ I nodded. And I kept that silence for sixty-two years.
The winter of 1944 was the hardest. Cold entered everywhere. In the barracks, the temperature fell to minus ten degrees. We slept seven women to a single plank of one and a half meters. The blankets were thin. We shivered through every night. But the cold of the body was nothing compared to the cold of the soul.
The abuse had become daily — and had evolved into something more systematic and more deliberate. It was no longer simply brutality. It was the methodical destruction of who we were. They had learned which cruelties would cut deepest into women of faith. They used our beliefs as instruments against us.
I remember a night in December. They brought all seven of us outside in our thin shirts, barefoot in the snow. A drunk officer lined us up. He said: ‘Sing. Sing your hymns. I want to hear your prayers.’ We sang the Ave Maria. Our voices trembled. Our teeth chattered. He made us begin again and again. When Sister Claire stumbled over a phrase, he struck her across the face. Blood fell onto the snow. Then he took her away. We sang until morning — alone in the courtyard — to drown out what we could hear from across the yard.
When she came back, she could no longer walk. Two guards dragged her. We laid her on the plank and prayed through the night. She died at dawn. She was nineteen years old.
We did not cry. We had no tears left. The Mother Superior said: ‘Let us bury her with dignity.’ The guards laughed. They threw her body into the mass grave with the others — no coffin, no prayer. That day, something broke inside each of us. Faith was no longer a refuge. It had become a weapon used against us.
But we were still resisting — in our own way. We sabotaged production. We broke shells. We slowed the assembly lines. We hid messages and helped other women in the camp whenever we could. One night in January, we managed to help two Polish prisoners escape through the barbed wire. They ran into the snow and disappeared into the dark.
The next day: collective punishment. We were forced to stand in the courtyard from five in the morning until midnight, in minus twenty-five degrees, barefoot, in shirts. Three of us collapsed. Sister Agnès froze to death. The Mother Superior lost consciousness; I held her in my arms until the guards finally took us inside.
That night, I made a vow — not to God, but to myself: if I survive, I will testify one day.
Spring 1944. The camp changed. Trains arrived more frequently, carrying thousands of women — Hungarian, Greek, Italian. The camp was overwhelmed. We were still seven — no, five now. Sister Claire was gone. Sister Agnès was gone.
Then a new doctor arrived. Young, composed, precise. His name was Mengele. They called him the Angel of Death. He selected us — the five French nuns — for what he called the study of spiritual resistance. We were transferred to Block 10, the block of medical experiments.
There, they injected unknown substances into our veins, our abdomens, our necks. I remember one injection — a burning sensation so severe I screamed for hours. They restrained me to the table. Sister Jeanne, twenty-eight years old, received an injection in her eyes intended to alter their color. She was left permanently blind. The Mother Superior refused a procedure outright. She told them: ‘You can destroy my body, but you cannot touch my soul.’ They forcibly sterilized her — without anesthesia, without care. She died of complications three days later. I held her in my arms as she went. Her last words to me were: ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ I nodded. But deep inside, I could not.
The nights in Block 10, we heard screaming until dawn. We heard things I still cannot bring myself to describe, even now.
One day, I was selected for a sterilization procedure myself. I woke on the table afterward. The doctor was smoking a cigarette nearby. I never recovered the physical capacity that was taken from me that day. But in that room, lying on that table, I made myself a promise: I would remember everything. I would carry every name. I would survive to say them aloud.
We were guinea pigs. We were numbers. But we still had one another. We shared bread. We whispered psalms in the dark. We kept the small flame alive.
Sister Louise — the youngest of us still living, twenty-two years old — began to lose her hold on reality as the months continued. She spoke aloud to God, claiming He answered her. One evening, a guard overheard her. What happened to Sister Louise that night was an act of deliberate cruelty designed to punish all of us. She did not speak again after that. She became a shadow of herself.
January 1945. Allied bombing runs began. We could see planes in the distance. We knew the end was approaching. But for us, the most dangerous moment was still ahead. The SS knew they were losing. They wanted to erase every trace of what had been done here. Executions increased. The crematoria ran without pause.
One morning, they assembled all the women from Block 10 and told us: ‘Death march — westward.’ We left on foot in minus twenty degrees, in wooden clogs and striped uniforms. Those who fell were shot where they lay. I walked beside Sister Louise. She had not spoken in weeks. She held my hand.
We walked for days. At night, we slept in barns, or in the snow. We ate snow. Many did not make it. Sister Jeanne — the one Mengele had blinded — fell on the third day. A guard hit her, and she did not rise. We left her on the side of the road. I wept for the first time in months.
After ten days, only three of us remained: myself, Sister Louise, and a Polish woman named Anna. The roads were crowded with columns of prisoners and fleeing civilians. Allied aircraft flew overhead, sometimes strafing the columns without knowing who marched below.
One day, a British aircraft swept low over us. Sister Louise was struck. She fell. I knelt beside her in the road. She looked up at me, and for the first time in months, she smiled. She said: ‘I am going to see Him.’ She died in my arms.
I stayed there in the snow. I did not want to get up. A guard ordered me to move. I did not move. She raised her weapon. An SS officer stopped her. He said: ‘Leave her. She won’t last much longer.’ They moved on. I was left alone with Sister Louise’s body.
I prayed — truly prayed — for the first time in a very long time. Not for myself. For her. Then I stood up, and I walked. Alone.
I walked for three days. I stole apples from an abandoned farm. I drank water from puddles. Then, on the morning of May 8, 1945, I heard distant artillery, and then the sound of engines. Tanks. I hid in a ditch. One passed close to me. On its side: a white star. American.
I came out of the ditch. I raised both arms. I shouted in French: ‘Don’t shoot! I am French!’ The tank stopped. A soldier climbed down. He looked at me — the striped uniform, the tattooed number, the shorn head. He said nothing at first. He simply removed his jacket and placed it around my shoulders. Then he said, in English: ‘It’s over. You’re free.’
I fell to my knees. I wept for the first time in two years.
The Americans took me to a field hospital. They fed me, washed me, gave me civilian clothing. A doctor examined me in silence — the scars, the burns, the number on my forearm. He wrote in my file: Severe trauma. Definitive sterility. Fragile psychological state. I stayed three weeks. I slept a great deal. I spoke to no one.
When I was repatriated to France by train, Paris received us like heroines. Speeches. Medals. Flowers. I smiled and said thank you. But inside, I felt only shame — unworthy, diminished, unable to explain why the liberation felt hollow.
I returned to the convent near Compiègne. The sisters who had stayed welcomed me with open arms. They cried. They said: ‘Sister, you have returned. God is great.’ I said nothing. I went to my cell, I knelt, and I tried to pray. The words would not come.
I asked to be transferred. Far away. They sent me to a small convent in Brittany, near the sea. There, slowly, I began to pray again — with difficulty, in fragments. I resumed the habits, the services, the routines. I cared for the sick, I taught catechism, I tended the garden, I smiled. On the outside, I was calm. Obedient. At peace.
But inside, the silence was screaming.
In 1985, a young sister asked me: ‘Mother, you were deported, weren’t you? Did you suffer?’ I hesitated. I said: ‘Yes. But it is over now. God protected me.’ She looked at me and said: ‘You don’t pray the way you used to. I can feel it.’
I wept for the first time in forty years.
That night, I wrote a letter to the Mother Superior General and told her everything — for the first time since the camp, everything. She replied: ‘My daughter, you have carried your cross alone for too long. Come to me.’ I traveled to Paris. For three days, she listened without interrupting. At the end, she told me: ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself for. You are a victim and a witness. Your silence was an act of love — to protect the others, to protect the Church.’
I did not entirely believe her. But I was, for the first time, relieved.
She authorized me to speak to a psychologist, to a confessor. I began therapy quietly, in secret. I spoke for years. I wept. I raged. I grieved. And slowly, very slowly, I arrived at something that resembled forgiveness — not of them, never of them, but of myself.
I am 86 years old now. Sister Claire is gone. Sister Agnès is gone. Sister Jeanne is gone. Sister Louise is gone. The Mother Superior is gone. Of the seven women who left the convent of Saint-Joseph on that September morning, I alone remain to say their names.
So I say them now.
Sister Claire, nineteen years old. Sister Agnès, forty-four. Sister Jeanne, twenty-eight. Sister Louise, twenty-two. Reverend Mother Superior, sixty-two.
They were women of faith who died with extraordinary courage in a place designed to extinguish both. They did not survive to receive medals or flowers. No one delivered speeches in their names. The world moved on, and they were not remembered.
I want them to be remembered.
That is all I have ever wanted.”