I was 16 when I learned that he There are things worse than death. I My name is Jeanne Lemoine, I am 78 years old and for 62 years I didn’t say a word about what happened in this place. Not because I lacked courage, but because no one would have believed. Today, sitting here in my house around Dijon, in front of a camera for the first time in my life, I asks if there is still time, if that still counts.
But then I remember if I don’t tell now no one will tell because that I was one of the last. It was October 1943. France had been occupied for three years. I lived with my mother and my little one brother in a village near Bone, in heart of Burgundy. My father was died in 1940, from the first days of the invasion.
We grew apples earth, turnips, everything that could grow in this hard soil and cold. I went to school when it was possible. I dreamed of becoming teacher. But war does not require not what you dream of. This October morning, two soldiers Germans appeared at our door. They didn’t shout, they didn’t have anything broken.
They simply said that I had to accompany them for a document verification. My mother has squeezed my hand. I saw the fear in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. Not in front of them. I never saw him again. Sometimes when I talk about all this, the people ask me where I get my strength to continue. I answer for certainty that someone somewhere needs to hear.
If you listen to me now, from where you are, know that your presence here already means something. Let a comment, tell us where you are from look at us because these stories cannot die in silence. I was taken away in a German facility that does not appear on any official map of the time, nor in the archives French, nor in the archives Germans captured after the war.
But I was there. It was about 40 kilometers away north of Dijon, hidden in a rural property which belonged formerly owned by a winegrower’s family. The The Germans had requisitioned it in 1942. They surrounded everything with barbelets, built wooden barracks the rear, install spotlights which remained lit all night.
Officially, the place did not exist not, but we, the women who were in there, we knew very well that he existed. When I arrived, there had around prisoners. Most was between fifteen and years old. Some were accused of resistance activity. Others, like me, found themselves simply in the wrong place, wrong time where had the wrong name or the bad face.
The first days, I still believed that I would be released, that someone would notice the mistake, that my mother would find a way to get out of there. But then, I met Simone. Simon was 22 years. Dark hair, big eyes, hands always cold. She had been there since almost a year when I arrived. She was the one who explained the rules to me.
Here you are no longer a person, she said to me gently first night. You are a number, an object. And more the sooner you accept this, the easier it will be to survive. I didn’t understand about the moment, but Simon was right. We We all received a number when we arrived. Mine was 4ente They sewed one piece of white fabric on the sleeve of my dress with this number embroidered in black.
I quickly learned that when they called the number, I had 5 seconds to answer. If I didn’t answer, I received a baton blow in the back. I never failed to respond. The routine was always the same. We we woke up at 5 a.m. to the sound shrill whistle. We were sons outside the barracks, even in the rain, even in the snow.
A officer was doing the counting. Then, we were taken to work. The work varied. Some days we washed soldiers’ uniforms. Others days, we peeled apples dirt in the kitchen. Sometimes we are ordered ditches to be dug or carry bags of cement. Nothing of this what we were doing really didn’t of importance.
The goal was for us keep busy. controlled, broken. But the worst was not the work, the worst was the looks. I noticed from the first weeks, there were soldiers who looked at us differently. Not with with hatred, not with indifference, but with something that I didn’t know not named at the time. Today I know what it was.
It was from the obsession. He watched us during that we work. They remained standing by the fences, smoking, speaking among themselves, but always with eyes on us. Some prove their favorite. I saw when a soldier fixed his gaze on a girl specific day after day. He memorized his movements, learned his schedules, waited and then one night this girl disappeared.
The first time it happened, it was with a daughter named Helene. She was ten years old, blonde, blue eyes, delicate face. A German lieutenant began to follow your gaze weeks after arrival. Simon noticed it before me. He’s going to take her, she told me one evening while we were lying on our board beds.
It’s always like that. Take it where I asked. Simon did not respond. Very later, Hélène was called by her number after curfew. Two guards are entered the barracks, pointed out towards her and said: “Come!” She came out trembling. She is returned before dawn. She didn’t speak to person. She lay down in her bed, turned his face towards the wall and stayed like that for two days whole.
When she finally started speaking again, his words were rare, broken, empty. Simon told me “Now she belongs to him.” I don’t didn’t completely understand what that meant meant, but I started to get afraid because I too was observed. There was a soldier. His name was Klaus. I never knew his name of family.
He was young, maybe twenty or 25 years old, tall, thin, hair blonde, cut short. He had a way of walking that seemed to study, controlled and he looked at me. At the beginning, I tried to ignore. I did pretending not to notice, but it was impossible. He was always there when I carried wood, when I washed the dishes, when we formed the line for the morning count.
He never said anything. He looked simply. Simon warned me. Don’t never looks back. Never. Because that if you look at him, he will think that you are interested and then it will be worse. I have obeyed. I kept my eyes downcast. I have walked slowly. I breathed deeply. I tried to become invisible, but Klaus continued to look.
One evening he appeared at the door to our barracks. He is not entered. He just stood there holding a lantern, lighting our faces one by one one. When the light came on for me, he stopped. He enlightened me for long seconds. I felt my heart beating so hard that I believed that it was going to explode. Then he turned off the lantern and left.
Simon squeezed my hand in the darkness. He’s deciding, she said. whispered. He doesn’t know yet if he’s going choose you, but he thinks about it. What is this what do I do? I already asked, feeling the tears streaming down my face. Nothing, she replied. You can’t do anything. Over the next few days, Klaus began to bring me things, small ones things, a piece of white bread, a apple, once, a clean handkerchief.
He left the objects near me when no one was looking. He didn’t say never anything. He simply posed the object there and left again. The others girls noticed it. Some me looked with envy, others with pity. Simone told me: “He’s courting you to his way. This means that he thinks that you are special, but that also means that you are in danger.
Why? Because that if you accept the gifts, it will think you want.” And if you refuse, he may feel rejected. And a soldier rejected is unpredictable. I didn’t know not what to do. So, I accepted the gifts. But I never thanked. I never looked at him. I didn’t speak never. I tried to remain neutral, invisible, emotionless.
But he kept coming. And then one night he called me. It was mid-December. Snow was falling outside. The barracks was freezing. I was lying there trying to sleep when I heard the door open. I heard footsteps. I heard my number. 48. I raised my head. Klaus stood at the entrance with the lantern at the hand. Come, he said.
Simon squeezed my hand one last time. I felt his nails digging into my skin. Then I got up and followed Klaus out of the barracks. He took me to a small stone construction the rear of the property. Before, that must have been a wine cellar. Now, it was empty, except for a table in wood, two chairs and a lamp oil.
Klaus closed the door behind us. I stood trembling, no cold, no fear. He looked at me for a long time, then finally he spoken. Sit down, I sat down. He has took something out of his pocket coat. It was a photograph. He placed it on the table in front of me. It’s my sister, he said. Is she your age? 16 years. I looked at the photo.
It was a young blonde girl, smiling, holding a dog in his arms. She is in Berlin Klaus continued. I haven’t seen him since two years. He remained silent looking at the photo. Then he looked at me. Do you remind me of her? I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. My body was stiff, my mind blank. Klaus has pulled the chair closer.
He sat down in front of me. His eyes were fixed on mine. Are you afraid of me? Did he asked. I didn’t answer. He has mouse. A sad smile, almost melancholy. It’s okay to be afraid. Here, fear keep alive. He watched me again moment. Then he got up and walked to the door and opened it. You can go back. I stood up, my legs trembling and I ran out.
When I I returned to the barracks, Simon waiting for me when I was awake. What does he have done? she asked. Nothing, did I answered. He just spoke. Simon has frown. It’s worse, she said, because it means that he idealizes you and when reality will not correspond to its fantasy. She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need it. I already knew.
That night was the first of many others. Klaus started to call me regularly, always late, always alone, always in this same stone piece. Sometimes he wanted just talk. He told about his sister, his mother, the town where he grew up. He showed photos, read extracts of letters he received from home. Previously, he remained silent.
He just looked at me as if trying to understand something even he didn’t know. I didn’t speak never. I was just listening. I remained still. I was waiting for him sends back and he always sent me back. But I knew it wouldn’t last eternally. Simon told me, he prepares, he builds something in his head, a story, a fantasy.
And When this fantasy collapses, you peras for that. She was right because that Klaus wasn’t in love with me. He was in love with the idea of me, of the girl he wanted me to be, the lost sister, the memory of home, the innocence that war had stolen from him and I couldn’t be all that. I was just a prisoner. Number 48.
A scared girl, freezing in a barracks in occupied France. But Klaus didn’t want to see that. He wanted to see something else and that terrified more than any violence because I knew that when he would finally realize the truth, that would there be any left of me? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Today, sixty years later, when I close my eyes I still see this stone piece.
I still feel the cold. I still hear Klaus’ voice saying my number and I wonder what’s worse? To be destroyed all at once or be slowly dismantled piece by piece until it nothing left? If I don’t tell now no one will tell because that there are things worse than death and I experienced all these things. Jane Lemoine survived. But what Klaus did to him in the following weeks forever changed his way of understanding the world, power and human fragility.
What happened in this room stone when Klaus’ fantasy took over finally collapsed? And how Jeanne Did she find the strength to continue to live when everything in her was already dead ? The answer lies in the next parts of this story. A story that remained buried for more than 60 years and now finally can be told.
There are things that the body never even forgets when the mind is desperate erased. years after that night in January 194, I can still feel Klaus’ hands on my shoulders, still hear the sound of his irregular breathing against my ear, still see the trembling glow of the kerosene lamp which transformed this stone cellar into a theater of shadow and nightmare.
That evening, when he learned that his sister had died under the rubble of a shelter in Berlin, something broke in him. And this something, this crack in his already fragile humanity became my prison for weeks following. When I returned to barracks that night, he had to be 4 a.m. The cold bit my skin through the blue dress that he forced me to wear, the one with the little embroidered flowers which had probably belonged to a French woman whom they had arrested or killed.
My lips were swollen, my legs were shaking so much that I barely managed to walk to my mattress straw. Simon was awake as always, waiting for my return with this mixed expression of relief and deep sadness that she reserved for nights when one of us returned from a summons. She didn’t say anything. She has just opened his arms and I collapsed against her silent because that even the tears no longer come.
I was a videuse as if everything that made me Jeanne had been snatched and thrown into a abyss where I could never recover. Simon stroked my hair whispering words that I couldn’t hear not really but whose sweetness was the only thing that still held me together to the idea that it existed somewhere in this world devastated by war.
A form of tenderness which required nothing in return. The following days took place in a kind of mist. I got up when we whistled. I formed the line for the counting. I worked where I was told to work, but I was elsewhere. My body moved, obeyed, was working, but my mind had removed to a dark place and silent where Klaus could not touch, where war did not exist, where I was still that 16 year old girl who dreamed of teaching in a small school village.
But Klaus wouldn’t let me not peaceful. He was calling me now almost every night. sometimes twice per night and each time it was worse than the previous one because he had crossed a barrier this January night and now there was no limit no more rules, no more boundaries between what he wanted and what he took. He touched me with a familiarity that made me sick.
He kissed me as if I was his girlfriend, his fiancée, as if we were two people who loved each other freely and not a soldier German and a French prisoner which he had at his disposal. He spoke to me about the future, about what would do after the war, how he would take me to Germany, how I would meet his mother, how we we lived together in a small house in Stougart.
And the most terrifying thing is that he really believed in what he said. In his head, I had become a character in a story that he told himself to survive the horror of war. I was the young innocent girl who had saved him. I was the replacement sister who would fill the void left by that that he had lost. I was proof that he wasn’t a monster, that he was capable of love, of protection, kindness.
But I was none of that. I was just a terrified child who wanted to find his mother, who wanted go home, who wanted everything it stops. Simon was trying to give me advice. She told me to play game, to make him believe that I was grateful, that I appreciated it, because as long as he saw me as precious, he would protect me from others soldiers.
He would give me extra food, it would keep alive. Use it, she said. Uses his obsession to survive. It’s the only weapon you have. But I couldn’t. Every time that he touched me, every time he whispered these sweet words which should have come from a lover but which came from a pretty, I felt something die in me.
A little piece of dignity, a fragment of humanity, a spark of hope. In February 1944, things got worse in a way I never could imagine. Klaus started to ask me to do things, little things at the beginning. He wanted me to read letters to him of his sister that he kept in a box metal. He wanted me to wear his clothes, those she had left behind the house and which he had taken with him.
He wanted me to sing the songs she sang, even though I don’t didn’t know the words, and that my voice trembled so much that the notes came out broken and false. And then he started calling me by her name sister. Greta he said. Sing for me Greta. The first time I thought that he had made a mistake, but then he repeated it again and again.
Greta always Greta. He didn’t see me no longer like Jeanne at all. I wasn’t no longer number 48. I had become the ghost of his dead sister. An illusion living creature that he had created so as not to face the reality of his loss. One evening he brought me a doll. A old porcelain doll with blonde hair and a faded pink dress.
He handed it to me with an almost smile. childish. It was hers. He said. She loved her when she was little. Now she’s yours. I took the doll because refused would have been dangerous. But hold this object in my hands, this child’s toy which had belonged to a dead girl that I had never met, but in which I was supposed to transform into, it was unbearable.
Klaus sat down across from me and looked at with a tenderness that froze me the blood. “You look so much like him when you hold this doll”, he whispered, just like her at 10 years old. At that moment I understood that Klaus wasn’t just obsessed. He was crazy. The war had broken him inside and now he was trying to put the pieces back together using my body, my face, my presence like cement to seal the cracks in its fractured psyche.
But the worst is arrived one night in mid-February. Klaus took me to the cellar like usually, but this time he had brought something. A device photo, an old German model with a brass lens and a flash which crackled when he took a photo. I want to remember you- he said, I want to have something when all this will be finished.
He made me stand up against the wall, sitting on the chair, holding the doll, wearing her dress sister, her hair down like her wore them. Each flash was like a shot. Every click of the shutter was not recording who I was really, but who did he want me to be. And then he asked me to smile. Smiles, Greta like on the old photos. I tried.
I forced my lips to to curl, my cheeks to rise. But this that came out was not a smile, it was a grimace of pain, a poorly disguised mask of terror. Klaus frowns. No, no, this is not like that. You must look happy. You must look like love me. He came closer, touched my face, to use his thumbs to push the corners of my mouth towards the high. like that. So. Perfect.
And he has took another photo. That night, when I got home, Simone told me looked and immediately knew that something had changed. She saw something in my eyes, extinction, a resignation which does not wasn’t before. “He’s going to kill you, she said softly. Maybe not physically, maybe not all of suite, but he will destroy you piece piece by piece until there is nothing left nothing.
And when he’s finished, when he will have completely transformed reality of who you are in whose fiction he wants you to be, he will throw you away because that even his madness will have its limits. So what do I do? I have asked the broken voice. Simon squeezed my hand. You survive day after day, night after night.
You remember who you are really. You keep a little piece of Jeanne hidden so deep inside you that he can’t reach it. And you wait because this war will not last not forever. The allies are advancing. I hear the guards talking about it. They have fear. And when they are afraid, they will make mistakes. And in these errors, maybe there will be a chance.
Mars is arrived with a cold rain which transformed the courtyard into a thick block. News of the war filtered through slowly towards us through the conversations that we heard between soldiers through the changes in the camp atmosphere. The Germans were nervous. The bombings allies were intensifying. The supply lines were cut. Something was changing.
But for me, nothing changed. Klaus kept calling me, kept calling to transform myself into Greta, continued to live in his illusion until the day when the illusion was cracked. It was early April. Klaus called me as usual, but when I arrived in the cellar, he was different, agitated. His hands were trembling, his eyes were red, bloodshot.
“Sit down!” He has ordered. I sat down. He took out a letter from his pocket. Another letter from mother, I supposed. But he doesn’t have it read. He just held her, staring at her like if it contained secrets that he didn’t want to know. Then he lifted eyes towards me. You are not her, he said suddenly. My heart went arrested. You are not Greta.
You will not be never Greta. You’re just a French girl, a prisoner. Nothing. He got up, started doing the 100 steps in the small room. I tried, I really tried to transform into her, to see you as her. But you’re not good enough. You don’t don’t sing like her. You don’t smile like her. You are not. He stopped, looked at me with a mixed expression of disgust and despair.
You are nothing. I should have been relieved. I should have been happy that the illusion breaks, that Klaus finally sees the truth. But at that moment I understood what Simon had tried to tell me say. An obsessed man is dangerous, but a man whose obsession collapse is fatal. Klaus approached me. He has grabbed my face forcefully.
his fingers digging into my cheeks. “Why can’t you be her?” He shouted. “Why can’t you just be what I need?” His hands are are moved towards my neck, not in tight, not yet, but they were there, trembling, hesitating between the violence and restraint. I closed the eyes, I waited and then suddenly he left me.
He backed away, collapsed on the chair, put his head in his hands and started to cry. Big ones heartbreaking sob that shook all his body. “I’m sorry”, he whispered between tears. “I am so sorry for everything, for what I have you done, for what this war has done to us all transformed. I stood still, not knowing what to do, not knowing if it was real or just another manipulation.
Then Klaus raised his head and looked. “Go on,” he said softly. Go away before I do something that I could not undo.” I stood up, my legs trembling so much that I could barely walk. “And don’t come back,” he added. “I won’t call you anymore.” It’s finished. I came out of this cellar to last time.
For two weeks, Klaus didn’t call. He didn’t have me watched during the counts. He didn’t tell me did not bring a present. It was as if I had ceased to exist for him. Simon told me I had to be careful, that this silence was perhaps more dangerous than obsession, that Klaus could turn against me at all moment.
But I dared to hope, hope that it was really over, that I had survived. And then on April 24, 1944, everything has changed. Allied bombers are came. They attacked the neighboring town, destroying railway tracks, bridges, supply depots. The camp entered a state of alert. The soldiers were running in all directions. The officers shouting orders contradictory.
Chaos has set in and in this chaos, Simone saw our luck. It’s now, she told me, her eyes shining with a determination that I never seen before. It’s now or never. That night, as the alarms were screaming and the soldiers were distracted, Simon and I with three other girls, we cut the fence behind the camp and we fled into the forest.
We ran all night, tripping over the roots, scratched by the branches, the heart beating so hard we thought that it was going to explode. Behind us, we heard the dogs barking, the soldiers shouted, gunshots pierced the darkness. But we don’t have not stopped. Two of the girls were caught before dawn. We have heard their cry, then the gunshots, then silence.
But Simon and I have continued. We walked for three days, hiding in abandoned barns, drinking water from streams, eating roots and bay that Simon identified as edible thanks to the knowledge of his peasant grandfather. And finally, exhausted, hungry, half dead, we reached a village controlled by the French resistance. We were free, but freedom, I learned, do not erase what has been done.
She doesn’t does not heal invisible wounds. She does not give back the pieces of yourself that have been stolen. Simon and I survived the war. We saw the liberation in August 1944. We saw the Germans fight retirement. We saw the flags French float again in the cities. But we never spoke of what had happened to us in this camp.
Nobody asked us questions. The French partisans who found us, dirty, hungry, half scared to death, gave us hot soup, blankets and a place to sleep. But they don’t have asked what had happened to us. Maybe because he already knew, maybe because he didn’t want to know. Simon and I stayed together during the following months, we moving from village to village, helping resistance as we could, washing clothes, preparing meals, carrying messages.
We let’s never talk about Klaus. We don’t let’s never talk about this camp which did not exist on the maps. We don’t We never talked about the nights in this stone cellar. But at night when everything the world was sleeping, I saw Simon wake up sweaty, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling as if she was reliving something that she never could never express in words.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.