“Is she screaming yet?” That’s what I heard from the other side of the metallic door, two German voices. One was laughing, the other simply confirming. I didn’t know yet what it meant, but my body was already trembling because something inside me, something primitive, already understood.

My name is Thérèse Duvallon. I am 83 years old, and I have spent most of my life trying to erase that question from my mind. I haven’t succeeded. It returns every time I close my eyes and the silence weighs too heavily.

They didn’t take us to work. They didn’t take us to be interrogated. They took us to a place where young French women were separated, observed, cataloged, and where some—some were chosen, not by chance, but according to criteria that none of us could have imagined possible.

I was just a 19-year-old girl, the daughter of a baker, born and raised in Annecy, a small town in the French Alps where everyone knew each other, where the war still seemed distant, something that happened in the newspapers, not on our streets. Until it stopped being distant, until they knocked on my door.

March 1943. A cold, glacial morning. My mother was in the kitchen when we heard sharp, metallic, authoritarian knocks. My father opened the door. Three German soldiers. Impeccable uniforms, inexpressive faces. One of them held a list. He read my name: “Thérèse Duvallon, 19 years old, single. Come with us.” No explanation, no time for questions. My mother tried to grab my arm; she was pushed against the wall. My father stepped forward; the butt of a rifle struck his face. He fell, blood running from his nose. I screamed, but I was already being dragged outside.

The truck waited in the street, canvas taut, engine running. There were other women inside. I recognized a few—young, most of them between 16 and 25, sitting on wooden benches, eyes wide, shallow breathing. No one spoke. No one understood. If you had asked me at that moment what was happening, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. I thought it was a mistake. I thought they would release us. I thought I would be home before dawn. I was wrong.

We drove for hours. The cold in the truck was brutal. No blankets, no water, just the sound of the engine, the smell of diesel, and the growing fear among us. Some wept softly; others prayed. I just stared at my hands. They were shaking. I couldn’t stop them.

When the truck finally stopped, it was daylight. We got out in a place I had never seen: a complex surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards everywhere. Long, gray barracks lined up like coffins. At the gate, a sign in German. I couldn’t read it, but one of the women beside me, who spoke German, translated in a whisper: “Women’s Labor Camp. Military Control Zone. Work.” The word seemed almost reassuring. I thought, “We’ll work. We’ll go home. This will pass.”

But when we crossed the gate, I saw something that chilled me. Women. Hundreds. Thin, dirty, empty gazes, moving like shadows between the barracks. Some carried buckets, others washed laundry in huge basins of dirty water. But what frightened me most was not the work; it was the silence. No one conversed. No one looked at us, the newcomers, as if they already knew, as if they had already given up on warning us.

We were taken to a registration barrack. Inside, a tall, blonde, impeccable German female officer watched us while two assistants noted our names, ages, and hometowns. They walked among us slowly, looking at every face, every body, as if choosing fruit at the market. When she reached me, she stopped, tilted her head, and said something in German to the assistant. They noted something next to my name. I didn’t understand, but I saw the look on the face of the woman next to me. She had heard, and her face went pale. It was only later that I discovered what it meant.

If you think you know the history of World War II, this testimony will change your perspective forever. Thérèse Duvallon is about to reveal what was hidden behind the closed doors of German-controlled camps—truths erased from history books, methods they wanted to disappear, and screams they tried to silence for over six decades. Stay until the end, because what she is about to say, no one should forget.

I spent my first hours in that camp in a daze. We were given uniforms, not clothes—thick gray dresses that scratched the skin. No undergarments, no socks, just wooden clogs that hurt our feet from the very first steps. They shaved our heads, all of us without exception. I remember the sound of the clippers, the sudden cold on my neck, seeing my brown curls fall to the ground, mixed with those of dozens of other girls. They told us it was for hygiene, but I believe they mainly wanted to make us identical, interchangeable.

We were assigned a barrack, Number 7. Inside, rough wooden bunk beds, three tiers high. No mattresses, just a thin, torn blanket for each of us. The smell was unbearable: sweat, urine, mold. The windows were small and boarded up. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, extinguished most of the time.

That first night, no one slept. We were about thirty newcomers mixed with women who had been there for weeks, months. They didn’t talk to us. They looked at us with a kind of weary pity, as if they already knew what awaited us. I tried to talk to the woman on the bunk below mine. Her name was Marguerite. She was 34, a schoolteacher in Lyon, arrested for hiding Resistance documents. She looked at me with sunken, dark-rimmed eyes and simply said, “Don’t ask questions. Do what they tell you, and pray they don’t notice your face.” I didn’t understand. Not yet.

The next morning, at 5:00 a.m., a siren woke us, strident, unbearable. We were ordered to go out, to line up in the central courtyard. It was still dark, the cold bit at our skin. We were barefoot in the frozen mud. A German officer counted us once, twice, then gave an order. The guards began to separate the women. Not at random. They looked at our faces, our bodies. They pointed right, left. The youngest to the right, the oldest to the left. I was sent to the right.

We were taken to another building, smaller, cleaner. Inside, there were chairs lined up, a table with instruments, syringes, vials. A German nurse awaited us. She examined us one by one: measured our height, our weight, looked at our teeth, our hands, our feet, noting everything. Then she injected something into us, a clear liquid. I felt my arm burn. I asked what it was. She didn’t answer. Later, a French detainee who worked as an interpreter whispered to me, “They are checking if you are healthy. If you can resist.” Resist what? I still didn’t understand.

But that evening, as we returned to the barrack, I heard screams. Sharp, terrified screams of women, coming from an isolated building at the back of the camp, a windowless building guarded permanently. Marguerite pulled my arm: “Don’t look. Don’t ask questions.” But I looked anyway, and I saw a young woman, barely older than me, leaving that building, supported by two guards. She wasn’t walking; she was being dragged. Her legs no longer carried her. Her face was white, her lips trembling. Her eyes—her eyes were empty. I recognized her. She had arrived with me in the same truck. Her name was Lucy. She was 19.

What I saw on her face that night, I will never forget. It wasn’t pain. It was something worse, something that has no name. And that’s when I understood. This camp was not a labor camp. It was something else. Something no one talked about. Something that history books don’t mention.

The following days, I tried to understand, to remain invisible, not to draw attention. But in that camp, invisibility did not exist, especially not for the young. Every morning, the same ritual: waking at 5:00 a.m., roll call in the courtyard, separation. The older women left to work: sewing uniforms, washing laundry, sorting equipment. It was hard, exhausting, but they survived. We, the youngest, were kept apart. We were made to wait for hours in the cold without explanation. Then, on certain days, officers would come. They observed us, talked among themselves, wrote things down, and some girls were called by name or by number. They never returned to work the same day. Sometimes they didn’t return at all.

Lucy, the young girl I had seen that first night, had become a shadow. She no longer spoke, no longer ate, stayed sitting on her bunk, her eyes fixed on the wall. Marguerite told me she had been taken three times in five days. “Why?” I asked. Marguerite lowered her eyes. “For what they call ‘medical experiments.’ But they are not experiments. It is torture. They test methods, devices, on bodies they consider disposable.” My throat tightened. “What devices?” She hesitated, then told me, her voice broken. “Electrodes. They attach them to the wrists, the ankles. Sometimes elsewhere. They send electric shocks to see how long a woman can endure before losing consciousness. They call it the ‘electric treatment.’ They say it’s for research, but it’s a lie. It’s just cruelty disguised as science.” I was petrified. My blood ran cold. “And why us? Why the young ones?” Marguerite looked at me with infinite sadness. “Because you are ‘fresh.’ Because your body resists better. Because you scream louder.” I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand.

But two days later, my name was called. It was a gray, rainy morning. We had lined up as usual. An officer approached with a list. He read several names. Mine was the fourth: “Thérèse Duvallon, Barrack 7.” My heart stopped. The other girls looked at me. Some looked away; others whispered prayers.

The five of us were taken to the isolated building, the windowless one, the one from which the screams came. Inside, it was hot, too hot. Powerful lamps lit every corner. In the center of the room, a cold, tilted metal table with leather straps at the four corners. A German doctor awaited us: white coat, round glasses, impassive face. Beside him, an assistant and a nurse. They spoke among themselves in German, calmly, as if discussing the weather.

We were told to undress completely, in front of them, without modesty, without humanity. I was trembling. My hands no longer obeyed me. The girl next to me was crying. Another was begging in French, in German—it didn’t matter. They didn’t react. They examined us one by one, like cattle. The doctor took notes, measured our reflexes, pressed certain parts of our bodies, noted our reactions. Then he chose the first girl, the one who was crying. Her name was Hélène. She was twenty.

They laid her on the table, strapped her wrists and ankles. She screamed, begged. The doctor signaled. The assistant brought a machine: a metal box with dials, wires, and clamps. They attached the clamps to her, to her wrists, to her ankles. Then the doctor turned a dial, and she screamed as I had never heard anyone scream—a cry that came from the depths of her being, a cry that was not human. He took notes, measured, adjusted, and started again. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t close my ears. I couldn’t escape that sound, that horror.

After Hélène, it was another girl’s turn, then another. They didn’t choose me that day. I don’t know why. Perhaps they wanted to keep some of us “intact” longer. Perhaps they had already had enough data. But leaving there, I was no longer the same. Something inside me had died, something I would never find again.

I quickly understood that this camp operated according to a logic—a monstrous logic, but a logic nonetheless. Everything was organized, planned, documented. The youngest and healthiest women were reserved for the experiments. The others worked. Some died of starvation, others of disease. But those who were chosen for the experiments—they died differently, more slowly, more painfully.

There were categories. I learned this from a Polish detainee, Anna, who worked in the administrative offices and translated German documents. She risked her life talking to us, but she did it anyway because she wanted us to know, to testify, if we ever survived. “They classify you according to three criteria,” she told me one evening, whispering in the darkness of the barrack. “Age, appearance, physical resistance. The youngest and prettiest are sent first because, for them, you represent the perfect enemy—the beautiful, proud young Frenchwoman. They want to break you, not just physically, but in your soul.”

She handed me a piece of paper, a report in German. I didn’t understand everything, but I recognized certain words: Electrische Behandlung (electric treatment), Schmerz Toleranz Test (pain tolerance test). “They test how long a woman can endure before begging, before losing her mind. They note everything: the duration, the intensity, the reactions. Everything is recorded. Everything is sent to Berlin for future ‘medical research.’” I felt bile rising in my throat. “And those who don’t survive?” Anna closed her eyes. “They disappear. There is a pit behind the camp. We never see the bodies, but at night we hear the shovels, the sound of earth being moved.”

That night, I didn’t sleep. I lay there, staring at the invisible ceiling in the dark. I thought of my mother, my father, my little house in Annecy, my life before—a life so simple, so normal, a life that now seemed to belong to someone else.

Weeks passed. I was called three times. Three times I entered that building. Three times I thought I wouldn’t leave. The first time, they tested my resistance to pain: electrodes on the wrists, progressive shocks. They noted my reactions: How long before I screamed? How long before I lost consciousness? The second time, they tested my recovery capacity: How long after a session could I still walk? Talk? Answer questions? The third time—the third time, I don’t want to talk about it, even today, even after all these years. There are things that remain locked away, not by choice, but by survival.

What I can say is that I heard that sentence, the one I will never forget. Two officers speaking outside the door before entering: “Ist sie schon am Schreien?” (Is she already screaming?). One of them laughed. The other replied with something I didn’t understand, but the tone was clear: amused, detached, as if he were talking about an animal, not a human being. And that’s what broke me—not the pain, not the fear, but that indifference, that certainty they had that we were nothing, that our lives didn’t matter, that our screams were just a sound among others.

If I am still alive today, it is not thanks to my strength. It is not thanks to my courage. It is thanks to moments, tiny moments, where someone, somewhere, decided to see me as a human being again. Marguerite, for example. She had lost everything: her husband executed by the Germans in 1942 for sabotage, her two children disappeared in a roundup in Lyon. She had nothing left to hope for, nothing left to wait for. She was the one who gave me her bread ration when I could no longer swallow. She was the one who held my hand at night when the nightmares woke me up screaming. She was the one who whispered, “Breathe, Thérèse. Just breathe. One breath at a time.”

She had developed a method, a way to survive psychologically in that hell. She counted the days, the hours, the breaths. She said that as long as you could count, you were still alive, still capable of thinking, still human. “Don’t give them your mind,” she kept telling me. “They can take your body. They can hurt you. But your mind, Thérèse, is yours. Keep it. Hide it. Protect it.” I didn’t always understand what she meant, but I clung to her words like a buoy in a raging sea.

Anna the Pole, she who risked her life every day by passing us information stolen from the administrative offices. She who told us, “Never forget. If you survive, tell the story. Even if no one believes you. Even if they call you a liar. Tell the story, because silence is their greatest weapon.” Anna had been a history teacher in Warsaw, arrested for helping Jews escape. Her entire family had been exterminated. She was alone, but she refused to be silent. She wrote down everything she could on tiny scraps of paper that she hid in the seams of her clothes, in the cracks of the walls. She told me, “If I die, perhaps someone will find these words and know.” I don’t know if anyone ever found her notes. I don’t even know if Anna survived. We were separated in February 1944. I never saw her again.

And then there was that man, that German guard. I never knew his name. I never clearly saw his face. But one night, as I was leaving the experiment building, unable to walk, my legs trembling, my vision blurred, he carried me. He didn’t drag me. He didn’t push me. He carried me the way one carries a child. He said nothing. He placed me in front of the barrack, looked around to make sure no one had seen him, and left without a word, without a look. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps he had a daughter my age. Perhaps he was simply still human, somewhere deep inside. Or maybe it was just a chance occurrence, an instant of pity in an ocean of cruelty. But that instant saved me because it reminded me of something, something I had almost forgotten existed somewhere: a humanity, even infinitesimal, even hidden, even crushed under the weight of the uniform and the orders.

There were also these small acts of resistance among us detainees, these invisible gestures that kept us alive: a woman sharing a stolen piece of sugar, another softly humming at night to help us sleep, a third telling stories of her life before to remind us that there had been a normal world, and that perhaps there would be a normal world again. I remember a woman, Claire, a Parisian. She had been a dancer at the Opera. Sometimes, in the darkness of the barrack, she would show us ballet positions, standing despite the hunger, despite the exhaustion. She would lift her arms, point her feet, and for a few seconds, she would become what she had been: graceful, free, beautiful. “They can lock me up,” she would say, “but they can’t stop me from dancing in my head.” Claire died in March 1944 of pneumonia, but until her last breath, she continued to lift her arms, point her feet, and dance.

Months passed. Winter arrived. The cold became unbearable. Our uniforms were not enough. Our clogs cracked. Our feet bled. Many died of cold, starvation, disease. The experiments continued, but they became rarer, less systematic, as if even the Germans were beginning to run out of resources or interest. Or perhaps they sensed that the war was turning, that their time was running out.

Rumors circulated: Allied landings, German defeats, cities retaken. We didn’t dare believe it, but we hoped in silence, desperately. I was called one last time in January 1944, almost a year after my arrival. This time it wasn’t for electrodes; it was for an interrogation. They wanted to know if I knew members of the Resistance, if my father had contacts, if I had transmitted messages, if I had helped Jews, if I had hidden weapons. I knew nothing, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have said anything. Not out of bravery, but out of exhaustion. I was so drained that nothing mattered anymore. Nothing could break me further.

The officer who interrogated me was young, perhaps 25. He spoke French with a thick German accent. He asked me the same questions over and over, as if hoping I would eventually crack, invent something just to make it stop. But I had nothing to invent, so I remained silent or repeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know anyone. I didn’t do anything.” After three hours, he gave up, looked at me with something resembling contempt, or perhaps disappointment, then sent me back to the barrack.

I didn’t understand why they released me. Perhaps I was no longer of value to them. Perhaps I was too damaged, too thin, too broken. Perhaps I had become useless. Or perhaps the war was truly beginning to turn, and they knew their time was limited, that they were already trying to erase the evidence, to make the traces disappear, to make us disappear.

In February 1944, they began to transfer detainees in groups to other camps, to Germany, to the East. We didn’t know exactly where, but we knew it was a bad sign, a very bad sign. Anna was transferred. Marguerite too. I watched them get into the trucks. I couldn’t even say goodbye to them. They disappeared, and I remained with a handful of other women, the weakest, the sickest, those who were no longer worth transporting. We were left almost alone. The guards were fewer, the rations even slimmer, the barracks even colder. It was as if they had forgotten us, as if we were already dead. But we weren’t. Not yet.

And then, one morning in August 1944, we heard something: distant explosions, then closer and closer. Gunfire. Screams. But not our screams—the screams of the Germans. They were running. They were burning papers. They were loading trucks. They were leaving. And we, we stood there, frozen, unable to understand what was happening, until the gates opened and soldiers entered. But not German soldiers: American soldiers, Free French soldiers, with flags, with smiles, with tears in their eyes. They looked at us, and some turned away because what they saw was too difficult, too unbearable: living skeletons, ghosts, women who no longer looked like women. One of them approached me, held out a blanket, and said to me in French, “It’s over. You are free.” Free. The word seemed so strange, so unreal, as if it were a language I no longer spoke.

The camp was liberated in August 1944. The Allies arrived. The gates opened. We were free. But what is freedom when you have lost everything? When you no longer know who you are? When you carry within you images that no word can erase?

I returned to France, to Annecy. My mother cried when she saw me. My father looked away. I no longer looked like the young girl they had known. I was thin, bald, my eyes empty. They asked me questions once, twice, then they stopped because they saw in my eyes that I couldn’t answer. Not yet. Maybe never.

I tried to resume a life. I worked. I got married. I had children. But a part of me always remained there, in that camp, in that building, on that table. For 64 years, I said almost nothing. A few words, a few phrases. Never the complete story. Because no one really wanted to know. Because it was too hard, too dark, too embarrassing. France needed heroes, not victims. It needed glorious stories of resistance, not stories of young women tortured in forgotten camps. So I kept silent, like thousands of others. We carried this silence alone, hoping that one day, perhaps, someone would truly want to listen.

That day came late. I was 83 when a historian contacted me. She was researching women’s labor camps in occupied France. She had found my name in German archives with a mention: “Experimental subject. Electric treatment. Survivor.” She wanted to interview me. I refused at first, then I accepted. Not for myself, but for Lucy, for Hélène, for Marguerite, for Anna, for all those who never returned.

This interview lasted three days. I told everything, or almost everything. There are things I still keep, that I will keep until my death, because they are too heavy, too intimate, too unbearable.

Five years after that interview, I passed away peacefully in my sleep. But before leaving, I asked for one thing: that my testimony be preserved, that these words survive, that what happened to us not be erased. Because history must not be written only by the victors. It must also be told by those who survived, by those who bore in their flesh the weight of that war.

Today, I am no longer here, but these words remain. And as long as there is someone to read them, to hear them, to transmit them, what happened to us will not be buried under silence. We were hundreds, thousands, perhaps, of young French, Belgian, Polish women, torn from our lives, used, broken, then forgotten. But we existed. We suffered. We resisted in our own way: not with weapons, but with our will to remain human despite everything. And that is perhaps the only victory that truly matters.

If you are listening to these words today, I ask only one thing of you: Do not forget us. Do not let our stories disappear. Because what happened to us can happen again, in other forms, in other countries, to other women, as long as humanity chooses to close its eyes, as long as it prefers indifference to the truth.

My name is Thérèse Duvallon. I was 19 when they took me. I was 88 when I left. In between, I lived. I survived. And now I testify forever.

Thérèse Duvallon carried this silence for 64 years—64 years living with those images, those screams, that pain that no one wanted to hear. But before leaving, she chose to speak for Marguerite, for Anna, for Lucy, for Claire, for all those who never returned. Their dignity, their silent resistance, their crushed but never destroyed humanity—all of this deserves to be known, to be honored, to cross through time.

If this testimony has moved you, if you feel the weight of these words in your chest, we ask something important of you: Subscribe to this channel so that stories like this continue to exist. Like this video, not as a simple gesture, but as an act of remembrance for those who could never tell their story. Share it with those who, like you, believe that some truths should never disappear, even when they hurt, especially when they hurt.

In the comments, take a moment to reflect: Where are you watching this documentary from right now? What did Thérèse’s story awaken in you? Do you think such horrors could happen again if we choose silence and indifference? These women survived not because they were exceptional, but because they refused to abandon their humanity, even in the darkness, even when all seemed lost. Their courage deserves more than our fleeting silence. It deserves our voice, our commitment to never forget.

Thérèse passed away in 2008 at the age of 88, but her words remain. And as long as there is someone to listen to them, to share them, to carry them further, what happened to her will never be erased by time. Thank you for listening until the end. Now, make sure her testimony doesn’t stop here. Subscribe, share, comment, and above all, remember. Amen.