“Let’s shower together.”
Five words, spoken with a smile, like an invitation among friends. The guard looked at the two prisoners – two pink triangles standing in the camp mud, shivering from the cold.
“You look dirty and tired. A good shower will do you good.”
The two men looked at each other. There was something in their eyes. Fear? Yes, but also incomprehension. A shower, here, now?
“Come on, follow me. The showers are ready.”
They followed him. They had no idea what these words truly meant.
In the Nazi camps, certain words had a double meaning; ordinary, banal words that concealed the horror. “Transport” meant deportation to death. “Special treatment” meant execution. “Shower” meant—you know what shower meant.
But for the homosexual prisoners, these words sometimes had an even more gruesome meaning: a personified cruelty, a humiliation devised specifically for them. “Let’s shower together.” These words were uttered dozens of times in various camps, and each time they heralded something terrible. Not always death, but sometimes something worse.
This is the story of what happened when a guard said these words to prisoners wearing the pink triangle. Sachsenhausen, Germany, February 1943. The two men following the guard were named André Le Fèvre and Michel Bonet.
André was a 52-year-old former bookseller from Paris. A gentle, cultured man who had spent his life surrounded by books. Michel was 27 years old, a former mechanic from Lyon, a practical, down-to-earth man who repaired broken things.
They had met six months earlier in Sachsenhausen. Two Frenchmen, two pink triangles, two lonely men in hell. What had they become? Friends? Lovers? Words no longer held any real meaning. They had become essential to each other’s survival. That was all that mattered. And now they were walking to the showers together.
“Do you both know each other?”
The guard walked ahead of them without even glancing at them. The question was asked casually. André and Michel didn’t answer.
“You were seen in the barracks. You sleep on adjacent bunks. You share your food.”
Be silent.
“Are you friends?”
Still no answer. The guard turned around. His smile had widened.
“Or maybe more than friends?”
André felt his blood freeze.
“We are fellow countrymen,” he said cautiously. “We help each other, that’s all.”
“Of course, that’s all.”
The guard moved on.
“The showers are right there, you’ll like them.”
The shower block was small, discreet, and located away from the other buildings. Inside was a tiled room with shower heads on the ceiling and benches along the walls – and nobody else, just the two of them and the warden.
“Get undressed.”
André and Michel obeyed slowly. They were used to nudity; dignity no longer existed in the camps. But this time something was different. Something in the way the guard looked at them.
“Very good, now let’s go shower.”
They stepped forward and stood under the showerheads. The attendant turned on a tap. Water. Warm water.
André couldn’t believe his senses. He hadn’t felt warm water on his skin for months, maybe years. Michel closed his eyes. The warmth flowed over his emaciated body. It was almost painful, almost good. For a minute, they forgot where they were, what they were, and what awaited them.
For a minute they felt only the water, and then the guard spoke:
“It’s pleasant, isn’t it? The warm water, the cleanliness.”
They did not reply.
“Do you know why you are here? Why I brought you both here?”
Be silent.
“Because we know what you do in your barracks at night.”
André opened his eyes. The water ran down his face and mixed with something else. Tears, perhaps.
“We’re not doing anything at all,” he said.
“Really? We saw you touching each other, looking at each other.”
“This is not…”
“Quiet!”
The guard stepped closer. He was now standing at the entrance to the shower. The water lightly splashed him.
“You are inverts, degenerates. That’s why you’re here. And tonight you’ll show us exactly what you are.”
Other guards entered. A total of five or six now stood around the shower, staring at the two naked men in the water.
“So these are them?” asked one of the newcomers.
“Yes, the two Frenchmen. We normally execute them.”
The word “normally” hung heavy in the air, full of hints and allusions.
“But tonight we’ll try something different.”
The head guard took something out of his pocket: a camera.
“You will give us a demonstration. You will show us what you do at night.”
André shook his head.
“No, we’re not doing anything. We…”
“If you refuse, you will both die tonight.”
“If we obey?”
The guard smiled.
“If you obey, you might stay alive.”
Michel took Andrés’ hand. A simple gesture they had performed dozens of times in the darkness of the barracks. But here, under the harsh light of the showers, in front of five SS men in their uniforms and with their smiles, this gesture was different.
“You see,” said the guard, “they can’t help it, it’s in their nature.”
He raised the camera.
“Keep going.”
What happened next, I will not describe in detail. Not out of shame – shame has no place here – but because some humiliations defy words.
What I can say is this: For an hour, André and Michel were forced to perform in front of their tormentors. Every gesture, every interaction was photographed, commented on, and ridiculed.
“Closer together, look at the camera. Smile, you like that, don’t you?”
They didn’t smile; they couldn’t. They mechanically did what they were told, without truly being present. Their bodies were in the showers, their minds elsewhere.
When it was over, the guard turned off the water.
“Very good. That was enlightening.”
André and Michel stood motionless, shivering as cold water dripped from their skeletal bodies.
“You can get dressed.”
They looked for her clothes. They were no longer there.
“Oh, I forgot to mention: Your clothes have been misplaced. You must return to the barracks like this.”
“Like this? Naked?”
“Yes.”
The guard smiled.
“The whole camp will see you, and tomorrow the photos will be posted everywhere so everyone knows what you are.”
They crossed the camp naked, in February, in the cold, under the gaze of the other prisoners. Some looked away, others regarded them with pity, still others with disgust.
The guards followed them, shouting insults:
“Look at the inverts! That’s what they do at night! Animals, less than animals!”
André and Michel walked mechanically, one foot in front of the other. They didn’t look at each other, they didn’t touch. Something between them had died in those showers.
The next day, the photos were everywhere: on the walls of the barracks, on the latrine doors, on the bulletin board at the parade ground. Photos of two naked men in compromising positions. Under each photo, a caption: “This is what the inverts do. Denounce them.”
André and Michel only left their barracks for forced labor. Even there, they were separated and sent to different work details. They were no longer allowed to be together.
“It’s for your own good,” said the Kapo. “Seeing you together will only make things worse.”
Worse? How could it get any worse? The other prisoners avoided her. Not out of malice, but out of fear. To be seen with the inverts in the photos meant risking the same fate.
André understood, he didn’t hold it against them, but the loneliness was unbearable. For six months, Michel had been his anchor, his reason to endure, the only beauty in this hell. And now that beauty had been defiled, exposed, and turned into a spectacle.
Every time André closed his eyes, he saw the camera flash and heard the guards’ giggling. He could no longer think of Michel without thinking of him.
Michel suffered the same fate. He now worked in the quarries – the hardest, deadliest work, an additional punishment. Every day he hauled stones. Every night he collapsed on his bunk, too exhausted to think.
But sometimes, before falling asleep, he thought of André, and shame flooded him. Not the shame of loving a man—he had long since accepted that. It was the shame of having been forced to turn that love into a spectacle, into pornography for monsters.
One night, André managed to sneak up to Michel’s bunk. The Kapos were asleep, the guards were elsewhere. It was risky, but he had to talk to him.
“Michel,” he whispered into the darkness. “Michel, can you hear me?”
Silence. Then a barely audible voice:
“Go away, André, please go away.”
“I just wanted to tell you that I…”
“No.”
Michel’s voice was broken, as if every word cost him endless effort.
“I can’t look at you anymore, André. Every time I see you, all I see is this: the showers, the photos. They’ve done it, André. They’ve taken and destroyed the only good thing we had.”
André returned to his bunk. He wasn’t crying. He had no more tears. He just stared into the darkness, thinking about what Michel had said.
They had taken the only good thing they had. It was true. That was exactly what they had done. Not killing her would have been too easy, too quick. No, they had found something far worse. They had turned her love into a weapon, an instrument of destruction.
Now André and Michel were lonelier than ever. Even together, they were alone. Perhaps that was the true genius of evil.
Michel died on April 12, 1943. No execution, no illness – an accident in the quarry. A stone that was too heavy, a wrong move, a fall. At least, that’s what the official report said.
But André knew the truth. He had seen it in Michel’s eyes over the past few weeks: that absence, that emptiness. Michel hadn’t fought. When the stone fell, when his body was crushed, he hadn’t resisted. He had let go.
André was not given back his body. The dead were never given back. He was merely informed by a Kapo during evening roll call.
“Number 7358 died today. Workplace accident, that’s all.”
No name, no humanity, just a number.
André didn’t react. Not in front of the others, not in front of the guards. He waited until nightfall and wept for hours in the darkness of the barracks, surrounded by fifty other men who were asleep or pretending to be, for Michel, for their love, and for what they had lost.
In the following days, André continued to live, if one could call it that. He worked, ate the little he was given, slept a few hours, woke up, and started again. But something inside him had died with Michel. Perhaps hope, or the ability to feel anything at all. He had become a machine, a body functioning without a soul.
In May, a new prisoner arrived at the block. A young Frenchman, barely 20 years old, wearing a pink triangle like André, arrested in Marseille for similar reasons. His name was Lucien Marchand. He was afraid. He didn’t understand anything that was happening to him. One evening, he spoke to André.
“Are you French?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been here long?”
“A year.”
“How… how does one survive here?”
André looked at him. That young face, those frightened eyes, that innocence that would soon vanish. He could have said nothing, turned away, remained in his shell. But something, perhaps a memory of Michel, compelled him to answer.
“You survive by preserving something human within yourself. Something. A memory, a hope, a connection.”
“Which connection?”
“With another person. Someone who reminds you that you exist.”
Lucien nodded.
“Did you have someone like that?”
André closed his eyes.
“Yes, I lost him.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
“Me too.”
André did not become Lucien’s friend, not like he did with Michel, but he became something else – a protector perhaps, a mentor.
He showed Lucien how to survive, where to find a little extra food, how to evade the cruelest guards, when to be discreet. It was a way of honoring Michel, of giving his death some meaning.
“What will you do now?”
André looked at the camp gates. Those gates he had passed through two years earlier, without ever thinking of crossing them again in the other direction.
“I don’t know. Life, I guess.”
“Will you return to Paris?”
“No, I can’t do that. Too many memories. Or somewhere where nobody knows me, where I can start over.”
Before he left, André did something. He returned to the showers. The building was still there, undamaged, as if nothing had happened. He went inside.
The tiled room was exactly as he remembered it. The showerheads, the benches, the white tiles. He stood in the middle, where he had stood with Michel two years ago. And he wept for Michel, for himself, for everything they had lost.
When he came out, his tears had dried. Something inside him had been released. He didn’t know if it was healing, but it was a start.
André Le Fèvre returned to France in June 1945. He did not settle in Paris. He chose a small village in Provence, far away from everything. He found simple work as a farmhand and lived discreetly, quietly, and alone.
Homosexuality was still a crime in France. Survivors of the pink triangle camps were not seen as victims; they were considered criminals. André didn’t speak to anyone about what he had experienced.
Lucien sometimes wrote him cautious letters, without incriminating details, news from Paris, of the reconstruction, of life going on.
“I often think of you and what you said to me in the camp. To preserve something human, a connection. I have never forgotten it.”
André rarely replied, but he kept every letter in a box under his bed, along with something else: a photograph. The only one he had kept. A photograph of Michel from before the war. Smiling, full of life.
In 1971, a German historian discovered archives in Sachsenhausen. Among them were photographs. Dozens of photographs taken in the camp’s showers. Photographs of homosexual prisoners who had been forced to perform acts.
The historian burned everything. Not out of shame, but out of respect.
“These images should never have existed,” he wrote in his diary. “They were created to humiliate, to destroy. The only decent thing to do was to destroy them in turn.”
He did this to show what hatred can do when it is institutionalized, and to remind everyone that love, even when persecuted and destroyed, always survives.
“Let’s shower together.”
These words were a curse, but Andrés’ love for Michel transformed them into a testimony.
