“My name is Zinaïde Boissau. Today, behind my window, it is 2012 and my native Paris is bathed in light. The city rustles, laughs, and prepares for the holidays. Young people walk under the plane trees without being able to imagine that the earth beneath their steps was once saturated with blood and silent despair.
I am 88 years old. I feel my strength escaping. My breath is becoming heavy like an old clock preparing to stop. For 70 years, I buried this story deep within me. My children and grandchildren knew that I had been taken prisoner, that I had lived through the war, but I never told them the whole truth.
I was afraid that these words would soil their peaceful lives, that the shadow of this past would project itself onto their future. Today, as I stand on the threshold of eternity, I understand that I cannot take this with me. If I remain silent, then those young girls left in the tiled and frozen rooms will disappear forever.
I am turning on this old cassette tape recorder so that you can hear my voice while it still resonates. This is not a simple story; it is a confession. I often close my eyes and see myself at 18, in 1942. I was another person. I had long braids, hands that smelled of field flowers and warm milk.
We lived in a small village in the Paris region. Then I left for the capital, dreaming of becoming a teacher. I wanted to read poems to children, to teach them kindness. My youth was full of hope despite a harsh childhood. I remember the famine of 1933 when we ate grass and weed cakes.
Yet, even then, an indomitable force lived in us. At 18, I believed the worst was behind me. When the war broke out in 1941, the sky over Paris darkened under the planes. I remember the whistling that shattered my ears, the smell of burning that stayed encrusted in my hair for years.
The occupation arrived suddenly. Like a frozen mist, the city became foreign. Everywhere, there were grey uniforms, barking dogs, orders written in a language that was not ours. We tried to survive, hid food, helped our own as best we could. I worked in a small pharmacy, discreetly trying to pass bandages and medicine to those leaving for the forests.
My world collapsed one day in September, soft and bright. It happened because of a betrayal. I will never know who denounced me, but I remember the face of that collaborating gendarme, our neighbor, who looked away when I was torn from my home. A German officer observed me as one examines a thoroughbred horse at a market.
He noted something in his notebook and nodded. I and about ten other young girls from the sector were taken to the station. We thought we were being sent to work in Germany in fields or factories. We cried, saying goodbye to familiar walls. But deep inside us, the hope remained that by working hard, we would return home one day.
If I had known what work awaited us, I would have preferred to throw myself under the wheels of that train. The wagon was crowded, 40 people packed into a stifling and foul space. We traveled for several days, losing all sense of time. There was barely any water. Our lips cracked until they bled.
A single thought haunted us: where are they taking us? Finally, the train stopped. It was neither a farm nor a factory. We were made to get off on a deserted platform surrounded by barbed wire. The forest surrounded us, and above the trees stood a grey concrete building, too clean. Too silent. It was a special medical unit hidden from view.
We were not taken to the barracks of the other prisoners. We, the young, the healthy ones, with eyes still clear, were separated. A shiver ran down my spine when I saw men in white coats alongside the SS. Their gaze was as cold and dead as those of the soldiers. Inside, a violent smell of chlorine, ether, and something indefinable seized my throat.
A smell of burnt flesh and ancient fear. Everything was a blinding white. The tiles shone so much it hurt the eyes. We were lined up in a long corridor. The silence was so dense that I could hear the heart of my friend Claire, standing next to me. We trembled, huddled against each other, seeking a bit of warmth in this sterile hell.
The heavy door at the end of the corridor opened. A man appeared—tall, straight, impeccably dressed in a white coat over his uniform. It was Doctor Richter. He didn’t shout; he didn’t push us. He walked slowly along the line, examining each face, sometimes lifting a chin with his frozen fingers.
‘Welcome,’ he said through an interpreter. His voice was soft, silky, and yet it carried a deathly cold. He explained to us that we had been chosen for an important mission in the service of great science. We understood nothing. Then came the order that I will hear until my last breath, pronounced with a terrifying banality:
‘Undress, it’s just an examination.’ We remained frozen. In our families, nudity was intimate, almost sacred. Undressing in front of these men was worse than a whip strike. But the soldiers cocked their rifles. Richter smiled again. ‘Take everything off. We must check that you are in good health. A simple formality.’
Slowly, consumed by shame and terror, we began to remove our clothes. My fingers trembled. The buttons seemed to weigh tons. When the last garment fell on the cold tiles, I felt totally stripped. He looked at us not with desire, but as one observes meat.
He took measurements, noted numbers. At that moment, I understood. We were no longer human beings. We had become files. I was the first to be led into an office, a metal table, unknown machines. Richter put on rubber gloves. The sound of the stretched material still haunts me.
‘Don’t be afraid, Zinaïde. You are a very precious specimen.’ The examination began. It wasn’t medicine; it was mechanical, indifferent. The pain was real, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was this feeling of being profaned, of being torn from myself. I stared at the lamp on the ceiling and imagined my garden, the blossoming apple trees.
I tried to leave my own body. When it was all over, I wasn’t allowed to get dressed. The following night, I heard the screams. They rose from the basement, through the walls. They were not just screams of pain, but howls in the face of the unspeakable. Then, I understood. The examination was only the beginning.
The next morning, Richter returned, rested, almost satisfied. ‘Today begins the first series of procedures.’ His gaze stopped on me. There was no hatred in his eyes, and that was the most frightening thing. We were led into what they called Room Number 10; a huge machine was humming there.
We were forced to remain lying under it for hours. And that is where hell really began. From this machine emanated an invisible heat that penetrated deep into us, down to the lower abdomen. At the time, we didn’t know the word radiation. We didn’t understand that this machine was destroying the very possibility of us ever becoming mothers.
We only felt a strange nausea, a dull burn. Doctor Richter stood behind a glass pane and took notes. He observed the transformation of our faces, the appearance of unusual spots on our skin. One day, I dared to ask a nurse named Greta what he was doing to us.
Greta was German, with a frozen face. She never smiled and treated us like inanimate objects. She stared at me for a moment. In her eyes passed something that looked like pity, immediately erased by the mask of discipline. ‘We are making you pure,’ she replied. It was only years later that I understood the real meaning of those words.
He wanted to sterilize us, women judged inferior, so that our blood would never flow in future generations. He wanted to erase our people by starting with our wombs, and he did it methodically, with German precision, using the most advanced technologies of the time.
Every day brought new suffering. We were forced to drink bitter mixtures that caused dizziness and violent convulsions. After these substances, many girls remained bedridden for days. Their bodies swelled; their skin became translucent like parchment. But Richter never stopped when a specimen died.
They were simply carried away in the morning. The next morning, a new young girl appeared in the rank. As frightened and young as I was on my first day. We lived in permanent expectation of death. But death did not come quickly. It played with us. It watched us through the lenses of Doctor Richter’s microscopes.
I remember the day Tamara was taken for a special procedure. She disappeared for three days. When she was brought back on a stretcher, she no longer recognized us. Her eyes were wide open but void of any spark of life. She whispered incomprehensible words: ‘white worms,’ ‘cold needles.’
A week later, she died in my arms. Her body was covered in small scars whose origin I could not explain. That night, I did not cry. My tears had dried up, turning into a cold stone in my chest. I understood that to survive, I had to become as cold as these tiles, as this metal.
I had to memorize everything. Every name, every face, every word from this monster in a white coat. Survive to testify, so the world would know what ‘examination’ was conducted here in the silence of the Eastern European forests on the daughters of my people. Life in this concrete box became a grey and endless cycle.
Time was no longer measured in hours, but in boot steps in the corridor and the clacking of metal latches. In this second part of my story, I open doors that I feared to look at for 70 years. Sitting here in Paris in 2012, I still seem to feel that icy draft running through rooms number 10 and number 11.
There were about 40 young women in our wing, all young, from different regions. But we no longer had a homeland or a name. The system was simple and ruthless. Every morning began at 5:30 AM with a shrill whistle and shouts from the female guards. The slightest delay resulted in a whip strike or the suppression of the ration—a clear soup based on rotten rutabaga and 200 grams of bread mixed with sawdust.
But hunger was not our biggest problem. We had understood that in this place, being better fed was a bad sign. Those destined for the heaviest examinations received more food so that their bodies would resist longer. Doctor Richter had created a world submitted to his perverted order.
He called it ‘biological discipline.’ Each of us had a number. Mine was 34. It was not tattooed on the skin but engraved on a small metal plate that we had to hold between our teeth during certain procedures so as not to bite our tongues under the pain. I remember Véronique.
She was my only support. She was 24, older than us, and already understood what was happening. One night in total darkness, she whispered to me: ‘Zinaïde, they are not just studying us. They want us to be the last of our line.’ At the time, I didn’t fully grasp these words, but Véronique had noticed what we didn’t yet see.
After the radiation sessions, periods disappeared. The skin took on a waxy hue. Greta, the head nurse, was Richter’s shadow. If he was the spirit of this hell, she was its hands. A woman in her forties with perfectly styled blonde hair, hands impregnated with the smell of disinfectants.
I never saw her blink when someone screamed under her needle. For her, we weren’t even animals, only annoying obstacles on the path to an impeccable report. One day, she caught me sharing a piece of my bread with little Tamara. Without a word, she struck me in the face with a metal tray.
My lip burst. Blood splattered her white blouse. She calmly took out a handkerchief, wiped the stain, and said: ‘In this block, there is no room for pity, only for data.’ The most serious injuries began when Richter launched the cycle of injections. In November 1942, a group of 10 women including Véronique, Tamara, and me was led into a room with high windows painted grey.
We were forced to lie on tables so cold that the skin stuck instantly. Richter circulated between us with a large syringe, injecting a bright yellow liquid directly into our veins. ‘It’s for your own good,’ he would say. Two minutes later, my body burst into flames. It felt like molten lead was flowing through my veins.
My heart beat so hard I thought it would break my rib cage. Then the rhythm raced. Next to me, Tamara went into convulsions. Her body arched; foam came out of her mouth. Richter observed calmly, stopwatch in hand, noting the precise moment the spasms began. This nightmare repeated three times a week.
Yet the worst was not the physical pain; it was the psychological pressure. Richter loved to talk. He summoned us one by one, asked about our dreams, our parents. For a few seconds, one could almost forget where they were. Then he would abruptly change his tone and describe in detail how our bodies would decompose under the effect of his products.
It was a torture made of hope and despair mixed. In December, an event occurred. A new woman arrived: Marie, almost a child. She had a magnificent voice. At night, she sang lullabies softly. Richter became interested. He wanted to study the effect of stress and certain chemicals on the vocal cords.
He forced her to sing while he injected her with substances causing the larynx to swell. We heard her voice become hoarse and then turn into a rattle. Two weeks later, Marie no longer sang. She didn’t die. She simply lost the ability to make any sound. Richter declared the ‘material’ defective.
She was taken away. We never saw her again. With Véronique, we made a pact. If one survived, she would tell everything. ‘You are young, Zinaïde, you must remember every detail. You are our witness,’ she told me. Then came the heaviest experiment: X-rays, a room with lead doors, a humming black machine.
We were forced to stay still for 15 to 20 minutes while Richter observed from a protected room. We felt only tingling and the smell of ozone. We didn’t know that this machine was burning our essence as women. One day, in a glass reflection, I saw my face. I didn’t recognize myself.
I was 18, but I looked 60. At that moment, something in me broke permanently. They had already won. I remember Stéphane, one of the few male prisoners. He worked in the technical service and sometimes threw an extra potato over the fence. One day, he whispered to me:
‘Hold on, my girl, ours are close. I hear the rumble of the cannons in the east.’ These words were oxygen for us. We began to listen to the silence. And indeed, when the wind blew from the front line, a dull, barely perceptible rumble reached us. It was hope, a dangerous hope.
Richter heard it too, and it made him even more cruel. He was in a hurry. He wanted to finish his research before the war reached the threshold of his laboratory. At the end of December 1942, the regime became harsher. Procedures took place twice a day. My body was so exhausted that I often lost consciousness in the corridor.
Greta would throw ice water in my face and force me to get up. ‘Movement is life, 34,’ she would sneer. But I knew that for them, our movement was only a way to measure the resistance of human flesh before its final destruction. I remember the last days of Tamara, lying on the neighboring cot.
She was delirious; she saw her mother, our village, the apples ripening in the orchard. She stretched out her arms, thin as matches, toward invisible fruit and smiled. This expression on her ravaged face remains the most terrible vision of my life. That night, she fell silent. In the morning, Greta entered for inspection, simply pushed Tamara’s body out of bed, and ordered Stéphane and me to take it away.
We carried her small weightless body to the ditch behind the building. Snow fell on her open eyes. I swore to myself never to forget that gaze. In this part of my testimony, I have only described the surface of the iceberg of pain in which we lived.
Richter’s system aimed to transform us into docile matter, into organic materials. But he was wrong about one thing: even in the most inhuman conditions, the heart can remember. My heart beat slowly, almost stopping under fear and hunger, but it counted every day of our humiliation. I write this in 2012, and my hands tremble not from old age, but because I still feel the smell of those yellow liquids they injected into our veins.
We were 18. The world should have flourished. Instead, we rotted in the sterile rooms of German science. The year 1943 was approaching—the year of the most terrible choice and the deepest despair. In the next part, I must tell how I was forced to become an assistant in Richter’s operating room.
And that moment when I understood that death is sometimes the most merciful gift. I am sitting here in my armchair. and I hear the peaceful hum of cars in 2012. But in my head, another noise still resonates: the humming of the lamps in Doctor Richter’s operating block. I must now speak of the worst, of the moment when muscular pain gave way to the emptiness of the soul.
In January 1943, I was no longer the young girl from a village near Paris. I was a shadow. My hair had almost all fallen out, the skin stuck to the bones like grey parchment, and my eyes—when I saw my reflection in the medical windows, I got scared. My eyes were dead. In the middle of the winter of 1943, Richter decided I was too useful to stay on a cot.
He learned that I knew a bit of Latin and pharmacy. So, he did worse than any injection. He ordered me to work for him. ‘Zinaïde, you have a steady hand,’ he told me one day while putting on his white gloves. ‘You will help me prepare the material.’ It was my personal hell. I washed the floors after procedures, sterilized the instruments that tortured my friends, and I held their hands when they screamed.
It was a cruelty that surpassed physical pain. Richter didn’t just want to destroy our bodies; he wanted to make us accomplices. He wanted me to look Véronique or Claire in the eyes while he injected them with his poisons and for them to see in me a traitress. I remember February 1943.
A cold so intense that frost appeared inside the concrete walls. But in the operating room, the heat from the lamps was suffocating. That day, Richter summoned Véronique. ‘My dear Véronique, like a sister to me.’ She was already very weak after the irradiations. Her stomach was covered in dark spots. Her breath whistled.
He announced a ‘final examination.’ This is what he called his organ removal operations. ‘Hold her by the shoulders, 34,’ he ordered. I stood at the head of the table. My hands trembled. Véronique looked at me. There was no hatred in her eyes. Only an infinite goodbye. ‘Zina, don’t look, close your eyes.’
I could not. Greta stood next to me, watching every gesture. That hour lasted an eternity. I saw the scalpel shine in Richter’s hand. He operated without anesthesia, using a simple local cooling. He wanted to observe every nervous reaction. Véronique screamed, then her voice broke. Her nails dug into my forearms.
I felt her life escaping through my fingers while I passed the instruments. I handed the tools that killed the person who had protected me from the first day. At that moment, my heart turned to ice. I understood that such was their goal: to burn all humanity in us so that we would hate ourselves.
After that day, Véronique did not return. Richter declared that her organism had provided valuable data for histology. I spent the night washing the operating room. I scrubbed the tiles until my nails bled, trying to erase her blood, but I knew it would remain forever on my conscience.
The experiments became even more sophisticated. Richter began to work with infections. He injected us under the skin with pathogens thought to have disappeared. He observed the ulcerations, the rotting flesh. He called it ‘the study of the resistance of Eastern races.’ One day, he chose five girls and made them drink water mixed with products that immediately destroyed the kidneys.
I had to note how many times per hour they asked for water and how many times they lost consciousness. One of them was barely ten years old. She called for her mother in a low voice. Even some guards looked away. Not Richter. For him, there were only numbers. The climax, our infernal peak, occurred in March 1943.
The front was advancing. The Germans were becoming nervous. Richter received the order to conclude the research and eliminate ‘non-essential assets.’ We understood what that meant. He decided to realize his great project: to test a theory of total sterilization via drinking water. But first, test the dose on us.
He gathered the remaining twenty girls in the large hall. We were naked, huddled against each other, sick, at the end of our strength. Richter entered accompanied by officers from Berlin. He looked triumphant. ‘Today, you enter history.’ He chose me to help him. I stood before a container of transparent liquid, odorless and yet saturated with death.
He pointed to Claire, my last friend. ‘Begin, 34.’ I looked at Claire. Her eyes were filled with terror. I looked at Richter; he was smiling. Everything froze. Even Greta held her breath. It was the moment of my final destruction or my last uprising. My fingers closed on the cold syringe.
The officers opened their notebooks, and then the unthinkable happened. Claire straightened up. Despite her thinness, she suddenly seemed immense. She spat in Richter’s face. A deathly silence fell. The drop slid slowly down his shaved cheek. His smile vanished. ‘You…’ A soldier struck Claire in the head with the butt of his rifle.
She fell to her knees without a cry. Richter snatched the syringe from me and plunged it himself into her neck, injecting the entire dose. Claire went into convulsions at my feet. Her body arched to the point that her bones cracked. It was an agony impossible to describe. Pure, concentrated evil. We stood still, watching the last spark of our group die.
At that moment, I understood that the examinations were over. After that, there was only darkness. Richter turned to us. His blouse was splattered with Claire’s blood. ‘Tomorrow, we will finish with the others,’ he said before leaving the room. We were pushed back to the dormitories, but we were no longer the same.
After Claire’s death, something had broken in us. We no longer feared the injections or the rays. We awaited death as a deliverance. That night, no one slept. We were sitting on the floor, huddled against each other, listening to the wind howl behind the walls. I looked at my hands and hated them for still being warm.
I remembered Véronique’s words: ‘You must remember everything.’ So, I recited the names like a rosary. Véronique, Claire, Tamara, Marie, Olga… 22 girls, 52 days in this block. 1943. These numbers engraved themselves in me forever. I knew we had reached the peak of human suffering.
It could not get any worse because we were already at the bottom of the abyss. That last night in Richter’s laboratory, I felt my soul detach from my body. I saw myself from the outside: a withered little old woman in the body of an eighteen-year-old girl sitting on a soiled mattress. I knew that in the morning, they would come.
I knew that Richter would abandon no witnesses. And yet, deep inside, I felt a strange, bitter freedom. He could take away my health, my youth, the possibility of having children, but he could not force me to forget who I was. Around four in the morning, we heard strange sounds.
They weren’t the screams from the basement; they were nearby explosions. The earth shook; plaster fell from the ceiling. Then panic—hurried steps, shouts in German, papers being burned. The smell of smoke became suffocating. Richter did not return with his polite smile. Through the crack in the door, we saw him and Greta loading crates into trucks.
It was the end of our captivity without us yet knowing if it marked the beginning of freedom or that of a mass grave. The last morning in this concrete hell did not come with light, but with a silence more terrifying than any explosion. In March 1943, the ground in the forests around Kyiv was still gripped by ice.
We woke up without hearing the dogs, without the heavy steps of the guards in the corridor. We remained lying, motionless, convinced it was an even more cruel trap. The air was saturated with smoke, a grey and sticky cloud. The Germans had fled in the night, trying to erase the traces of what they called ‘science.’
They had set fire to the archives, the basements where our medical records were kept—our lives reduced to experiments. Finally, we dared to go out. The doors were open for the first time in months. We walked barefoot on the white tiles, now covered with burnt papers and empty ampoules.
The skin of my feet, hardened by the cold, touched the ground and this contact was the most beautiful feeling in the world. It was the cold of freedom, not the icy steel of the operating table. Black ashes floated in the air. Our names were burning; our suffering was disappearing in smoke. I went out into the courtyard, into the open air.
I will never forget the taste of that March earth. It smelled of melting snow, damp pine needles, and hope. I was 18, but I felt as old as the world. We looked like ghosts: grey faces, empty eyes, arms thin as branches. Our striped shirts hung on us like on skeletons.
We didn’t know where to go. So, we looked at the forest surrounding this cursed place. And suddenly, they appeared: men in quilted coats, weapons on their chests, red stars on their caps. Our soldiers. I remember the young lieutenant who was the first to cross the fence. He must have been 22, barely older than me.
When he saw us, his face, already hardened by war, froze. He took off his cap and remained silent. He looked at our shaved heads, our scars, what the Reich’s doctors had made of us. In his gaze, there was no pity, only the horror of understanding what one human being can inflict on another.
He slowly took out a piece of dry bread and handed it to me. His fingers, blackened by gunpowder, trembled. I took this bread, pressed it against my chest like a treasure, but I could no longer eat it. My throat tightened. I cried for the first time in months spent in Block Number 10. They were tears of relief and grief.
Véronique, Claire, Tamara—they had stayed back there, in nameless pits behind the fence. Richter had taken their lives. From us, he had stolen the possibility of a normal life. We were transported to a field hospital. A month later, after endless examinations, I heard my final verdict.
A young Soviet doctor leafed through my analyses, exhausted by sleepless nights. Finally, he looked up. ‘Zinaïde… what they did to you—the rays, the substances—has destroyed everything. You will never be able to have children.’ At that moment, the sky above me collapsed. At 18, I learned that my lineage would end with me, that I would never carry life, that I was scorched earth.
It was Richter’s last victory. He hadn’t killed me with a bullet; he had killed my future. When the front moved west, I returned to Kyiv. The city was in ruins, wounded like me. I saw people clearing debris, singing despite the hunger. I, I could not sing. I walked through the destroyed streets.
I saw women with strollers. Every child’s laugh pierced my heart like one of Doctor R’s needles. Epilogue 2012: Today, in 2012, I am finally telling this story. I have had no children, but I have a memory. As long as I speak, it is alive. And as long as someone listens to me, evil has not won.
For 70 years, I have carried this sterility like the heaviest invisible burden of my life. In 1947, when the world slowly began to breathe again in peacetime, I met Stéphane. He too was broken by the war. He had known captivity. His back bore terrible scars and his eyes a deep sadness.
We got married. We lived in a small room in a communal apartment and we never spoke out loud about what had happened back there. Stéphane knew my secret. He knew I could never give him a son or a daughter. When I woke up screaming at night, he simply squeezed my hand and whispered: ‘The main thing is that we are together, Zinochka.
The main thing is that we are breathing.’ Together we rebuilt this city that I see today from my window in 2012. I worked on construction sites, carrying bricks as heavy as those the men carried, then worked in a pharmacy, healing people with the simplest means.
I wanted to be useful. I wanted to forget myself in work so as not to think about the eternal silence of my home, about the absence of children’s laughter. But the smell of disinfectants in hospitals made me pale and lose consciousness. I have avoided doctors all my life. I have been afraid of every medical examination until death.
My entire existence took place in the shadow of that single year. I told Stéphane everything. He was the only one to know the truth. But even to him, I never fully confessed how I had helped Richter in the operating room when Véronique was being tortured. I was afraid he could never touch my hands again if he knew those hands had passed the executioner’s instruments.
It was my secret cross. I carried it alone for decades. Today, in 2012, I watch the young people walking along the banks of the Dnieper. The city is preparing for a football championship. There are flags, music, laughter. In them, I see the life they tried to steal from us. Stéphane passed away 10 years ago.
I am alone in this empty apartment. Sometimes, it seems to me that I am still sitting on that dirty mattress in Block Number 10 and that all my life afterward has been only a long, detailed dream—dreamed just before death. 70 years of silence. I kept it to protect my own from the evil I had seen.
But today, as I feel the cold approaching my heart, I understand one essential thing: silence is also a poison. If we do not tell, if we let these stories disappear with us, then the Doctor Richters can return. Evil loves the silence of oblivion. I often think of that man in a white coat.
I don’t know what became of him after the war. Perhaps he fled across the ocean, lived long and respected. But I know one thing: his science lost. He wanted to prove that we were waste. He wanted to make us biological material without value. But I am here, I am 88 years old.
I remember every name. His name has been erased from the world’s memory. His manuscripts burned in March 1943. My memory, it is alive. My memory is the supreme justice. My ability to mourn Claire and Véronique after 70 years is something he never had and could never have had. He had only cold calculation and steel.
We had a soul that he could never dissect with his scalpel. I feel the flame of my life flickering. This old tape recorder is recording my last breaths. I want to address those who will listen to this in Kyiv, in France, or elsewhere in the world. Preserve the human in you; it is the most difficult and essential thing.
Never let anyone convince you that one life is worth more than another because of skin color or the shape of a skull. Never let fear make you an instrument of another’s will. Remember that behind every dry number in history textbooks, there is a living heart capable of loving, hoping, and forgiving.
When I am no longer here, I want these recordings to remain, that they be a reminder—even in the darkest place, in the deepest hell, it is possible and necessary to preserve the light. I close my eyes and I finally see them all. They are standing in an immense green meadow in the sun.
There are no more tiles, no more needles, no more cold looks from Doctor Richter. Claire is laughing. Véronique is adjusting her braid. Little Tamara is eating a ripe, juicy apple. They wave to me; they call me. I am going toward them, my heart at peace. I did not remain silent. I told everything. My voice is fading. The tape will soon stop.
For 70 years I have waited for this moment—the one where I could finally place this story in your hands. Life is the greatest of miracles, even when it has passed through fire and ashes. Remember that. Remember us. We were 18 and we simply wanted to live.”
Historical Note and Warning
According to historians, during the Second World War, thousands of Soviet and Ukrainian women were subjected to forced sterilizations in SS medical facilities. In the Ravensbrück camp alone, hundreds of young women were mutilated during chemical and radiological experiments conducted in the name of racial hygiene, depriving them of motherhood forever.
Giving a voice to those from whom it was torn away is the only way to ensure that history does not repeat itself. Remembering is an act of resistance and a sacred duty toward human dignity.
