“She is thirsty” – The “bathtub” method used by the Gestapo in the cellars of Paris.
Paris, the City of Lights. But beneath the cobblestones, in the cellars of the bourgeois buildings on Avenue Foch or Rue Lauriston, existed a world into which the light never penetrated. The story you are about to hear is one of torture that leaves no scars on the skin, but drowns the soul. This is the story of Elise and a simple bathtub filled with dirty water.
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Take a deep breath. It could be your last. Part 1: The Invitation to the Bath. My name is Elise. I am 91 years old. I live in a small ground-floor apartment. I don’t have a bathtub at home, only a shower with a non-slip floor. And even in the shower, I never let the water run over my face. Never. If a drop of water gets into my nose, if I choke, my heart races, my hands tremble, and I’m back there in that basement.
It was July 1943. I wasn’t a soldier. I was a courier. I transported letters, forged documents, sometimes money for the resistance fighters. I felt invisible, untouchable, the way you feel when you’re 22. They arrested me one Tuesday morning on the Rue des Saussaies. Not a shot was fired, just a black car braking, two men in leather gabardines getting out, a hand over my mouth, and the world turned upside down.
They led me to a building that looked like any other building in Paris. A beautiful facade of hewn stone, geraniums in the windows. This was the headquarters of the French Gestapo, the gang from the Rue Lauriston, Frenchmen who worked for the Germans with terrifying zeal. I wasn’t taken to an office for a typical interrogation.
They let me go downstairs. The stairwell on duty smelled of wax and grime. But the further down we went, the more the smell changed. It smelled of damp, mold, and something else. A metallic, sweetish smell, the smell of fear dried on the walls. They pushed me into a room in the basement. It used to be a laundry room.
The floor was raw concrete, stained with dark patches. The walls were damp with moisture. In the middle of the room stood the object, a bathtub, an old cast-iron bathtub on legs, the kind you used to send to your grandmother. The enamel was peeling and grayish. It was full. The water wasn’t clear. It was murky, brownish.
Water that had already been used, stagnant water. There were three men in the room. Two thugs with rough faces, smoking dark cigarettes. They had rolled up the sleeves of their white shirts like butchers before work. And the third, the leader, his name was Monsieur Henry. He was short, thin, with an impeccable gray suit and a neat little mustache.
He looked like a provincial accountant or notary. He approached me. He didn’t hit me. He smiled. A polite, almost shy smile. “Miss Elise,” he said softly. “It’s hot outside today, isn’t it? A real July sun.” I didn’t answer. I was shivering, not from the cold, but because my animal instincts were screaming. I stared at the bathtub. I knew.
Everyone in Paris had heard the rumors about the bathtub. “You must be thirsty,” Monsieur Henry continued, observing my dry lips. Fear dehydrates. He signaled to the men. “Help the young lady quench her thirst. She is very thirsty.” They grabbed me. I struggled. I scratched, I kicked, but they were strong, and I was a young girl weighing 50 kg.
They twisted my arms behind my back. I heard the click of the handcuffs. Not comfortable police handcuffs, but crude iron cuffs that were tight enough to crush my wrists. They dragged me to the bathtub. I saw the surface of the water rising. I could see particles floating in it. Dirt, hair, maybe vomit.
“No!” I screamed. “No, I beg you, I don’t know anything.” Monsieur Henry sat down on a wooden chair, crossed his legs, and took out a notebook. “Everyone knows something, Elise. And everyone ends up drinking.” The two men grabbed me by the hair and waist. They lifted me up like a pile of dirty laundry. My feet left the ground.
I found myself floating above the brackish water. I took a deep breath. One last time, I filled my lungs completely, a ridiculous survival reflex. And then they submerged me. The first contact wasn’t the cold, it was the texture. The water wasn’t liquid, it was thick and viscous. It seeped into my ears, my nostrils, and clung to my closed eyelids like a mask of grease.
You think you can hold your breath for a long time. In movies, heroes endure for minutes on end. But when two men are pinning your neck to the bottom of a cast-iron bathtub, time ceases to exist. Panic consumes your oxygen in seconds. I was hunched over, knees against my chest, hands tied behind my back, scraping across the rough enamel floor.
I could feel the vibrations. The men above me must have been talking, maybe laughing. But to me, it was just a dull, distant hum, distorted by the liquid. Don’t breathe. Whatever you do, don’t breathe. That was the only command my brain screamed. I clenched my teeth so tightly my jaw cracked.
I could feel my heartbeat, not in my chest, but in my temples, my throat, behind my eyes. Boom boom boom. A jackhammer craving air. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, my lungs began to burn. It wasn’t acute pain, it was overwhelming heat. It was as if I had swallowed hot coals. My diaphragm began to spasm. It’s a survival reflex.
My body was desperate to inhale. It wanted air at any cost. I was fighting against my own body. I knew: if I opened my mouth, it would be the end. But the pressure of their hands on the back of my neck increased. They wouldn’t let up. They had been waiting for this exact moment. They knew biology better than I did.
And then came the breaking point. I didn’t choose to open my mouth. It was my body that betrayed my will. A violent shudder shot through my shoulders, and my mouth opened in a desperate reflex, trying to suck in life. But there was no life. There was nothing but this vile soup. The water rushed in. It was absolutely horrifying.
I felt the liquid pass through my glottis and overwhelm my throat. It was an intimate, profound violation. It wasn’t clear water. It was a salty, metallic mixture. It tasted of rust, castile soap, and urine. Yes. The water had been used by others before me. I was drinking their fear. The chemical burn in my bronchial tubes was so intense I thought I would explode.
I started coughing underwater, which only made things worse. I swallowed even more liquid. I was drowning. I felt my consciousness fading. Black stars began to dance before my closed eyelids. At that very moment, as I was slipping into oblivion, they pulled me out with a sudden, brutal jerk.
They grabbed me by the hair and yanked me out of the water. The air filled my lungs with a terrible gurgling sound. Ah! I vomited immediately. I spewed up water, bile, and phlegm. I dangled between the executioners’ hands. Soaked to the bone, blind, my hair plastered to my face.
I coughed so hard my throat felt like it would burst. Every breath was like a knife stabbing me because my lungs were irritated by the dirty water. “Stay calm, stay calm,” Monsieur Henry’s voice came through the air. I opened one eye. My vision was blurry, hazy. I saw him sitting there, still impeccably dressed, his legs crossed. He looked at his watch. “Three seconds,” he noted, “that’s not much. Mademoiselle has a small lung capacity.” He leaned toward me. He looked at me the way one watches a goldfish wriggling on a rug. “Was it good?” he asked. I couldn’t speak. I could only gasp for air, trying to get oxygen into my blood. “I told you she was thirsty,” he said to the two men, “but I don’t think she drank enough. Look, she’s still shivering.”
He closed his card. His face turned serious, almost sad. “The problem, Elise, is that you haven’t answered my question about the Alliance network, and until you do, I’m obliged to offer you a drink.” He nodded, just a small nod. His hands closed tightly around my neck. “No,” I managed to articulate with a gurgling sound. “Wait, let me breathe.” “You’ll breathe when you speak,” Henry replied. And they submerged me again, without giving me time to catch my breath, without giving me time to empty my lungs of the previous water. This time I had no air reserve; I went in with an empty tank. The second submersion is worse than the first because this time you know. You know what the water tastes like.
You know how it burns, and you know they won’t kill you. They’ll push you to the edge again and again until you go insane. Underwater, I screamed, a crime that only created bubbles on the surface. Bubbles that burst with a small, obscene sound in the silence of the cellar.
Plop! Plop! What followed was no longer torture, it was industry. They had found a rhythm, a hellish pace. Plunge in, hold, wait for the spasm, pull out, take a breath, plunge again. It was a precise, ruthless hydraulic mechanism. The two henchmen didn’t even break a sweat. For them, it was like doing laundry. They argued about their ration cards while I died at their feet.
By the fourth or fifth time—I’d lost count—my body began to change. First my stomach. From reflexively swallowing that foul water, my abdomen had swollen. It was hard, tense, painful. I felt like I’d swallowed rocks. Every time they pulled me out of the water, I vomited liters of slimy fluid onto the concrete.
The executioners stepped aside only a little so as not to soil their polished shoes. “She’s a glutton,” one of them said, laughing heartily. “She never stops.” Monsieur Henry didn’t laugh. He was observing the clinical symptoms. He was looking for the breaking point. He approached me as I lay on my side, coughing and shivering through my soaked lungs.
He lifted my chin with the tip of his fountain pen. “Look at me, Elise.” I tried, I opened my eyes, but the world had changed color. Water pressure, lack of oxygen, the violent effort of holding my breath. All of it had caused the tiny blood vessels in my eyes to burst. I no longer saw Monsieur Henry in shades of gray. I saw him through a red veil.
My eyes were bloodshot. I must have looked terrifying. A sea monster washed up on the tiles. “Your eyes are bleeding,” he remarked coldly. “The pressure in your skull is rising. Soon your eardrum will rupture. Then you won’t be able to hear my voice anymore. So take advantage of it while you still can.”
He brought his face close to mine. He smelled of cheap cologne and stale tobacco. “One name, Elise, just the section head. Give me a ‘fox’ and I’ll give you a dry towel. I’ll give you a hot coffee. I’ll give you air.” Air. The word echoed in my hypoxic brain like a divine promise. My whole body screamed for that air.
My political will, my patriotism, my convictions. All of it crumbled in the face of the biological need to breathe. Therein lies the perverse genius of the bathtub. It’s not a battle between you and the executioner, it’s a civil war within yourself. Your body wants to betray your mind.
Your diaphragm is ready to sell all of France for a breath of oxygen. I opened my mouth. My lips trembled. Henry smiled, his pen close to his notebook. “Go ahead,” he whispered. “Say it, break free!” I gathered the last of my saliva and spat it out. A stream of dirty water and blood landed on his pristine gray vest.
Henry’s smile faded. He didn’t shout. He simply took a white handkerchief from his pocket, carefully wiped the stain, and then looked at his men. “She’s still thirsty.” This time they didn’t wait for me to catch my breath. They grabbed me. But they changed the method. Instead of submerging me headfirst, they turned me over.
They laid me on my back, held me by the shoulders and thighs, and submerged me horizontally. It was worse. When you’re on your back, the water runs straight up your nose. Your sinuses are instantly flooded. It’s the feeling of pure drowning. You see the ceiling, the bare light bulbs shining through the surface of the murky water, as if you were already at the bottom of a pond, watching the world of the living recede.
I could feel the water filling my sinuses. A sharp, stabbing pain between my eyes. I fought back, but my movements had become weak and slow. I was a waterlogged rag doll. My mind began to drift away. I no longer thought about the network or the war. I thought about absurd things. I thought about the rain on the rooftops of Paris.
I thought of my childhood goldfish, which I had found dead, floating on the surface. So that was what it had felt. It’s cold, it’s dirty. I stopped fighting. I let myself sink. Water seeped in everywhere. It was hunger, gentle drowning, surrender. Suddenly, a hand grabbed my throat and yanked me to the surface with incredible force.
“Not now!” Henry screamed. I snapped back to reality with a jolt of chest pain. He didn’t want me to die. Death is meaningless to them. A corpse can’t speak. They needed me at the edge. Right on the precipice. They threw me to the ground. I landed in a huge puddle. I couldn’t get up. My legs wouldn’t support me.
I lay sprawled in my own filth. Blind, numb, with a huge belly, lungs burning. Henry crouched close to my ear. “Let’s take a break, Elise, just five minutes, so you can feel how good the air is. And in five minutes we’ll start again. And this time we’ll use hot water.” Hot water? The thought sent a shiver of pure terror down my spine.
Hot water dilates blood vessels. It accelerates suffocation. It makes the blood boil. He stood up and left the room with his men, leaving me alone in the darkness and dampness as I counted the seconds to hell. Five minutes. That’s how long it takes to smoke a cigarette. That’s how long it takes to boil a soft-boiled egg.
For me, lying on the cold concrete, it was an eternity of liquid terror. I didn’t rest. I was drowning from the inside out. It’s a medical phenomenon I learned about later: dry drowning. The water that had remained in my lungs irritated the alveoli. Even in the fresh air, I suffocated. I gasped like a run-over dog.
Ah! But the oxygen wasn’t getting into my blood. I could feel the weight of my water-filled stomach. It was pressing on my diaphragm, preventing me from breathing properly. I was a full, heavy, immobile tube. The silence of the cellar was broken by a single sound. Gluck, glug, glug, the sound of the drain plug.
He emptied the bathtub. The water was dirty. My water flowed into the Parisian sewers. Then a new sound, clattering noises. They were bringing metal buckets. I could feel the heat even before he came in. A rush of hot, humid, stifling air. He poured water into the cast-iron tub.
The steam began to rise, filling the cold room and creating an eerie mist around the lightbulbs. The door opened. Monsieur Henry’s polished shoes reappeared in my limited vision. “Break’s over, Elise.” They helped me up. I couldn’t resist. I had no muscles left. I was as limp as a jellyfish. As they brought me closer to the bathtub, I felt the heat on my face.
It wasn’t lukewarm water; it was very hot water, not boiling. He didn’t want to boil me, but hot enough to cause an immediate thermal shock. “Cold preserves,” Henry said, adjusting his cuff. “Heat expands. It opens the pores, it opens the mind. Immerse it.” The shock was like an electric shock. I was just recovering from mild hypothermia caused by the cold water and the concrete floor.
Stepping into that 50-degree Celsius water was like being plunged into acid. My icy skin screamed at the touch of the heat. Thousands of needles pricked me. But the worst part wasn’t the pain on my skin, it was the reflex. Cold water triggers a diving reflex that lowers your heart rate and allows you to hold your breath. Hot water does the opposite.
It sends the body into a panic, it accelerates the heart, it forces hyperventilation. As soon as my head was submerged beneath the steaming surface, my body wanted to breathe immediately. I didn’t last 10 seconds. The heat suffocated me. I felt like I was in a cursed womb, a burning amniotic sac trying to dissolve me. I opened my mouth. Hot water rushed in.
It was a completely different sensation than with cold water. Cold water numbs the pain. Hot water burns the airways. It flows down like lava. I could feel every millimeter of my lungs being scalded. This time I didn’t just swallow water. I lost consciousness. Complete darkness. A vasovagal syncope due to the heat and saturation.
I woke up on the floor to a sharp slap across my cheek. “Get up,” Henry barked. I opened my eyes; the world was spinning. I vomited hot water and bile. My body was bright red, like a lobster, from the vasodilation. My heart was racing at 200 beats per minute, on the verge of stopping. “She’s fragile,” Henry sighed. “She faints too easily, it’s annoying.” He knelt down, grabbed my hair, and jerked my head back so I would look at him. “Do you know what’s going to happen, Elise? If you keep fainting, we won’t be able to play in the bathtub anymore.” He smiled, and for the first time, his smile made me shiver more than the water. “We’ll have to switch to solid tools. The pliers, the blowtorch. See that table over there?” He had a wooden table with leather straps. “The bathtub is clean, it’s civilized. What comes after is butchery. So please, give me that name. Spare me the butchery.” I stared at him, unable to speak. My throat was burned by the hot water.
All I could manage was a hissing sound. But in my confused mind, a clear thought surfaced. They know nothing. If they did know something, they wouldn’t be so desperate over a single name. They are desperate. They are afraid of their leader. If I hold out just a little longer, they will be the ones in trouble.
I looked into his eyes, my eyes red with blood, and shook my head. No. Henry’s face hardened. He lost his composure as a notary. Pure hatred replaced politeness. He jumped up and knocked over his chair. “Put it back in!” he shouted. “And this time hold it until the bubbles stop. I don’t care if it bursts.” The two gorillas grabbed me.
I didn’t resist. I knew it was over. They lifted me above the steam. I closed my eyes. I thought of Renard, my leader. I thought of freedom. I thought of the fresh air of a spring morning, and they lowered me. The hot water enveloped me like a final shroud. I waited for death. I waited for my heart to explode.
But death didn’t come. Something else came. A dull thud, distant as an earthquake. Then a siren, not a police siren, an air raid alarm. The cellar light flickered and then went out. We were in total darkness, me underwater, her above, and in the darkness the hand that held my neck loosened.
The darkness saved my life. In the panic of the air raid sirens—an Allied bombing raid on the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt was underway, as I later learned—the men in Rue Lauriston were terrified. These executioners were brave in the face of a young, bound girl, but they were utterly afraid of the bombs. I heard curses, the stamping of boots as people ran for the stairs.
“Leave them, it doesn’t matter.” They left me there in the bathtub. I lifted my head above the water. I breathed in the black, viscous air of the basement. I didn’t try to run away. I couldn’t. My legs were paralyzed from the thermal shock. I was just a living being, floating in the dark, listening to the distant rumble of explosions shaking the walls.
They returned an hour later, after the alarm had passed. But the atmosphere had changed. The momentum was broken. Monsieur Henry was in a hurry, he was irritable. There was soot on his suit. “Throw her in the cell,” he ordered, without even looking at me. “We’ll continue tomorrow.” They didn’t kill me. They deported me. Ravensbrück, Mauthausen.
I survived it all. I survived the filth, the cold, the end. But strangely enough, it wasn’t the camp that haunted my nights, it was the bathtub. 1945, the trial of the French Gestapo. I was there. I was 24, but I looked 60. I had lost 20 kg. My hair had grown back gray. My eyes still bore red marks, burst capillaries that would never fully heal. Monsieur Henry sat in the dock. He seemed smaller. He no longer wore his impeccable suit, but a rumpled jacket. He no longer had his notebook. When I stepped up to the witness stand, he looked at me. I saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes. He remembered the thirsty girl. The judge asked me to tell my story. I spoke of the dirty water, the urine, the heat, the taste of rust.
The room was silent. People were crying. Henry wasn’t crying. He was taking notes on a small piece of paper, as if still searching for flaws in my breathing. At the end of my testimony, Henry’s lawyer stood up. “My client maintains that he never touched you personally, that he only asked questions.” I looked directly into Henry’s eyes. “That’s true,” I said, my voice forever broken by the chemical burns in my windpipe. “He didn’t touch me. He did worse. He watched. He stopped my death throes. He turned water, the source of life, into an instrument of death.” Henry was sentenced to death and shot at Fort de Montrouge.
I was told he refused the blindfold and looked the firing squad straight in the face. I don’t care. His death didn’t give me back my breath. Today, seventy years later, it’s raining in Paris. I’m sitting in my armchair by the window. I’m listening to the sound of the raindrops on the glass. Drip, drip, it’s a soothing sound.
To me, it’s the sound of a countdown. I never go to the swimming pool. I never go to the sea. I can’t drink a glass of water in one go. I have to drink it in tiny sips and control my breathing. If I drink too fast, if the water hits my throat a little too hard, my body tenses up. I see the bare lightbulbs again. I feel the hands on the back of my neck.
My lungs are scarred, they’re stiff. I’m out of breath after climbing three steps. The doctors call it restrictive lung disease. I call it the memory of Henry. But there’s one thing he didn’t take from me. I never said a name. Renard survived the war. He had children, grandchildren. He died in his bed, free.
He never knew that his life had hung by a thread while I held my breath in a bathtub on Rue Lauriston. Sometimes, when I take my very short shower, with lukewarm water, never hot, never cold, I let the water run over my shoulders and close my eyes. And I tell myself: “You won, Elise.” You are breathing.
The water tried to take me. The person tried to drown me. But I am the cork. “I always come back up.” Bathtub torture, or waterboarding, is one of the oldest and most horrific methods because it simulates imminent death without leaving immediately visible marks. It breaks the mind by attacking the most primal instinct: breathing.
Elise and thousands of other resistance fighters faced this hell in the Gestapo’s cellars. Many spoke out; we cannot condemn them. When the body is deprived of air, the mind loses control. But those who remained silent, like Elise, paid for their silence with a lifetime of liquid nightmares. When you drink a glass of water today, think of her.
Think about the value of this simple breath you take without thinking about it. Breathing is a privilege. Breathing is a victory. If this story took your breath away, if you felt a sign of life, write the word AIR in the comments. Just to say that we are alive and free. Subscribe to the channel. Don’t let the story be forgotten. Share this video to bring the truth to light. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for taking a breath with us.
