The German soldiers’ actions towards the French prisoners were a truly cowardly act.
I was 25 years old when I learned what these human beings meant. It wasn’t instantaneous. It wasn’t with a bullet or a blow. It was gradual. It was cold. It was hanging upside down, feeling the blood rush down until my head exploded with pain while German soldiers laughed outside the cell. My name is Thérèse Boulanger.
I was four years old and for decades I told no one what happened that winter of 1943, not my daughter, not my husband when he was still alive, not the doctor who asked me why I couldn’t sleep on my back. Because what they did to us doesn’t appear in any report. There is no photograph, there is no official proof, only memory and pain.
Today, in 2005, I agree to speak because my little girl, who is here beside me holding my hand, has convinced me that this story cannot die with me. She’s right. But despite everything, every word I’m about to say hurts just as much as if it were happening right now. What the German soldiers did to the French prisoners in this camp was not just violence, it was cowardice.
It was a planned dehumanization and it has been erased from history. I was born in 1917 in Lyon. I grew up in a family of bakers. My father used to say that bread was sacred because it nourished the body but also dignity. I learned that early on. I learned that there were things worth dying for.
When France fell in 1940, I was 22 years old. I saw the German soldiers enter the city as if it already belonged to them. I saw the fear in the eyes of the neighbors. I saw the silence settle in like a disease. I didn’t want to join the resistance. Nobody wants it . But in 1942, when I saw a Jewish girl being dragged down the street by two Gestapo officials, something inside me broke.
My father always said that bread was sacred, but so was dignity. I started slowly. I was delivering messages. I was hiding fake documents under the bread at the bakery. I was helping families cross the Swiss border. Little things, things that at the time made me feel that I was still human. Until in November 1943, someone betrayed us.
It was 4 a.m. when they knocked on the door. I heard the boots before I heard the screams. My heart stopped. I knew what that meant. They didn’t give me time to put on a coat. They dragged me outside in the November cold, still in my nightgown, onto the frozen sidewalk. My mother was shouting from the window.
My father tried to get out, but a soldier pushed him back inside and locked the door. I never saw him again . They threw me into a van with six other young women, all terrified. One of them, Marguerite, was only ten years old. She cried constantly. I held her hand, not out of kindness, but out of fear, because I too needed something to hold.
They took us to a temporary camp 40 km from Lyon. It was not an official concentration camp. It does not appear on any map. He has no name in the Allied military archives. It was just an old textile factory converted into a detention center, a place where he did things he didn’t want recorded. When we got out of the van, it was already dark again.
The place smelled of mold, rusty iron, and something worse, something I only understood afterwards. It reeked of human despair. A German officer greeted us. He was tall, had light eyes, and spoke French with a strong accent. He said that we were traitors to the German order and that our fate would depend on our cooperation.
We didn’t know what that meant. Not yet. They separated us. They put me in a cell with four other women. There was a jump in the corner. No blanket, just an old, torn mattress on the floor, smelling of urine. Marguerite was with me. There was also Simone, a schoolteacher from Grenoble, and Claudette, a nurse from Marseille.
All arrested for resistance, all young, all terrified. That first night, we still thought we would survive. But on the third day, everything changed. What Thérèse Boulanger experienced in the following weeks defies all military logic. This was not conventional torture. It was not an interrogation. It was something much more calculated, much more perverse.
And for decades, no historian mentioned what was really happening in that camp. Because what the German soldiers were doing to these French prisoners was not just violence, it was planned humiliation, methodical dehumanization, something that could never be officially recorded. What Thérèse is about to reveal will contradict everything you think you know about the German occupation of France and will show how far human cowardice can go when there are no witnesses.
On the third day, they came to get us at midnight. I remember the sound of boots in the corridor, the clinking of keys, the door creaking open, the light of torches blinding us. A German officer, the same one who had greeted us, said something in German. Then he repeated it in French with that cold smile that I will never forget. You will learn what it means to betray the Rich.
They took us out of the cell. There were four of us. Marguerite was trembling so much that she could barely walk. Simone, the teacher, was trying to keep her head held high. Claudette prayed in a low voice. I couldn’t feel anything anymore, just cold. They took us to another part of the building, a huge, empty room with beams on the ceiling and metal hooks hanging from chains.
Hooks like the ones that were once used to hang meat carcasses in slaughterhouses. I remember thinking, “This is where they’re going to kill us.” But they didn’t kill us, they did worse. The officer gave an order. Two soldiers captured Marguerite. She screamed. She struggled, but they were too strong. They tied his ankles with a thick rope.
Then they attached the rope to one of the hooks and hoisted it up. She was now hanging upside down, her arms dangling, her hair almost touching the ground. She was crying, she was screaming, she was begging. They did the same thing with Simone, then with Claudette, then with me. I remember the sensation, the blood rushing to my head, the pressure rising behind my eyes, my temples throbbing as if they were about to explode, my arms hanging limply and heavy, my breath shortening.
And above all, I remember the soldiers’ laughter. They laughed, they smoked cigarettes, they talked amongst themselves as if we weren’t there, as if we weren’t human. The officer approached me. He leaned forward so that his face was level with mine. He said, “You’re going to stay like this all night.
Tomorrow we’ll see if you’re ready to talk.” Then they left , they turned off the lights and they left us alone, hanging in the dark. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. One hour if time no longer existed. There was only pain, pressure in the head, nausea, dizziness, and that unbearable feeling of no longer having control over one’s own body.
Marguerite vomited. The vomit fell into her own hair. She was crying. She begged God to let her die. Simon tried to move his arms, to sway, to find a less painful position, but there wasn’t one . Claudette was praying. She prayed incessantly, like a litany. I don’t know if she really believed that someone could hear her, but that was the only thing that kept her going , I wasn’t crying.
I was just trying to breathe, to hold on, not to lose consciousness because I knew that if I lost consciousness, I might not wake up. They returned at daybreak, they untied us. We fell to the ground like sacks of meat. My legs could no longer support me. My head was spinning. All I could see were black spots.
They dragged us back to our cells. They threw cold water on us. Then they left. We thought it was over, that it was a one-time punishment, a warning. But that night, at midnight, they came back and started again. For three weeks, every night, they came to get us. Every night, they would hang us up . Every night we thought we were going to die, but we didn’t .
And perhaps that was the worst part, because he didn’t want to kill us. He wanted to break us. He wanted to show us that we were nothing anymore, that we had no dignity left, that we were no longer human. And they almost succeeded. Marguerite has lost her mind. She stopped speaking. She remained huddled in a corner of the cell.
Empty eyes, trembling lips. When he came to get her, she no longer resisted. She let herself be manipulated like a rag doll. Simon tried to commit suicide. She attempted to hang herself with a piece of fabric torn from her dress. Claudette and I stopped him, but I don’t know if we did the right thing because sometimes staying alive was worse than dying.
What still haunts me today, 60 years later, is not the physical pain. It’s not about nights spent suspended upside down. It’s not even the laughter of the sola. Silence followed because after the liberation, when the allies arrived, when the camps were opened, when testimonies began to circulate, no one spoke about what had happened in that factory.
Military reports do not mention this camp. The German archives make no mention of it. Historians don’t talk about it as if we never existed, as if this violence never happened. And for 60 years, I believed it was better this way, that it was easier to remain silent, that no one would want to hear, that no one would believe.
But now I know I was wrong because silence is exactly what he wanted. On December 15th, the German soldiers left the camp. Not because they had lost, not because the allies were approaching, simply because they had received orders to retreat eastward. The front line was moving. The factory no longer had any strategic use.
They left us there, alive but barely. There were 11 of us women at the start. There were only six of us left. The others had died, two from pneumonia, one from a cerebral hemorrhage after being suspended for too long. Another woman had committed suicide. One last one had simply stopped breathing one night for no apparent reason, as if her body had decided it had had enough.
Marguerite was still alive, but she no longer spoke. She was no longer walking . She remained seated in a corner, her eyes fixed on nothing. When she was given water, she drank it. When they gave her bread, she ate it, but she wasn’t really there anymore. Her gaze was that of a broken doll. Her lips sometimes moved, but no sound came out.
At night, she rocked back and forth , her forehead against the cold wall. Simon had lost 20 kg. Her hair had fallen out in patches. She was coughing up blood. Each fit of coughing made her fold in half and she spat into a piece of cloth which she held tightly in her hand. The fabric was red, dark, almost black.
Claudette had a leg infection that was getting worse every day. She smelled of gangrene. The smell was unbearable, sweet and rotten at the same time. Her leg was swollen, purple, with red lines that extended up towards her thigh. She moaned at night, but softly so as not to wake us. I was able to stand, but I don’t know how.
The day after the Germans left, local resistance fighters found the factory. They searched for abandoned weapons and salvageable equipment. They didn’t expect to find us. I remember the face of the first man who entered our cell. He was young, maybe twenty years old. He was carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder and a blue breastplate.
When he saw us, he froze. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he shouted, he called to the others. They came running. They got us out of there. They gave us water, bread, and blankets. They tried to talk to us, to ask us questions, but we didn’t answer. We no longer knew how.
One of them, an older man with a grey beard, knelt before me. He placed his hand on my shoulder. What did they do to you? Simon tried to answer. She opened her mouth, but instead of a word, a sob came out, a deep sob that came from the bottom of her stomach. And then she collapsed. The young resistance fighter rushed to catch up with her.
He took her in his arms and she clung to him like a child. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at his comrades with a lost expression. Claudette looked away. Marguerite didn’t even react. I said. They suspended us every night for weeks. The young resistance fighter looked at me without understanding.
Suspended ? How is that suspended? I showed my ankles. Their bodies were marked by the ropes. The skin was black, purple, torn off in places, feet first, head down until we lost consciousness. He paused, took a step back, then said, “My God!” But it wasn’t compassion in his voice, it was horror and perhaps also disgust because we were no longer women, we were broken things, witnesses to a violence he didn’t want to imagine.
They took us to a convent a few kilometers away. The journey lasted forever. Claudette moaned with every movement. Simone was coughing up blood. Marguerite looked at the landscape without seeing it. The sisters welcomed us, cared for us, and fed us. She didn’t ask any questions. She looked at us with immense sadness, but she said nothing.
One of them, an old nun with a wrinkled face, cried when she saw my ankles. She murmured something in Latin. Then she applied a balm to my skin with infinite tenderness. But despite their care, some injuries could not be healed. Claudette died three days after our arrival. The infection had spread. The sisters called for a doctor, but it was too late.
” It would have to be amputated, but she is too weak,” he said. Claudette heard it . She smiled weakly. She said, “Good, I don’t want this leg anymore. Anyway, it’s already dead.” She left in the middle of the night without a sound. When the sisters found her in the morning, her eyes were open as if she were looking at something we couldn’t see.
We buried him in the small cemetery behind the convent. The sisters sang a hymn. Simone cried. Marguerite remained motionless. I threw a handful of earth on the coffin and prayed that Claudette would find peace. Marguerite was admitted to a psychiatric hospital two weeks later. She still wasn’t speaking.
She didn’t recognize anyone. A doctor said she was suffering from acute war trauma. The day they came to get her, I held her hand one last time. I whispered. I’m sorry, Marguerite. She did not reply. They took him away and I never saw him again. She died in 195 at the age of 33 without ever speaking again, without ever leaving that hospital, without ever finding out who she was. Simone survived.
The sisters cared for him for months. She returned home to Grenoble in the spring of 1944. She resumed her teaching position. She got married, had two children, but she never contacted me again. I think she never wanted to think about that time again, and I understand her. I returned to Lyon in January 1944. My mother cried when she saw me.
My father, however, did not recognize me. My mother told me that he was never the same after my arrest, that he faded away little by little. He died two months later of a heart attack. I never told him what had happened. How could I have? After the war, I tried to bear witness. I contacted the French authorities.
I wrote letters. I spoke to journalists. I even tried to find other survivors. But nobody wanted to listen to me. Not really. I was told that it was hard to believe, that the German archives did not mention this camp, that without material evidence it was impossible to confirm. A military historian received me in his office in 1952.
He listened to me politely. Then he closed his notebook and said to me, “Madam, I understand that you have experienced terrible things, but the war caused a great deal of trauma. Sometimes, memory distorts events without documentation. Without additional witnesses, I cannot include it in my research.
I understood that day that no one would ever truly believe me, that this story would remain buried, that these men had won in a way. So, I stopped talking about it. I tucked this story away in a corner of my mind. I got married. I had a daughter. I lived my life. But never, ever could I sleep on my back. Never could I bear having my ankles touched.
Never could I look at a butcher’s hook without feeling my stomach churn. And for 62 years, I kept silent. In 2003, I had a stroke . I was 82 years old. My body was beginning to fail. The Doctors told me I was lucky to be alive, that many women my age wouldn’t have made it. But I didn’t feel lucky. I felt tired.
Tired of carrying the weight, tired of waking up every night in a sweat, my heart pounding, with the feeling of falling over. My little girl, Mathilde, came to see me every day. She came with me to my medical appointments. She held my hand during the tests. She read to me when I couldn’t hold a book myself. One day, she asked me, “Grandma, why do you always have nightmares?” I hesitated.
Throughout my life, I had protected my daughter from this story. I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to look at me differently. I didn’t want her to carry that burden. But Mathilde was not my daughter. She was the next generation and maybe it was time. So I told him because I experienced things during the war, things I’ve never talked about.
She looked at me with her big black eyes. She was 23 years old. She was studying history at university. She said, “Tell me!” And for the first time in sixty years, I told the whole story from beginning to end. The suspended nights, the pain, the humiliation, the death of Claudette, the madness of Marguerite, the silence after the war.
She cried, she hugged me and she said, “Grandma, you can’t die with this. The world needs to know.” Mathilde organized this interview. She was the one who contacted the documentary filmmakers. She was the one who convinced me that my testimony mattered. At first, I refused. I told him it was too late, that nobody cared , that historians had already decided what happened during the war and that my story wouldn’t change anything. But she insisted.
She told me, “If you don’t speak up now, this story will disappear with you, and these men will have won.” She was right. So in 2005, at the age of 18, I agreed to testify in front of a camera. Math – he was by my side. She was holding my hand. Every time I stopped, every time I lost my breath, she would squeeze my fingers and say, “Keep going, Grandma, you ‘re almost there.
” This documentary is the result of that interview. It’s my voice, my words, my truth. After this testimony was broadcast, things changed. Historians reopened archives. They found indirect traces of this forgotten camp: vague mentions in German military reports, fragmentary testimonies from other resistance fighters who had never dared to speak.
A former German nurse interviewed in 2007 confirmed that she had heard of suspension methods used in some unofficial detention centers . She didn’t want to say more, but that was enough. In 2010, a commemorative plaque was placed on the site of the former factory. It reads: “In memory of the women resistance fighters, detained and tortured here in 1943.
Their names have been erased, but their courage will never be forgotten. Mathilde was there that…” That day. Me too. I was 92 years old, I could barely walk. But I was there, and for the first time since 1943, I felt I could breathe. I died in 2013 at 95. But before I went, I left this testimony. Not for pity, not for glory, not even for justice.
I left it because silence is a weapon, and as long as we remain silent, it wins. What the German soldiers did in that factory in 1943 was not an exception. It wasn’t an isolated case. It was a method. A method of dehumanization. A method to break women without leaving visible traces, without photos, without official reports, because blows leave marks, shootings leave bodies.
But hanging someone upside down until they lose their mind leaves nothing. Nothing but a shattered memory and a silence that lasts for decades. And that’s the real truth. Cowardice. Not the violence, not the cruelty, but the choice of a form of torture that will never be proven, that will never be acknowledged, that can always be denied.
Today, in 2025, very few survivors remain from that era. We are disappearing one by one, and with us the last direct testimonies of what happened. But Mathilde, my granddaughter, carries on. She has made this story her mission. She gives lectures, she writes articles, she seeks other testimonies, other evidence, other voices that have never dared to speak because she knows what it took me sixty years to understand.
Silence protects the executioners, not the victims. I would like to conclude by saying something to the people watching this documentary. You may doubt, you may wonder if what I am saying is true, if I haven’t exaggerated, if my memory hasn’t distorted the events. And I understand, because it’s easier to doubt than to accept.
But I ask you a question. Why would I have waited sixty years to invent such a story ? Why would I have broken the silence at 97 when I could have taken it to my grave? The answer is simple: because it happened, because it was real, and because if I hadn’t spoken about it, no one would ever have known. So now, I leave you with this, with this story, with this memory, with this truth. Do with it what you will.
Believe me or not, share it or forget it. But know one thing: as long as someone remembers, they haven’t won. And I, until my last breath, remembered. Thérèse Boulanger died in March at the age of 97. Her testimony led to the official recognition of the existence of the Saint-Maurice factory detention camp near Lyon.
In 2015, three other survivors finally agreed to testify. Their voices, long remembered, The stifled voice continues to resonate. What Thérèse Boulanger experienced was not an exception. It was a method, a calculated violence designed to break without leaving a trace, to erase dignity without witnesses, to kill the humanity before killing the body.
For sixty years, she carried this burden alone in silence because no one wanted to believe, because official history had no room for her truth. But today, thanks to her courage and that of her granddaughter Mathilde, this story exists. It resonates, it refuses to die. If this testimony has moved you, if you believe that voices like Thérèse’s must continue to be heard, we need your support.
