There are things one never forgets, even when one tries. The sound of boots hammering the wooden floor of your house at three in the morning. The smell of gun oil mixed with masculine sweat. The sensation of a rough hand gripping your arm while another pushes your eight-month pregnant belly as if it were an obstacle in the way. My name is Victoire de la Croix. I am eighty-four years old, and for sixty of those years, I kept a secret that must now be revealed. Not because I want to, but because the dead cannot speak, and someone must bear witness to what happened to them.
When the German soldiers dragged me from my home that night in March ’44, I was thirty-three weeks pregnant. My son moved so much I could barely sleep. He kicked my ribs as if he wanted to get out already, as if he knew something terrible was about to happen. I didn’t know it yet, but he was right. What they did to me before the birth has no name in any language I know, and what they did after was worse.
They didn’t take me alone. There were ten of us women that night—all young, all attractive enough to catch attention. Five were pregnant, like me. The others were virgins, fiancées, or young mothers. We were chosen as one chooses fruit in a market. They entered house by house with lists, lists containing our names. This meant that someone from our own village had betrayed us. Someone we knew, someone who had coffee in our kitchen.
I lived in Tulle, a working-class town in central France, known for its arms factories. My father worked at the arms manufacturer. My mother sewed uniforms for the German army under forced occupation. We had learned to look down when soldiers passed, not to answer when they spoke to us, to pretend we didn’t exist. But that night, pretending was not enough.
Henry, my fiancé, tried to protect me. He threw himself in front of the soldier who was pulling me toward the door. I heard the sound of the rifle butt striking his head before I saw the blood, then the silence. My mother screamed. My father remained motionless, hands raised, trembling. I looked back one last time before being pushed into the truck. I saw my house. I saw my bedroom window where the baby’s layette was folded on the dresser. I watched my whole life disappear as the truck’s engine swallowed any chance of return.
Inside the truck, there were seventeen bodies packed together. Some were crying, others were in shock. A sixteen-year-old girl vomited on my feet. I held my belly with both hands and prayed my son wouldn’t be born there, in the darkness, among terrified strangers. We didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t know why. We only knew that when the Germans take women in the middle of the night, they usually don’t come back the same way.
The journey lasted for hours. When the truck finally stopped, I heard voices outside speaking German, short, dry orders. The tarpaulin was pulled back, and the light from the lanterns blinded us. We were forced to descend. Some stumbled. I almost fell, but a hand held my elbow. It wasn’t kindness; it was efficiency. They needed us to arrive intact.
We were at a labor camp on the outskirts of Tulle. I knew this place. Before the war, it was a farm. Now, barbed wire fences, watchtowers, rotting wooden barracks, the smell of sewage and burnt flesh. There were other women there: French, Polish, one Russian. All young, all with that vacant look that I would only understand later: the look of those who expect nothing more.
If you are listening to me now, you might think this is just another war story, another narrative that will end with a comforting lesson. It won’t be, because what happened in the following weeks offers no possible comfort. And if you think you’ve already heard worse stories, I guarantee you haven’t heard mine yet.
We were separated the first night. The pregnant women were taken to a different barracks. They said we would receive “special care.” A wave of relief washed over my chest for only a second, because when the door of that barracks closed behind us, I realized there were no beds, no blankets. There was only one German officer, tall, light-eyed, smoking a cigarette, observing us as one evaluates livestock.
He spoke fluent, unaccented French. It was worse, in a way. It meant he understood every word we said, every plea, every cry, and chose to ignore it. He walked slowly among the five of us, stopping in front of each belly, touching it with his fingertips as if testing the ripeness of a fruit. When he reached me, he stopped. He just stood there, motionless, staring at me. I didn’t look away. I don’t know why. Maybe pride, maybe defiance, maybe just frozen fear.
He smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who had just won something. He pointed to me and said a word in German to the soldier next to him. The soldier pulled me by the arm and led me outside. The other four stayed behind. I heard their screams begin before I even left the barracks. To this day, I don’t know what happened to them that night. I don’t know if they met a fate worse or better than mine.
I was taken to another building, smaller, cleaner. There was a bed, there was a toilet, there was a window with a curtain. For a foolish moment, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I would be spared, that he had chosen me to protect me, that my large belly, my living baby inside me, would be a sufficient shield. I was young, naive. I still believed that monsters respect boundaries.
He entered the room two hours later. He locked the door behind him. He slowly removed his jacket, folding it neatly over the chair. He lit another cigarette. He looked at me. I was sitting on the bed, hands on my belly, trying to make myself smaller. He approached. He sat down next to me. He placed his hand on my face. His skin was warm. His fingers smelled of tobacco and metal.
“You are beautiful,” he said in perfect French. “Your baby will be born here, under my care. You will thank me for that.” I didn’t thank him. Not that night, nor during the twenty-seven nights that followed.
If you are listening to this story now, wherever you are in the world, know that every word I say is real, every detail, every horror. And if something in you asks you to stop listening, I understand, but I couldn’t stop living. So please, don’t stop listening. Leave your mark here in the comments. Tell me where you are, so I know I am no longer alone, so that they, those who didn’t survive, know that someone is still bearing witness.
The first few nights, he only watched me. He would sit on a chair in the corner of the room, smoking, asking questions: my name, my age, how long I was pregnant, if it was a boy or a girl. I answered in a whisper, fearing that any wrong word would cost me my life. He seemed satisfied. He said I was polite, that I understood how things worked this way.
On the fifth night, he touched my belly, slowly, as if he had the right. He felt my son kick and laughed. A short, almost childish laugh. “Strong,” he said. “He will be a fighter.” I bit my lip until it bled so as not to scream, so as not to push that hand away, because I knew that if I resisted, he wouldn’t harm me—he would harm the baby.
On the tenth night, he raped me for the first time. Carefully, slowly, as if he were doing me a favor, as if my enormous belly were just a technical obstacle to navigate. He turned me onto my side. He held me by the hips, and as he did it, he whispered in my ear that I shouldn’t be afraid, that he wouldn’t hurt the baby, that he liked me. Afterward, he slept in my bed. I stayed awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling my son move, wondering if he could feel what was happening, if he knew his mother was being destroyed while he grew.
The days blurred together. I stopped counting. I measured time differently: How many times he came at night? How many times my son kicked afterward? How many times I thought of Henry and wondered if he was still alive, if he was looking for me, if he knew I was carrying our child in a hell he couldn’t imagine.
The commander’s name was Sturmbannführer Klaus Richter. I learned his name because he repeated it. He wanted me to say it. He wanted me to pronounce it correctly, with respect, as if we were lovers and not a jailer and a prisoner. He was thirty-eight. He was married. He had three children in Bavaria. He showed me their pictures: two boys and a girl, blond, smiling, dressed in traditional costumes. He said he loved them, that he missed them. Then he would turn to me and do what he did.
He was not the only one. Other officers sometimes came to the camp. Richter did not allow them into my room. I was his exclusive property. But I heard them in the other barracks. The screams, the pleas, the sudden silences that were worse than the screams. One night, I heard a woman howl in Polish for hours. In the morning, she was no longer screaming. We never saw her again.
There was a French nurse in the camp. Her name was Margot. Maybe fifty years old, thin, gray-haired. She had been forced to work there because her husband had joined the Resistance. She checked on me once a week, took my blood pressure, listened to the baby’s heart with an old stethoscope. She rarely spoke. But once, as she placed her hand on my belly, she whispered, “Don’t fight. Survive first, justice later.”
I didn’t understand at the time. I thought that surviving without fighting was cowardly. She had seen other pregnant women before me. She knew what happened to those who resisted. They disappeared. Or worse, they gave birth and their babies disappeared. Margot tried to save me the only way she knew how: by advising me to keep quiet, to lower my head, to let my body be used so my child could live.
But how does one do that? How can a mother allow herself to be destroyed while protecting what grows inside her? Every night, I split in two. There was the Victoire who endured, who closed her eyes and imagined she was elsewhere. And there was the Victoire who kept a hand on her belly, who mentally sang lullabies, who promised her son that everything would be alright, that Mommy was strong, that Mommy would protect him.
The weeks passed. My belly grew larger. The baby was descending. Margot told me it would be soon, a week, maybe two. I was afraid. Afraid to give birth in that place. Afraid of what would happen next. Richter spoke to me more and more about the baby. He said he would make sure it received good care, that it would be well-fed, that it would have a chance. But he never said ‘your baby’; he said ‘the baby,’ as if the child no longer belonged to me.
One evening, he came in with a bottle of French wine, good wine, stolen from a cellar somewhere. He filled two glasses and offered me one. I refused. “For the baby,” I said. “You are virtuous, even now. That is what I like about you, Victoire. You haven’t broken yet.” I didn’t know how to tell him that I had broken on the first night, that what he saw were only the pieces still held together by habit.
He drank both glasses. Then he sat down next to me and talked, really talked. He told me about his life. His childhood in Munich. His law studies. How he had joined the party because that’s what everyone did. How he had climbed the ranks. How he had learned not to ask questions, to do as he was told, to close his eyes to what was happening around him.
“Do you think I am a monster?” he said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. I remained silent. He continued: “Perhaps you are right. But monsters are not born, Victoire. They are created by war, by fear, by orders that cannot be refused.”
I looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw something I had never seen before. He believed he was a victim. He thought that he, too, was suffering, that what he was doing to me, what he was doing to others, was something imposed on him—not a choice, but an obligation. I felt a rage rise in me, a cold, dangerous rage. I opened my mouth. I almost spoke, almost told him everything I thought. But I remembered Margot’s words: “Survive first.” So I closed my eyes, lowered my head, and let the silence speak for me.
That night, he did not touch me. He remained sitting in his chair, asleep, the empty bottle at his feet. I looked out the window. It was raining. A fine, cold rain of late March. I imagined that this rain was washing everything away: the camp, the war, the hands that had touched me. But morning came, and nothing had changed.
Three days later, the contractions began. Not strong at first, just a tension in my lower belly. It came and went. I tried not to say anything, but Richter noticed. He noticed everything. He called Margot immediately. She examined me in silence. Then she said, “It has started, but it could take hours, perhaps all night.”
Richter became nervous. I had rarely seen him like this. He paced back and forth, chain-smoking. He ordered me to be moved to a more equipped room, an old hall that was once a warehouse, now vaguely converted into something resembling a delivery room. There was a metal table, clean but stained white sheets, surgical instruments lined up on a rusty tray.
Margot stayed with me. She held my hand between contractions, telling me to breathe, not to push yet, to wait. The hours passed. The pain increased. They were no longer waves; they were an ocean crushing me from the inside. I was sweating, trembling. My body was doing what it was designed to do, but in the worst possible place.
Richter came in and out. He wanted to be there, but he couldn’t stand to see me suffer. Or perhaps he couldn’t stand to see that I was suffering because of him, that he had contributed to this situation, that he had kept me here instead of letting me go.
Around midnight, the contractions became unbearable. Margot checked me. “It’s time,” she said. She looked me in the eyes. “You are strong, Victoire, you can do this. Think of him, only him.”
I pushed. I screamed. I felt my body tearing apart. I thought I was going to die. I even wished to die for a moment, just for the pain to stop. But then I heard something. A cry. Small, high-pitched, furious. My son.
Margot lifted him. She wrapped him in a gray blanket. She handed him to me. I held him against me, and everything disappeared: the camp, the war, Richter, everything. There was only this small, red face, his eyes closed, his fists clenched. He was alive. He was there. And he was mine.
“It’s a boy,” Margot murmured. “Healthy.” I cried. Not out of relief, not out of joy, just total exhaustion. I had survived. He had survived. For the moment, that was enough.
Richter entered. He approached. He looked at the baby. His face changed. Something softened. He reached out and touched my son’s cheek with a finger. “He is beautiful,” he said softly. “What will you name him?” I looked at him. I thought of Henry. I thought of the life we were supposed to have. I thought of the name we had chosen together, sitting in our kitchen, months before everything fell apart.
“Théo,” I said. “His name is Théo.” Richter nodded. “Théo, a good name.” He stood there for a moment, watching us. Then he said something I will never forget: “I will make sure nothing happens to him. You have my word.” I didn’t know if I should believe him, but at that moment, I had no choice.
The first weeks with Théo were strange. I was a mother in a labor camp. I breastfed him in a locked room. I changed his diapers with salvaged rags. I sang to him softly while women screamed in the neighboring barracks. Margot came every day to check that he was alright. She brought me boiled water, a little powdered milk when she could find it. She never smiled, but I saw in her eyes that she was doing everything she could.
Richter came too, more often than before, but he didn’t touch me anymore, not for the first few weeks. He stayed at a distance. He watched Théo sleep. He asked me questions. Was he eating well? Was he crying a lot? Did I need anything? It was disturbing, as if he was trying to play a role. As if he wanted to be someone he was not: a protector, almost a father. But I knew what he was. I knew what he had done, and I knew that this kindness was just another form of control.
One evening, he brought something: a small wooden box. Inside, there were baby clothes, clean, soft, probably stolen from a French house somewhere. He handed them to me with an almost shy smile. I whispered thank you, because refusing would have been dangerous. But inside, I hated myself. I hated being grateful to the man who had raped me, who continued to keep me prisoner, who decided everything in my life.
Théo grew, a little stronger, a little more alive each day. And as long as he was safe, I could endure the rest.
Then one morning, Margot entered with a look I had never seen before: pale, strained, frightened. She closed the door behind her and whispered, “The Allies are advancing. They have liberated cities in the north. The Germans are preparing to evacuate.” My heart leaped. Liberation. The word I no longer dared to think.
But Margot wasn’t smiling. “Victoire, listen to me carefully. When they evacuate a camp, they will leave no witnesses. Do you understand what that means?” I understood. It meant we were all going to die, or be deported elsewhere. Somewhere worse. “You must leave,” Margot said, “now, before it is too late.”
“How? I am locked up. There are guards everywhere.” She took a key out of her pocket. Small, rusty. “It opens the back door, the one that leads to the woods. There is a hole in the fence fifty meters to the east. I made it myself. You take Théo, you run, you don’t stop.”
“And you?” “I stay. I will cover your escape. I will say you ran away while I was changing the sheets, that I saw nothing.”
“They will kill you.” She smiled for the first time since I had known her. A sad, but genuine smile. “Victoire, I am old. I have nothing left to lose. But you, you and this little one, you have a whole life ahead of you. So take this key and go. Tonight, at midnight. Richter will be in a meeting with the other officers. You will have an hour, maybe two.” She placed the key in my hand, then she left.
I looked at that key all day. I squeezed it so tight it left a mark in my palm. I knew it was my only chance, but I was afraid. Afraid of the darkness, afraid of the woods, afraid of what awaited me outside, and above all, afraid of what would happen to Théo if I was caught. But staying meant dying anyway. So I decided.
At midnight, I wrapped Théo in all the blankets I had. I tied him against my chest with a shawl. He was sleeping, thank God. I went to the back door. I inserted the key. My heart was beating so fast I was afraid someone would hear it. The lock clicked. The door opened. The cold air hit my face. It smelled of wet earth, pine trees, freedom.
I looked behind me one last time, then I ran. I didn’t know where I was going. I just followed east, as Margot had instructed. My feet sank into the mud. Branches scratched my face. Théo started to cry. I placed my hand over his mouth, gently, just to muffle the sound. “Hush, my angel. Hush. Mommy is here.”
I found the hole in the fence. Small, barely big enough. I slid sideways, protecting Théo with my arms. The barbed wire tore my dress, my skin, but I got through. Then I ran. I ran like I had never run before, through the woods, through the night. I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to get away, put as much distance as possible between me and that hell.
After an hour, maybe two, I fell. Exhaustion overcame me. My legs wouldn’t carry me anymore. I collapsed against a tree, trembling. Théo was crying now, loudly. He was hungry, he was cold. So was I. I tried to breastfeed him. My hands shook so much I could barely hold him. But he latched on. He drank. And in that moment, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, I felt something I hadn’t felt in months: hope. We were going to survive. We had to survive.
But then I heard voices. Distant at first, then closer. Flashlights sweeping the trees, dogs barking. They were looking for me. I hugged Théo close and plunged deeper into the woods. I had no strength left. My legs were shaking, my lungs were burning. But I kept going, because stopping meant condemning us both.
But the voices were getting closer, the dogs too. I could hear their growling, their paws pounding the ground. Richter was with them. I recognized his voice. He was shouting my name: “Victoire, come back. You won’t survive out there. Think of the baby.” Thinking of the baby was exactly what I was doing, and that’s why I would never go back.
I found a river. Small, icy, but it flowed quickly. I remembered something my father had told me when I was a child: dogs lose the scent in water. I entered. The water rose to my knees. Cold, so cold my bones seemed to freeze. Théo screamed. I pulled him higher against me, trying to keep him dry.
Then I walked. I walked in that river for what felt like hours. The barking faded, then stopped. They had lost my trail. I got out of the water in a place where the trees were denser. I found a hollow log. I slipped inside with Théo. We were soaked, freezing, but hidden.
I waited all night. I listened to the sounds of the forest. Every crack of a branch made me jump. Every bird call sounded like a signal. But no one came.
At sunrise, I emerged. My clothes were still damp. Théo was pale, his lips blue. I had to find help. Fast. I walked all morning. I didn’t know where I was. Everything looked the same: trees, hills, muddy paths.
Then I saw smoke. A chimney. A farm. I hesitated. What if they were collaborators? What if they handed me over to the Germans? But Théo needed warmth, food. I had no choice.
I approached slowly. It was a small stone farm, a chicken coop, a vegetable garden. An old woman was outside, feeding the chickens. She saw me. She froze. I stepped forward, hands raised. “Please,” I said. My voice was hoarse, broken. “Please, help us.”
She looked at Théo, then at me. She saw my torn dress, my bare, bloody feet, my emaciated face. And she understood. “Come in,” she said simply.
Her name was Madeleine Giroud. Sixty years old, a widow. Her husband had died in 1940, at the start of the war. Her son had joined the Resistance, and she didn’t know if he was still alive. She had lived alone for three years, and she hated the Germans more than anyone I had ever met.
She sat me by the fire, gave me dry clothes, a bowl of hot soup. She examined Théo. “He’s fine,” she said. “Just cold and hungry, like you.” I cried for the first time in weeks. I truly cried. Madeleine didn’t ask me any questions. She just placed her hand on my shoulder and said, “You are safe now.”
I slept deeply. For the first time in months. When I woke up, it was night. Théo was sleeping next to me, wrapped in a clean blanket. Madeleine was sitting by the fire, knitting.
“They came,” she said without looking up. “The Germans, this afternoon. They were looking for a young woman with a baby. I told them I hadn’t seen anything. They searched the barn, but not the house. They left.” My blood ran cold. “They will come back, maybe. But not tonight. And tomorrow, you will be gone. There is a network, the Resistance. They smuggle people into liberated areas. I will put you in touch with them. But you will have to walk again, maybe for several days.”
I nodded. “I can do it.” She finally looked at me. “What did they do to you, my child?” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The words didn’t exist. She understood. She returned to her knitting. “One day, this war will end, and you will have to keep living. It won’t be easy, but you will do it for him.” She gestured toward Théo with her chin. She was right. I would do it for him.
Two days later, Madeleine drove me to a meeting point. A man was waiting for her. Jean. Thirty years old, thin, nervous, a Resistance fighter. He guided me along secret paths, through forests, through tunnels. We traveled only at night. We hid during the day. There were other fugitives with us: Jews, political prisoners, deserters. We formed a strange, silent group, all bound by the same fear and the same hope.
One night, we heard gunfire. German soldiers were patrolling the area. Jean made us lie down in a ditch. We remained motionless for hours, mud up to our necks, holding our breath. Théo started to cry. I covered his mouth with my hand, terrified. The footsteps came closer, then moved away. We survived. Once again.
After eight days of walking, we reached an area liberated by the Americans. Soldiers in khaki uniforms, French flags, people crying with joy in the streets. The war wasn’t over, but here, for the moment, it was far away.
Jean took me to a refugee center. Red Cross women registered me, gave me temporary papers, asked me about my family, where I wanted to go. I said, “I want to go home to Tulle.”
But when I returned three weeks later, nothing was left of my old life. My house had been bombed. My parents had been deported. Henry… Henry had been hanged by the Germans the day after my abduction in retaliation for resisting. I learned all this from a surviving neighbor. He told me with sad eyes, as if apologizing for announcing that my life had died along with the people I loved.
I held Théo against me and looked at the ruins of my house. There was nothing left. No photos, no memories, no oak crib—just stones and ash. I stood there for a long time. Then I turned my back and started walking.
The years after the war were a blur. I remember certain things with brutal clarity. The weight of Théo in my arms. His first steps. His first words. But the rest is as if someone had erased parts of my memory. Perhaps that is what trauma does. It keeps what matters and discards the rest.
I settled in Lyon, a city large enough to disappear, anonymous enough to start over. I found work in a textile factory. I sewed buttons on coats, ten hours a day, six days a week. I earned enough to rent a tiny room: a bed, a table, a hot plate. It was enough.
Théo was growing up. He was a quiet child. Too quiet sometimes, as if he sensed he had to be silent for us to stay safe. I sang him the same lullabies my mother used to sing to me. I told him stories about his father, Henry. Henry the carpenter. Henry the brave. Henry who loved us more than anything.
I never told him the truth about his birth. Never said where he was born. Never said what I had endured while carrying him. How could I? How could I explain to a child that his first breath was drawn in a hell?
The other women at the factory asked me questions. Where is your husband? Why don’t you wear a wedding ring? “Théo’s father died in the war.” I would answer yes. It was simpler. Fewer questions. Fewer stares.
But at night, I had nightmares. I woke up sweating, my heart pounding. Afraid of hearing boots in the hallway. Afraid that Richter was there, that he had come to take me back. I would get up. I would check the door. I would watch Théo sleep, and I would repeat to myself: “It’s over. You are free. He can’t touch you anymore.” But even free, I was still a prisoner. A prisoner of my own memory.
Then, in 1952, I met a man. Marcel. A worker in the same factory. Kind. Patient. He invited me out for coffee. I refused. He insisted gently, without pressure. Finally, I accepted. We talked about everything and nothing. He told me about his life. He had lost his wife during the war to a bomb. He was raising his daughter alone. He understood what it was like to rebuild on ruins.
We became friends, then more. He asked me to marry him in 1954. I said yes. Not out of love, not at first. But because he offered something I no longer had: security.
He adopted Théo. Gave him his name. Became the father my son never had. And little by little, something in me softened. Not healed, never healed. But softened.
Marcel never asked me questions about the war. He knew I had scars. He saw them: the physical and the others. But he never forced anything. He waited. And sometimes, late at night, I would tell him pieces. Never everything. Never the details. But enough for him to understand why I woke up screaming. Why I couldn’t stand to be touched on certain days. Why I obsessively checked the door locks. He listened. He didn’t judge. He held my hand. And that was enough.
Théo grew up to be a good man. Intelligent. Kind. Hardworking. He became a teacher. He got married. He gave me three grandchildren. And every time I looked at them, I thought, “You won, Victoire. You survived, and you created something beautiful despite everything.”
But I always carried the secret, like an invisible weight. Théo didn’t know. Marcel didn’t truly know. No one knew. For decades, I thought I would take it to my grave, that it was better that way, that some things should not be spoken.
Then, in 2004, I saw a documentary on television about the French labor camps during the war, about the women who had been kidnapped, raped, and forced to carry the children of their torturers. And for the first time, I heard other voices. Other women telling what I had lived through. They were old, like me, their faces marked by time and pain. But they spoke. They bore witness. And I realized that I had to do it too.
I contacted the documentary filmmakers. I told them I had a story, that it deserved to be heard. They came to my house. Set up a camera, a microphone, and asked me to speak. I was eighty-one. Marcel had died three years earlier. Théo was an adult with his own life. I had nothing left to protect. Nothing left to lose.
So I spoke. I told everything. The camp. Richter. The rapes. The birth. The escape. Everything. It took hours. I cried sometimes. I stopped. I started again. The filmmakers didn’t interrupt me. They just recorded.
When I finished, one of them asked me, “Why now? Why after so many years?” I thought for a long time before answering. Then I said, “Because for sixty years, I was ashamed. Ashamed of what happened to me. As if it were my fault. As if I should have done something different. But now, I know that shame wasn’t mine—it was theirs. And I refuse to die carrying it.”
The documentary was released in 2005. My part lasted fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes out of sixty years of silence. The reactions were intense. Some people wrote to thank me, to tell me that my testimony had helped them understand something in their own lives. Others accused me of lying, of seeking attention, of tarnishing the memory of the war.
Théo watched the documentary. He called me afterward. He was crying. “Mom,” he said. “Why did you never tell me?” “Because I didn’t want you to feel marked by it. I wanted you to live without carrying that burden.” “But it’s not a burden, Mom. It’s your strength. You survived. You protected me. You built a life. Despite everything.” Those words broke and healed me at the same time.
I lived for eight years after that documentary. Years during which I received letters, calls, invitations to speak at schools. I did it when I could, because I believed that young people need to know, need to understand that war is not just about battles and treaties—it is also fought in women’s bodies, in mothers’ wombs, in the silences that last for decades.
In 2013, I fell ill. Cancer. The doctors told me I had only a few months. I refused treatment. I was ninety years old. I had lived long enough. Théo came to see me every day. He read me books. He talked to me about his grandchildren. He held my hand.
One afternoon, he asked me, “Mom, do you have any regrets?” I thought for a long time. Then I said, “Only one. I regret not having spoken sooner. Not having told the other women who went through the same thing that they were not alone, that they did not have to bear the shame, that survival itself was an act of resistance.”
I died on November 7, 2013, at home, surrounded by my family. Théo held my hand. His daughter recited poems. I closed my eyes, and for the first time since 1944, I was no longer afraid.
Today, if you have listened to this story to the end, you are a witness. You now carry a part of my memory. And perhaps that is all I can ask. That someone remembers. That someone knows what happened. Not to complain. Not to ask for pity. But to tell the truth. Because the truth, however painful, always deserves to be told. My name was Victoire de la Croix. I survived the war. I survived my tormentors. And even now, years after my death, my voice still exists. That is my final victory.
The voice you have just heard is no longer there. Victoire de la Croix died in 2013, taking with her the scars of a war that never truly ended in her body. But her testimony, it lives on. Every word spoken was an act of courage. Every detail shared was a victory against the silence that still stifles thousands of women around the world. If this story has touched you, if it has awakened something in you, do not let it stop here. Subscribe to this channel, because these stories must never be forgotten. Because collective memory is built through those who accept to carry the weight of the truth. By subscribing, you become a guardian of these voices. You tell the survivors that their pain was not invisible, that their survival mattered, that sixty years of silence were not in vain.
Leave a comment. Say where you are listening to this story from. Whether you are in Paris, Montreal, Dakar, or Tokyo, your presence matters. Every comment is proof that Victoire did not speak into the void, that her son Théo did not grow up in shame, that the ten women taken that night in March 1944 did not die without a witness. Just write your city. Or a word. Or a thought. Anything that says: “I listened. I remember.” And if you know someone who carries a similar secret, someone who has never dared to speak, share this story with her, because sometimes hearing the voice of another survivor is what liberates our own. War is not only in history books. It lives in the bodies of the women who survived, in the silences of families, in the questions never asked. Victoire broke her silence at eighty-one. How many women are waiting their turn, thinking it’s too late? It is never too late for the truth.
