“I still can’t sit down”: something German doctors did to me when I was 18 in the camp…-phuongthao
“I still can’t sit down” – What the German doctors did to me in the camp when I was 18
My name is Madeleine Charpentier. I was ten years old when I realized that the human body can endure far more pain than we imagine. I’m not talking about the quick, sharp pain that cuts through and then disappears. I’m talking about the pain that lingers, that becomes a part of you, that changes the way you breathe, move, and exist.
Even today, many years later, when I approach a chair, my body trembles, not from weakness, but from memory. I was born in 1926 in a small town near Lyon. Before the war, I was an ordinary girl. I got up early to help my mother at the bakery. I read novels, which I hid under the covers. I dreamed of becoming a teacher.
My cousin Élise was my best friend. She was a year younger than me. She was shy, I was curious. She drew flowers, I drew cards. We were two halves of the same innocence. An innocence that was stolen from us one November morning. It was a gray day. I remember the smell of burnt bread in the kitchen. My mother had left the dough in the oven too long.
She was distracted, looking out the window. I knew it. We all knew it. The Germans were retreating, but they still controlled parts of the territory. And when they lose, men become dangerous. That morning they arrived. They didn’t knock. They just walked in. Four soldiers. Two of them dragged my mother outside.
The other two came straight toward Élise and me. We didn’t scream. We didn’t have time. They threw us into the back of a truck with other women. Some were crying, others remained silent, staring blankly, as if they already knew what was coming. The journey lasted three days. I don’t know exactly where we went.
All I know is that we crossed the border, that the cold intensified, that the smell of sweat, urine, and fear became unbearable. Élise was trembling beside me. She squeezed my hand so hard it left marks. I told her, “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.” But I didn’t believe it. None of us did. The journey lasted three days.
Three days locked in that truck. No air, no light, no hope. The smell was unbearable. Sweat, urine, fear. Élise was trembling, pressed against me. She squeezed my hand so hard her nails left marks on my skin. I whispered to her, “It’ll pass. This will pass.” But she didn’t believe it. Nobody believed it.
When the truck finally stopped, they pushed us out. The cold hit us like a punch. In front of us was a massive gate. Barbed wire, guard towers, barking dogs. If you’ve never seen the gate of a concentration camp, you can’t imagine what it’s like to feel the weight of fate. It’s not just visual; it’s a presence, the certainty that you no longer have control over yourself.
They led us to an area surrounded by barbed wire, hundreds of women, maybe thousands. French, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Sinti, and Roma, all different, all the same. Then they undressed us, examined us, shaved us, and tattooed us. My number was 47. Élise, 471. Consecutive numbers, as if we could still be together, as if that meant something.
The first few days were the worst. Not because of the physical violence, not yet. But because of the loss of humanity. You learn very quickly that your own body no longer belongs to you, that your own needs don’t matter, that crying is a waste of energy, that complaining is a death sentence. I learned to urinate standing up in front of other women, without privacy, without dignity.
I learned to eat a thin soup made with potato peels and dirty water. I learned to sleep in lice-infested wooden bunks. Six women shared the same cramped space. I learned that silence could be the only form of resistance, but there was something worse than all of that. Something I’ve never spoken aloud to this day.
There was a barracks there, a separate barracks, where some women were taken and never returned. Others did return, but transformed, broken, unable to look you in the eye, unable to sit upright. I was taken there in the third week. Rumors were circulating in the camp. It was said that German doctors were conducting experiments in that barracks.
No one knew exactly what, but everyone knew that those who returned were no longer the same. Some died within days, others survived. But their eyes grew dim, their bodies marked by invisible wounds. The fear of that hut was greater than the fear of hunger, greater than the fear of beatings, because it was the fear of losing what little remained of ourselves.
In the third week, they took me to the barracks. It was night. The sky was black, starless. I remember the sound of my footsteps on the frozen ground, Élise’s ragged breathing as she watched me from the barracks, unable to move, unable to speak. She knew, we all knew, but no one said anything, because speaking would have confirmed what shouldn’t be.
The interior smelled of disinfectant, mixed with something thicker, more organic: blood perhaps, sweat, fear. In the middle was a metal table with instruments I didn’t recognize. Two men in white coats. Not once did they look me in the eye. To them, I wasn’t a person.
I was an object, a unit, a number to be used. They ordered me to undress. I did it slowly, because every second I wore my clothes was a second I was still myself. Then they laid me on the table. The metal was freezing. I felt my muscles tense. My whole body resisted, as if trying to protect itself from what was about to happen.
But there is no protection against this kind of violence. I can’t describe in detail what they did to me. Not because I don’t remember. On the contrary, I remember it perfectly. But because there is pain that cannot be described with words. What I can say is that it involved tests, experiments, injections, and cold instruments: metal that penetrated me without my consent, without anesthesia, without humanity.
They took notes, measured, and observed my reactions as if I were a lab rat. The pain was unbearable, but the worst part was the humiliation of knowing that my body no longer belonged to me, that it had become a testing ground for men who considered themselves scientists, men who, after the war, could return to their families, kiss their children, and never think about what they had done, what they had destroyed.
When they finished, they kicked me out. I literally fell to my knees in the icy mud. I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t respond. The pain spread from my pelvis to my thighs, back, and stomach. I crawled to the barracks. Élise saw me coming. She ran toward me. She helped me inside. She didn’t ask me anything.
She knew. I didn’t sleep that night. I stared at the rotting wooden ceiling and listened to the other women’s ragged breathing. Some wept silently, others whispered prayers in languages I didn’t understand. I wondered how many of us would survive, how many would make it home, and if going home even meant surviving.
After that first night in the cabin, I could no longer sit down. Every time I tried, the pain took my breath away. It started in my pelvis, traveled up my spine, radiated into my thighs and abdomen, as if something inside had been torn apart and could not heal. I stood during roll call, for hours, my legs trembling, while the guards sometimes seemed amused.
Some laughed, others looked away. But no one intervened. In this world, compassion was a weakness, and weakness killed you. Élise supported me as best she could. She lent me her shoulder when I faltered. She whispered words I could no longer hear clearly. She asked for nothing. She knew words were useless.
But the cabin kept coming back. Not every day, not every night, just often enough for the fear to become constant, a shadow that never faded. It was always the same: the same icy table, the same men in white, the same cold instruments, the same notes in a notebook. As if my suffering were a scientific experiment, as if my pain could be measured, quantified, archived. I stopped crying.
The tears had dried. Nothing remained but silence and rage. A dull, simmering rage that kept me standing when my body threatened to collapse. And then, one morning, something changed. A young German soldier working near the kitchen looked at me, not like the others, not with contempt or indifference, but with something that seemed like curiosity, perhaps even compassion.
His name was Klaus. He was twenty years old, with light eyes and nervous hands. He almost never spoke, but he always watched. And in that hell, to be seen as a human being, even by the enemy, was overwhelming. Klaus began to leave me small pieces of bread. Never directly. He would place them in a corner of the table when no one was looking.
The first time, I thought it was a trap, that if I took that bread, they would accuse me of theft and kill me. In the camp, the slightest offense could be fatal. I had seen women beaten to death for picking up a bowl they had dropped. I had seen prisoners executed simply for looking at a guard for too long.
Survival depended on invisible, shifting, and arbitrary rules, but hunger was stronger than fear. I took the bread and shared it with Élise. She wept as she ate it, not with joy, but with despair, because this simple act of kindness reminded us of what we had lost. It reminded us that somewhere in this insane world, a trace of humanity still remained. The weeks passed.
Klaus continued. Sometimes it was a slightly wrinkled apple, hidden under a dirty cloth, sometimes a piece of hard cheese that I had to chew slowly so I wouldn’t break my teeth. Once he passed me a piece of paper with a single word in German: “I’m sorry.” I crumpled the paper in my hand until it was nothing but a tiny ball.
So I threw it all in the mud, because apologies change nothing. Because a man’s guilt doesn’t raise the dead. Because saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t heal mutilated bodies, doesn’t restore stolen dignity, doesn’t make the nightmares that haunt you every night disappear. But something inside me began to crumble; I wondered if some of them were prisoners too.
Prisoners of war, of ideology, of fear. Thinking about it filled me with outrage, because I was the one who suffered. I was the one with a number tattooed on my arm. I was the one who could no longer sit without feeling pain. And yet, I couldn’t ignore what I saw in Klaus’s eyes. It wasn’t cruelty. It wasn’t indifference; it was something else, something I couldn’t yet identify.
Weeks passed, and Klaus continued leaving small pieces of food—a piece of bread, a wrinkled apple, a chunk of hard cheese—never directly, always hidden, discreet, risky. He knew the risks. The other guards wouldn’t have hesitated to report him, or worse, but he persisted. One night, as he walked alone near the latrines to escape the suffocating smell of the barracks, Klaus appeared.
The shadows were long, the sky a dark red. He spoke to me in halting, clumsy French, with a heavy accent. He told me he hadn’t wanted to be there, that his name had been chosen at random during a forced conscription in his village, that his mother was French, originally from Alsace, and that she had taught him French songs as a child.
He told me about his father, who beat him and called him weak because he preferred reading to hunting. About the war, which had first been his escape and then his prison. He told me he saw things he could never forget, that he woke up trembling at night, just like us. I listened without answering because I didn’t know what to say.
Because the victim should never have to comfort the executioner. Because, even if those words sounded sincere, even if it seemed like he was truly suffering, it changed nothing. I was on the other side of the barbed wire. I wore rags. My body was scarred by violence. He wore a uniform. He had a gun.
He was able to go home one day, but he wasn’t like the others. He never touched me without permission. He never looked at me with that predatory gaze some guards have. That gaze that strips you bare, that violates you even before any physical contact. Klaus saw me, and in a place where invisibility was the norm, where we were reduced to numbers, to interchangeable labor, being seen was dangerous, but also vital.
It was recognition, confirmation that she still existed, that she wasn’t just a ghost. One morning, Élise was taken to the experimental barracks. She was 16 years old and weighed about 40 kg. Her ribs protruded beneath her translucent skin. Her eyes were sunken. When she returned, she no longer spoke.
She wasn’t even crying anymore. She lay in our crib, staring blankly. An emptiness seemed to be draining her from within. I tried to get a reaction out of her. I told her about our childhood, our dreams, our past lives. I reminded her of my mother’s bakery, the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the Sundays we spent strolling near the Saône.
I reminded her of the day we stole cherries from the neighbor’s orchard and how we laughed until our stomachs hurt. But it was like talking to a ghost. She was already gone. Her body was there, breathing faintly, but her spirit had fled. She had sought refuge in a place where pain could no longer reach her. The other women in the barracks watched her with silent sadness.
They knew it, we all knew it. Élise wouldn’t survive. Not because her body was too weak, but because she had given up. And in a concentration camp, giving up was the first step toward death. The body could endure a few more days, but the spirit, once broken, never heals. Three days later, Élise died.
Not directly from the experiments, nor from the hunger, nor from the beatings. Her body simply stopped. She offered no resistance. She didn’t fight. She went out like a candle in a gust of wind. I held her in my arms as I walked. Her lips were blue, her skin cold. She didn’t say a word.
She simply closed her eyes, and I stood there, with the weight of her body, light as a feather, wondering why it was her and not me. What cruel lottery decided who would live and who would die? I was ordered to leave her there, to place her with the other bodies piled up near the latrines, waiting to be taken away. I refused.
I hugged Élise tightly. A guard raised his baton, but Klaus intervened. He said something in German. The guard hesitated and then walked away. Klaus let me hold Élise for another hour. An hour in which I cried all the tears I hadn’t been able to shed in months. An hour in which I said goodbye to the only person who still connected me to my former life.
That night, Klaus found me sitting in a corner, unable to cry anymore, unable to move. My tears had dried up. Only an immense emptiness remained, a black abyss that threatened to swallow me whole. He sat beside me. He said nothing. He didn’t try to comfort me with empty words. He simply stayed there.
And for the first time in months, I broke down, not in tears, but with words. I spoke, I told them who Élise was, how we had grown up together, how she drew flowers even when we could no longer see any. How she hummed lullabies to fall asleep, how sweet she was, innocent, incapable of hurting anyone. Klaus listened. He didn’t interrupt me.
She didn’t say everything would be alright, because she knew nothing would be alright. But she stayed, she listened. And in that hell where no one listened, where the spoken word was lost in the void, where suffering was trivialized, listening was an act of resistance. It was proof that we existed again.
Something deeper happened that night. Something I didn’t want to acknowledge. A connection formed, not love in the romantic sense, but a recognition, a mutual understanding that we were two human beings trapped in a machine that was crushing us both. He on the side of the executioners, I on the side of the victims, but both prisoners of a war that transcended us.
And this thought terrified me because it called into question everything I thought I knew about good and evil, about us and them. The following months are a blur in my memory. Time ceased to exist. Only survival existed. Get up, eat, obey, sleep, start again. Every day was like the last.
An endless repetition of the same suffering, the same emptiness. The seasons changed, but we no longer noticed. Winter had become our permanent state. A cold that didn’t come from outside, but from within. A cold that froze the soul long before it froze the body. But something had changed between Klaus and me. It wasn’t love.
Not in the romantic sense people imagine when they hear the word. It was a connection. A mutual recognition of our humanity in a place designed to strip it away, a shared fragility amidst the horror. We were two castaways clinging to the same piece of wood in an ocean of violence. In April 1945, everything stopped.
The Allies advanced relentlessly. We could hear the bombing in the distance, growing ever closer. The guards began to disappear. Some fled in the dead of night, abandoning their posts and changing their uniforms to blend in with the civilian population. Others burned documents in large bonfires, destroying all evidence of what had happened.
Panic was etched on their faces. These men, who had terrorized us for months, for years, were now terrified themselves. They knew what awaited them if they were captured there. The atmosphere in the camp was strange, a mixture of hope and terror. We knew liberation was near, but we also knew that the Nazis, upon escaping, might decide to kill us all to leave no witnesses.
It had happened in other camps: last-minute massacres, death marches where prisoners were forced to walk for days without food or water. Those who fell were shot on the spot. Klaus came to visit me for the last time. It was night. The camp was almost completely dark. The floodlights were off.
He found me sitting on my bunk in the barracks, surrounded by women who were asleep or pretending to be. He gestured for me to follow him outside. I hesitated for a moment and then went out. We stood in silence in the shade for a while. Then he told me he was leaving, that he didn’t know where he was going, that he would try to get home to find his mother if she was still alive.
I just wanted him to know I was sorry, that if things had been different, if the world hadn’t gone mad, maybe, just maybe, we could have been friends, maybe even more. I didn’t answer right away. I stared at his face in the darkness. A young face, marked by weariness and guilt. A face that could have belonged to any ordinary boy in an ordinary world.
So I simply told him, “Go and never come back.” He nodded. He took something out of his pocket, a small package wrapped in cloth. He handed it to me. Inside were bread, cheese, and a photograph. The photo showed him as a child with his mother and brother, all smiling in front of a modest house. On the back, he had written an address.
“If you survive,” he whispered. “If you want to understand, come find me.” I took the package. I didn’t know if I’d ever use that address. I didn’t know if I wanted to see him again. But I took the package. Then I watched him leave. He disappeared into the darkness. Part of me wondered if I’d ever see him again.
Another part of me hoped it wouldn’t be like that. The camp was liberated three weeks later. British soldiers arrived one foggy morning. I can still hear the sound of their jeeps, the slamming doors, the orders shouted in English. They opened the gates, cut the barbed wire, and wept when they saw us. Some vomited, because even for men accustomed to war, what they saw was unbearable.
Living skeletons, corpses piled like logs, women unable to walk, speak, or react, their eyes vacant, unable to grasp that it was all over. I limped out of the camp. My body weighed 84 pounds. My hair never grew back, leaving bald patches that never fully healed. My skin was covered in infected wounds, but I was alive, and this reality terrified me as much as it relieved me, because surviving meant carrying this burden for the rest of my life.
To survive meant to bear witness, and to bear witness meant reliving every day what I had lived through. After the liberation, I returned to France, but it wasn’t a return; it was arriving in a country that didn’t recognize me. My mother had died during my absence. My father had disappeared. Our house had been looted.
Nothing remained: no family, no place, no past. I wandered for months. I slept in emergency shelters. I ate in soup kitchens. I tried to find work, but no one wanted to hire a former deportee. They saw us as problems, as reminders of a war everyone wanted to forget. Then, one day in 1947, I met Klaus in a small town near the border.
I worked there as a factory worker. Our eyes met. We froze. For a moment I thought I would scream, that I would hit him, that all the pent-up anger would explode. But no, I just felt empty. He came closer. He said, “My name, Madeleine, not my number, my name.” And something inside me broke.
We talked for hours in a seedy café, drinking lukewarm beverages. He told me he’d appeared in court and been acquitted for lack of evidence, that he’d changed his name, that he was trying to live with what he’d seen, what he’d done, what he hadn’t prevented. I don’t know why, but I stayed.
We started seeing each other and then living together. Not out of love or forgiveness, but because we were two broken people who understood each other, because no one else could understand what we had been through. Obviously, we were judged: a French woman with a former German soldier. They called me a traitor, a collaborator. They spat at me as they passed, they insulted me, but I didn’t care, because their hatred couldn’t be worse than the hatred I already carried inside.
Klaus and I lived together for 50 years. We never married. We never had children. We simply existed side by side. Two survivors of a war that never truly ended. He died of cancer in 1999. In his final days, he repeatedly asked for my forgiveness. I never told him I forgave him, because it wasn’t my place to forgive.
The dead cannot forgive. Élise cannot forgive. Today I sit in this room in front of a camera and tell a story I’ve kept buried for 60 years. I know I’m going to die soon. My body tells me so. The pain I felt at 18 has never left me. It has simply taken root. It’s part of me, like scars, like memories. I’m not telling this story to elicit pity or to condemn.
I tell this story because silence is another form of death. Because as long as no one speaks, the executioners can pretend nothing happened, because memory is the only weapon of the vanquished. So now I ask a question. A question I’ve asked myself for decades. Can a man who has participated in evil, even indirectly, be redeemed? Does an executioner who becomes more human cease to be an executioner? Or is guilt an indelible mark, impossible to erase? I don’t know the answer.
Perhaps you don’t know the answers either, but perhaps it’s not the role of history to provide them. Perhaps its role is simply to pose the questions and refuse to forget. I don’t tell this story to elicit pity, nor to condemn, nor to obtain answers that no one has. I tell it because silence is another form of death.
Because as long as no one speaks, the executioners can pretend nothing happened, for memory is the only weapon of the vanquished. Today, in 2009, I sit in this room before a camera to tell a story I kept buried for 60 years. I know I will die soon. My body tells me so. The pain I felt at 18 never went away.
It’s simply become a part of me. It’s like the scars on my skin, like the number 47 tattooed on my arm, like the memories that return every night. I haven’t forgiven. I will never forgive those who strapped me to that table, those who took notes while my body screamed, those who viewed my suffering as a scientific experiment.
But I don’t hold a grudge against Klaus. He did something human amidst the inhuman. He saw me when I was invisible. He fed me when I was hungry. He listened to me when no one else would. He risked his life to give me one more hour with Élise. Was that forgiveness? No. Was it love? Perhaps not in the way people imagine.
It was a shared survival, a mutual recognition, the understanding that we were both being crushed by the same machine. I don’t ask for forgiveness. I don’t ask for him to be idealized. I only ask that you remember that a 22-year-old German soldier, at a certain point, chose to remain human when everything around him turned monstrous.
And this story reminds us that even in absolute hell, a human being can choose. I had no children or family after the war, but I held onto this truth, this truth that I share today because the last witnesses are disappearing. Every year we lose thousands of voices, men and women who have seen humanity at its worst and, sometimes, at its best.
Her disappearance must not mean oblivion, for oblivion means opening the door to repetition. So listen, remember, pass on, for memory is painful, but it is our only weapon against barbarity. My name is Madeleine Charpentier. I was ten years old when I ceased to be a person, and all my life I have tried to become one again. Today, in 2010, I died at the age of 84 in a small hospital room near Lyon, surrounded by a few faithful friends who never asked questions or judged. He held my hand.
He whispered that I had been brave. Before closing my eyes for the last time, I thought about everything. The icy table in the barracks, the cold instruments, the men in white taking notes while my body screamed, Élise, who had vanished in my arms, light as a feather, blue lips, her gaze already distant.
I thought about the pain that never left me, that still prevents me from sitting without trembling at my memory, that part of me like a second skin. I thought about Klaus, his nervous hands slipping me a piece of bread, his bright eyes that saw me when I had become invisible. “I’m sorry,” crumpled in the mud, in the photo he gave me, with his clumsy handwriting on the back.
If you survive, come find me. I never went looking for him. I never wanted to know if he survived, if he found peace, if he had children, if he ever told anyone what he saw. But I do know one thing: for a moment, he chose to remain human amidst inhumanity, and that matters. I have not forgiven the executioner.
I could never do it. The dead don’t forgive. Élise doesn’t forgive. But I don’t hold a grudge against Klaus. He did something human, and in absolute hell, something human is a miracle. To you, who are listening to this story today, I leave a message. The last one. War takes everything. Dignity, freedom, the people we love, the right to live without pain. But it doesn’t take everything.
He cannot take from us what we choose to preserve: the memory, the voice, the refusal to be silent. To speak is already to resist. Silence protects the executioners. Words protect the victims. I do not ask forgiveness for those who participated. I do not ask that the pain be forgotten. I only ask that we remember that a young soldier, at 22 years old, decided in an instant to give bread instead of looking the other way.
And this story reminds us that even in the deepest darkness, even when humanity seems to have vanished, there is always someone who can choose to remain human. Now it’s your turn. When you see injustice, don’t look away. When you have to choose between obeying a cruel system or listening to your conscience, choose conscience, even if it costs you dearly, even if it’s terrifying, because in these choices we remain human.
I am Madeleine Charpentier, I survived at the dinner table.