Sometimes it wears a clean uniform, speaks in a calm voice, and destroys everything you love without raising its tone.
My name is Mélis Durock, and for more than sixty years I kept this story buried inside me.
Not because I forgot.
But because some memories never stop hurting.
Even now, decades later, I can still remember the smell of my mother’s fresh bread drifting through our small home in Saint-Rémy-sur-Loire. I remember my father bent over his workbench repairing old clocks. I remember my sisters laughing in the kitchen while sunlight spilled through the windows.
Back then, our village felt untouched by the war raging across Europe.
We were wrong.
The war was already on its way.
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