One evening, Séverine was called. Two soldiers appeared at the door of our barracks and pronounced his name. She got up slowly, legs trembling and looked in back before exiting. I will not forget never this look. It was a farewell. It was a request for forgiveness. It was pure fear. She returned at dawn. She didn’t say anything.
She simply lying on the board bed and turned his face towards the wall. Aurora has tried to touch her but Séverine curled up as if she had received a shot. I stayed there, sitting on the frozen ground, feeling something die in me. Three weeks later, It was Aurore’s turn. Then mine, I’m not going to describe what happened spent those nights.
Not because it is forbidden or because I’m ashamed, but because there are things which, even after sixty years, are still too heavy to be transformed into words. I would only say this: iner had no need to use violence physical. He used absolute power and that was enough. When I realized that I was pregnant, it was winter. My body was skeletal, my hair had fallen out in clumps but my belly was starting to grow.Aurora also, Séverine too, three sisters, three pregnancies, same father. The silence who fell on the camp when they found out was deafening. The other women looked at us with pity, with horror, with relief not be us. The soldiers looked away. Even the guards the most brutal seemed difficult to comfortable. Von Steiner, however, remained impassive.
He summoned us to his office one afternoon in February. We we stayed there standing the three sisters rock while he signed papers without looking at us. Finally, he looked up and said in a almost perfect French: “You give birth here. The children will be registered as war orphans and sent to German families appropriate.
You will return to work as soon as you are physically capable.” There was no room for the discussion. There was no call possible. Séverine gave birth premiered in April 1943. A girl. They tore him from his arms even before the umbilical cord is cut. Séverine screamed for three days in a row. Then she stopped. She simply stopped talking, eat, react.
She died 6 weeks later. Officially from tifus. Heartbroken indeed. Aurora had a boy in May. She managed to hold it for a few hours before that he doesn’t come and get him. I was at next to her when it happened. I saw his face would break into pieces if small than it could ever be reunited again. I gave birth in June another boy dark hair, eyes closed, tiny hands that clung to my finger with a inexplicable force.
I felt love and hate at the same time. From love because he was my son, hatred because it was his son him. They took him away the next day. The war ended etsteiner disappeared before the arrival of the allies. Some say he fled South America, others it was killed by his own men when they realized they were going to lose.
We don’t we’ll never know. I returned to Saint-Rémi sur Loire. My mother was died of grief. My father didn’t have me recognized when I knocked on the door. I I stood there, watching the old watchmaker, looking at me as if I was a ghost. Maybe I was. I survived another few years after the end of the war. I lived alone. I worked as a seamstress.
