I was 22 when I learned that the human body can withstand much more pain that the mind cannot bear accept. And I learned it on my knees pointed stones with a mask of iron attached to my face in a cellar without windows where no one could hear me scream. Not because I wasn’t trying but because they removed my voice before even saying my dignity. My name is Jeanne Delmas.
I was born in Lyon in 1920. I was seamstress, I have been a girl, I have been engaged and for 48 hours I didn’t been a kneeling body waiting to don’t die before dawn. I passed 63 years without telling this story to no one, neither to my husband, nor to my children. I kept everything inside me like we hides a wound that doesn’t heal never.
She’s just bleeding inside, silent, constant. It wasn’t until I was a year old when my knees didn’t folded more without squeaking, when my hands shook while holding a cup that I agreed to speak. A team historians came to my house. I am sitting in front of an old camera. I drank a glass of water and started. Not because I wanted to relive everything that, but because I realized that if I didn’t speak, these women would die twice.
Once in the cellar, a another time into oblivion. What I’m going to tell now does not appear in any history book, does not appear in any museum, has no commemorative plaque because what happened to me and dozens of other French women between 1942 and 1944 was erased from official records. Not by accident, but for convenience.
There were things that after the war no one wanted to remember. And we survivors, we learned that some truths are too heavy for be said out loud. But I will say because now at 85, with death knocking at the door, I discovered that I am less afraid of her than silence. It was October 1942. Lyon was under German occupation for more than two years.
The streets smelled of coal smoke and fear. I worked in a small sewing shop rue de la République sewing uniforms for officers Germans. Not because I wanted but because it was that or die of hunger. My father had been arrested the previous year for having distributed leaflets of the resistance. My mother died of tuberculosis 3 months ago later. I was alone and alone.
We quickly learns that survival is an art dirty. That morning I was sewing a coat gray when I heard the door of the shop open violently. Three German soldiers entered. one of them, tall, blond, with eyes cold as ice, pointed at me finger and said simply: “You, come.” He didn’t ask my name, didn’t not explained the reason, simply ordered.
And I obeyed because this time obeying was the only way to continue to breathe. If you listen to this story, you you may be wondering how a such a thing could have happened. How so many women have disappeared without leaving traces? How the story official has never recorded its caves, its masks, its stones? The truth is that the most terrible terror effective is the one that no one sees.
and Jeanne Delmas was about to discover that silence can be the cruelest weapon of all. What happened to him in the following hours changed his life forever. And what she is about to reveal is something that few have had the courage to document. It’s not just the story of a woman, it is the testimony of a chapter hidden from World War II and you have to listen to it until the end.
They drove me in a van gray military without windows that smelled engine oil and sweat. I was sitting on a wooden bench, hands tied in front of me with a rope rough that burned my skin. In front besides me, there were three other women. None spoke, none to me looked. Their eyes were empty as if they had already understood something I didn’t know again.
The journey took maybe 20 minutes, maybe an hour, I don’t know not. Time in this van no longer existed. Everything I felt, it was the cold of the metal under my thighs and the dull rou noise on the irregular paving stones from Lyon. Every chaos made me jump. Every sharp turn threw me against the metal wall. And all this time, the three women in front of me remained motionless.
The fixed gaze like wax mannequins. I tried to meet the gaze of one of them. A older woman, maybe 40, with catty hair pulled into a bun strict. But she looked away immediately as if looking at me could get him into trouble. or maybe she just didn’t want to not see his own reflection in my eyes. Fear, confusion, the total incomprehension of what was happening to us.
When the van stopped, we were brought down. I looked up. We were in front of a gray building, without sign, without number, an old factory perhaps, or a warehouse disused. The windows were condemned with boards nailed in cross. The door was solid iron, rusty in places with a metal handle black.
And there was no one around, no neighbor, no witness, just one wasteland dotted with bad grass and brick debris. The neighborhood itself seemed abandoned. Further away, I could distinguish the chimneys from another factory, but it wasn’t even there anymore. Everything was silent. Even the birds seemed to have deserted this place.
It was as if building was a black hole in the city, a place that even Lyon had forgotten. A soldier pushed me into the back, not violently, but with a firmness that left no room for hesitation. I walked through the door. To inside, it smelled of damp earth, the month and something else I couldn’t identify. Some something organic, rotten, like forgotten meat or clothes soaked left too long in the darkness.
The corridor was long, narrow, lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling at the end of an electric wire frayed. The light was yellowish, weak, creating more shadow than it hunted. Our steps reasoned on the cracked cement floor. In front of me, a women stumbled. The soldier who followed, caught her by the arm and stood up without a word.
She continued to walk with his head down. I have noticed the walls. They were discovered dark spots, humidity probably, but in this light, it looked like dried blood. Electric wires were hanging here and there. Pieces of plaster were detached, revealing the red brick in below. It was a place that had been abandoned for a long time then reused for something no one was to see.
And then at the end from the corridor, there was a staircase, a wooden staircase which descended into the pitch black. The steps were worn, some creaked under the weight of soldiers who preceded us. An even stronger smell rose from this basement, earth, mold and this indefinable stench that took over you to the throat.
I remember thinking “If I go down these steps, I won’t I’ll never come back.” It was a thought clear, clear, like a certainty which imposed itself on me. But I didn’t have the choice. The soldier pushed me and I went down step after step towards the basement, towards something that my mind still refused to imagine. The steps were 16 in number, I have them counted.
16 steps which separated the world of the living of this hell underground. Halfway there I felt the air change. It was getting colder, heavier, loaded with humidity. My breathing became visible in the darkness. little white clouds which were escaping from my mouth. When I I arrived downstairs, I saw there was a large rectangular room, maybe 15 meters long by 10 meters large, lit by two kerosene lamps placed on wooden boxes.
The light was trembling, casting shadows dancing on the stone walls raw. The ceiling was low, supported by wooden beams blackened by age and humidity. drops of water oozed in places, forming small puddles on the floor. And this ground, this ground was covered in stones, not smooth stones, no, stones pointed, irregular like those found in rivers or careers.
Some had edges bright, others were rounded but presented steep angles. They had been placed there intentionally, I saw it clearly, not thrown at random, but arranged for cover the entire surface of the room like a torture mat. And in the middle from this room, there was already a ten women, all on their knees, all motionless and all carrying the same thing on the face, a mask in iron.
It was a simple device but terrible, a metal frame which surrounded the whole head with a plate in front of the mouth held by thick leather straps. The plate was perforated with small holes, just enough to breathe, but not enough to talk, not enough to shout. The metal was dark, probably cast iron or raw steel. The straps were tight behind the neck and at the top of the skull.
When we wore this mask, we became silent. And in this basement, the silence was the absolute rule. The kneeling women did not move. Some appear with their hands placed on their thighs. Others kept joined before them as if in prayer. Their clothes were dirty, wrinkled. Some had tears in their dress. One of them had to dried blood on his leg.
I didn’t know not how long they have been were there. hours, days, their body was stiff, frozen in a position that seemed unnatural. A German officer, I still remember of his square, hard face, with a scar that went down from the temple straight up to the jaw approached me. He wore a uniform impeccable gray with decorations on the chest that I could not identify.
He held a mask in his hands gloved in black leather. He placed it on my face without a word with a mechanical precision as if it had made this gesture hundreds of times. I felt the cold metal against my skin, cold as ice. This made me made me jump, but I didn’t dare move. The straps tightened behind my head. I heard the noise leather that slipped in the buckles metallic. Click click.
Tight, again tighter. The plate is stuck against my mouth and chin. And suddenly I couldn’t open the mouth. I couldn’t speak anymore. Everything what I could do was breathe through the small holes. And breathing was already painful. The air entered with difficulty, as if I had to force my lungs to work. Then he took me to the center of the room.
He showed the stones of a hand gesture and he said in French with a thick accent but perfectly understandable. You stay here on your knees until we tell you to get up. If you move, you will be punished. If you fall, you will be dragged out. Understood ? I don’t have not answered. I couldn’t. The mask prevented me from doing so.
But I nodded the head. A little movement, just enough to show that I understood. I looked at the other women. They were motionless like statues of stone. Some had their eyes closed, others kept them open, staring the void in front of her as if she had become disconnected from reality. And I, slowly, bent my knees. I I knelt down.
At first, it doesn’t didn’t hurt that bad. The stones were cold, hard but bearable. I said, “I’ll hold on. It’s only one question of time. They will get tired. They’re going to release us.” But the time in this basement was not my friend. After 10 minutes, I felt the first pains, tingling in the knees like needles that were starting to sink in.
After thirty minutes it felt like blades pierced my skin. The pressure of the stones was concentrated on specific points, the ball joints, the tendons. After an hour, I didn’t feel no more my legs, only the pain. Sharp, constant pain that rose in my thighs, in my back, in my neck. And I couldn’t move because if we moved, it struck.
I saw a soldier give a blow of a stick to a woman’s ribs who had tried to change position. She fell on her side. The mask has hit the ground with a metallic sound deaf. She didn’t scream. She doesn’t couldn’t. But I heard it breathing panic through holes of the mask. A quick whistle, desperate. The soldier waited. He looked at him struggle to get up.
She put almost a minute. His hands were trembling. Her legs refused to wear. But finally, she back on her knees and she didn’t move again. I understood that day what it was than being reduced to a body. Not one person, not a name, just a body that suffers, who obeys, who waits. And in this nameless basement, I started to losing the sense of who I was.
After 6 hours on my knees, the world around me started to change. The lamps oil cast long shadows and trembling on the walls. The faces of the other women became blurry. My vision narrowed. Everything I saw, it was the ground, the stones, my hands placed on my thighs, my nails pressed into my skin to try to distract my brain from the pain in my knees. But it didn’t work.
The pain was everywhere. She radiated, she was pulsing. Every beat of my heart sent a new wave of pain in my legs. I had the impression that the stones were shining through, that my bones were going to break, that my skin would tear and yet I couldn’t do anything, just stay there on your knees in silence. The silence itself had become a physical presence, not just the absence of noise, but something heavy, oppressive which weighed on my shoulders like a blanket wet.
Sometimes I heard a muffled moan coming from one of the women, a barely audible sound which escaped despite the mask, but he was immediately followed by a blast of stick. Then the silence returned absolute, total. There were two soldiers who stood guard. They stood near the stairs, smoking cigarettes, talking to each other in voices bass in German. Sometimes he laughed.
A low, gutural laugh. I was wondering to at which he laughed. Maybe from us, maybe from a stupid joke, maybe nothing at all. Maybe for them, we were no longer even human beings, just objects, things that we punish because we have the power. One of them was young, no more than 20 years. He had a baby face, red cheeks, cut blonde hair very short.
He could have been the son of someone, someone’s brother. But when he looked at us, his eyes were empty as if we had removed something essential. The other was older, maybe 40 years old, with a gray mustache and deep wrinkles around the eyes. He chewed tobacco and spit on the ground from time to time. The sound of his saliva hitting the cement echoed in the cellar like a whiplash.
I tried to count the hours, but in this basement, there was neither clock nor window, no daylight, no landmarks, just time stretching, infinite, overwhelming. The kerosene lamps burned brightly constant flame, never weakening, as if they were powered by our suffering itself. I tried to think of my mother, of her sweet face, to his hands which smelled of lavender, to his voice that lulled me when I was small.
I tried to think of my father, with his salt and pepper beard, with the way he lifted me in his arms and twirled me around the garden. I tried to think about my life before, to the sewing workshop, to the dresses that I made, to conversations with customers, on Sunday, at the market. But his memories seemed to belong to someone else, to another Jeanne.
A Jeanne who had never known this basement. A Jeanne who didn’t know what it was like to have knees torn by sharp stones. A Jeanne who could still breathe freely, speak freely, exist freely. This jean was dead and the one who remained kneeling on this ground was just an empty shell, a body who was still standing by pure stubbornness.
Toward what should have been the hour, maybe more, maybe less, I don’t knew more, one of the women collapsed. She fell forward, face against the stones. The mask has hit the ground with a metallic sound deaf who reasoned throughout the cellar. She no longer moved. His body was inert, slumped like a pentin from which one would have cut the wires.
One of the soldiers approached, the oldest, the one at the gray mustache. He turned it over with his boot unceremoniously, as one turn over a bag of grain to check if it’s still good. She was breathing still weakly. I could see her chest rise by acus irregular, but she did not resume consciousness. He gestured to the other soldier.
Together they dragged him out from the room by his arms like a sack. His feet scraped the ground, his head hung back. The mask was still attached to his face. I don’t never saw him again. I don’t know if she is dead. I don’t know if she has survived. I don’t even know how her name was. And I stayed on my knees because I didn’t want to be the next to fall.
because I don’t didn’t want to be dragged out. Because that somewhere deep inside me, there still had a little voice that said “Hold on, hold on, hold on.” But hold on, it’s easier said than done do. After 24 hours, my body was nothing more than a mass of pain. My knees were on fire. My thighs were shaking uncontrollably.
My my back was so stiff that I couldn’t no longer straighten it. Every time I tried to move, even just one millimeter, a discharge of pain went up along my spine spine up to my neck. My mouth was dry. My tongue stuck to my palace. I was thirsty, terribly thirsty, unbearable. My lips were managed under the mask.
I could feel the taste of blood in my mouth. But he didn’t give us any water. He doesn’t gave us nothing. No water, no food, nothing that can remember that we were still alive. The other women around me seemed in the same condition. Some looked slightly as if they were going to fall at any moment. Others remained perfectly still, but I saw their hands trembling.
A woman to my left, young, maybe ten years old, with black hair that fell on the shoulders, cried. I couldn’t see her tears because of the mask, but I could hear his jerky breathing, the little ones muffled sobs escaping despite the metal. I would have wanted him talk, tell him everything would be okay, tell him to hold on, but I don’t couldn’t. The mask prevented me from doing so.
All I could do was stay there next to her. sharing the even hell in silence. Toward what must have been the third hour, I started to hallucinate. I saw shapes in the shadows, faces that appeared and disappeared, hands reaching out towards me. I heard voices, not those of soldiers. Other distant voices like whispers coming from far away on the other side of a long tunnel.
I have saw my mother. She stood before me, dressed in her blue Sunday dress, the one she wore to go to the church. She smiled at me, she tended hand towards me. I wanted to take it. I tried to move my arm, but it was heavy as lead. And when I blinked, she had disappeared. There were only the stones, shadows, silence.
I saw my father, he was standing at the back from the cellar, near the stairs. He me looked with sadness. His eyes said: “Forgive me, forgive me for leaving you alone.” I wanted him screaming that it wasn’t his fault, that None of this was his fault, but no sound came out. The mask swallowed my voice and when I looked again, he was no longer there.
I was wondering if I was dying, if my brain was shutting down, so that was the end. A slow slide in madness, in hallucinations, into oblivion. If that was how it was ended, not with a big bang gradual dissolution of reality. But no, that wasn’t the end because that after 36 hours, an officer is descended, not the same as the one who put the mask on me.
Another plus young, maybe 30 years old, with combed back brown hair and metal frame glasses. He wore an impeccable uniform with polished boots that shined in the flickering light from the lamps. He did around the room slowly, methodically. He stopped in front of each woman. He didn’t look at us with pity, not with hatred, with indifference, with curiosity perhaps, like a scientist observing specimens in a laboratory, as we look animals in a cage in the water.
He has took a small notebook out of his pocket. He has noted something. Numbers probably. How many of us were there? How much was still conscious? How many had already abandoned? He closed the notebook, he nods to the soldiers and he went back up. His footsteps reasoned on the wooden steps and then nothing. And we remained kneeling on the stones in silence as if we did not exist as if we had not never existed.
hey that’s what they made us hold two whole days without water, without food, no sleep, just the pain, just silence, just fear to never come out of it. The fear that this basement becomes our grave, that our bodies stay there on their knees eternity. And when finally they ordered us to get up, I understood that I couldn’t.
My legs didn’t respond more. My knees are fig. I tried to stand up. I asked my hands on the ground for support. But as soon as I wanted to move, I felt something crack in my left knee. A searing pain hit me crossed as if someone were pushing me white hot knife in the joint. But I didn’t scream because I still wore the mask and in this basement, no one could hear me.
They took us out of basement one by one. The soldiers supported by the arms because none of us could walk alone. My legs were stiff, heavy, as if they no longer belonged to me body. Each step sent a shock pain in my knees, but I kept moving forward because getting out of this basement was about surviving. And surviving was all that mattered to me remained.
When I got to the top from the stairs, they removed the mask. I felt the fresh air on my face. I opened my mouth. I inspired deeply and I understood that I had forgot what it was like to breathe normally. For 48 hours I had been breathing through holes. Now breathe without the mask almost hurt me, as if my lungs no longer knew what to do with all this air.
They us put in the same gray van. There were seven of us. The others, those who had collapsed, those who had not held. I don’t know what that they have become. Maybe that they are dead. Maybe they were taken elsewhere. Maybe that they simply disappeared like so many others during this war. The van took us back to the center of Lyon.
They dropped us off in a street empty near Perche station. Not one word, not an explanation. They are left and we stayed there standing on the sidewalk trembling, stunned, trying to figure out what came from happen to us. One of the women, she must have been 40 years old, gray hair, the marked face, turned towards me and said: “Don’t tell anyone about this, never.” I looked at him.
I saw in his eyes something that I don’t could never forget. Fear, not fear of the Germans, fear that no one don’t believe us. The fear that if we spoke, we would be taken for crazy or worse that we would be punished again times. So I didn’t say anything. I am When I got home, I locked the door. I sat on the edge of my bed and I cried.
For the first time in months, I cried not because I was in pain, but because I had just understood that my life would never be this again same. For years after the war, I tried to continue. I took back my work in the workshop. I met a man, Jacques, who was a teacher. We were married in 1947. I had two children, a daughter, Marie, a boy, Pierre.
I taught them to sew. I read them stories. I I prepared meals for them. I did everything a mother should do. But every night, in my dreams, I went back to that basement. I saw the stones, I felt the mask, I heard the silence. And I woke up sweating, my hands tense on the sheets, heart beating so loud that I was afraid it would explode.
Jacques asked me what was wrong not. I told him it was nothing, just a bad dream. But it was not not a dream, it was a memory. A memory that I could not erase. Over time, I learned to live with it. I learned to bury the pain, hidden under everyday gestures, smile when you should smile, speak when it was necessary to speak.
But at deep inside me, there was always this basement, this room, these stones and this silence. My knees didn’t help me never allowed to be forgotten. From the age of thirty, I started to have pain chronicles. Osteoarthritis, said the doctors, cartilage wear, premature aging. He prescribed me anti-inflammatories, ointments, but nothing worked really because it wasn’t fair wear.
It was an injury. A wound that won’t heal. In 2005, 63 years after that October day, a team of historians working on the clandestine detention centers of World War II hit me door. They had found traces, fragmentary testimonies, German documents partially destroyed. They were looking for survivors.
They asked me if I agreed to testify. I hesitated. For decades I had kept the silence. Why speak now? What would that change? And then I thought of other women, those who were with me in this basement, those who never came out, those whose names no one knows. And I told myself that if I didn’t speak no, she would die twice.
So, I accepted. They came to my house with a camera. I drank a glass of water. I took a deep breath and started to tell. not to take revenge, not to hate. Just to testify, to say “It existed, we have existed.” I died in 2017, I had 97 years old. My children were at my bedside, my grandchildren too. I I left slowly in my sleep as they say.
But before leaving, I said something, one last sentence. Marie told me later when she listened to the recording of my testimony. She said my last words had summer I still feel the stones because it’s true, even at 9 years old, even after all these years, even after living a lifetime, marriage, children, grandchildren, joys, the sorrows, I never stopped feel these stones under my knees.
It’s like a print, a scar invisible, something that remains engraved in the body, even when the body grows old, even when it weakens, even when it turns off. What I want you to understand, is that this basement, this nameless place, without address, without plate was not unique. There were others everywhere in France, throughout Europe, places where women were punished.
Not because that they had done something, but because they were there, because that they were vulnerable, because that we could. The historians who have interviewed found traces of similar devices in several occupied cities in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, the same system everywhere, a basement, stones, masks and the silence.
Always silence because silence is what allows forgetting and forgetting is what allows this start again. But I haven’t forgotten and I didn’t want you to forget neither. That’s why I spoke. That’s why I accepted this camera, this microphone, these questions. Not to make me complain, but to leave a trace so that in 100 years, in 200 years someone will be able to listen my voice and say to yourself “It really existed. It was not a myth.
This was not an exaggeration, it was real. Today, this registration is preserved in the national archives French women in Pierrefit on stage. He is part of a collection of testimony from survivors of treatment centers clandestine detention. There is a twenty testimonies like mine, 20 votes, twenty women who had the courage to speak, 20 fragments of a story that no one wanted hear.
But these 20 votes represent only a tiny part of the reality. How many women have gone through these basements? How many are never out? How many died without been able to testify? We won’t know never because these places were not recorded. Because these practices were not official, because after the war, no one wanted speak.
I survived, but I didn’t never really left that basement. He followed me all my life, in my nightmares, in my pain, in my silences. And even now, after my dead, he is still there. Grave in my voice, in this testimony, in these words that you are listening to. So, I ask you a question. not for you to feel guilty, not to accuse yourself, just to make you think how much basements like this exist still today? Not necessarily with stones and masks, but places where people are broken, where we reduces them to silence, where their dignity and how many votes will not be
never heard. I had the chance to speak but so many others will not never. So if you listen to this story, if you share it, if you talk about it around you, you do something something important, prevent you oblivion. You give a voice to those who no longer have them. You tell the world we do not forget.
That’s all I ask. Don’t forget me. Do not don’t forget. Don’t forget us. Because that we existed, we have suffered, we survived. And even if our bodies are no longer there, our ways remain forever engraved in history like stones. You just heard the story of Jeanne Delmas, a woman among thousands, one voice among millions silence.
She was 22 when they broke it. She was 85 when she found the courage to speak. And between these two moments, there was a whole life carried on knees that do not never healed. Jeanne does not have told this story to shock. She told it to testify, to tell those who would come after her, that existed, we existed and you must remember because forgetting is the second death, the one that erases no only the bodies, but also the memory, that which allows history is repeated again and again in others basements, other cellars, other unnamed places. Today, while listening
these words, you become the guardians of this memory. You are the ones who can prevent Jeanne and all women as they disappear definitely. Every listen, every sharing, each comment is an act of resistance against forgetting. It’s a way of saying “I heard you, I don’t I won’t forget you.” If this story touched you, if she woke you up something in you, anger, sadness, incomprehension or simply of humanity, so let a trace of your presence.
Write where you are listening to this testimony from. Tell us how you feel. Share your thoughts because every comment is a stone that we let’s pose together to build a monument of memory. A monument that no one will be able to destroy. Subscribe to this channel if you believe that these stories must continue to be told, that the voices forgotten ones deserve to be amplified.
Let the truth, however hard it may be, must always have a place. Your support helps preserve these testimonies, to make them accessible, to pass them on to generations future people who perhaps will not believe that such a thing could have happened. Like this video if you think Jeanne deserved to be listened to, if you think that his courage, after 63 years of silence deserves to be honored.
A simple gesture but which says “Your story matters. Your pain was not in vain. We we are here and we are listening. Share this documentary with those who believe still in the power of memory. With those who understand that knowing the past, it is not to rehash the pain, but prevent it from reproduce.
With those who know that stones on which John stood kneeling are not only in a lion basement in 1942, they exist wherever we break the human dignity. And now take for a moment, close your eyes. Imagine these 48 hours. Imagine the stones beneath your knees, the mask on your face, the silence that suffocates you. And you ask yourself, would I have held on? Would I have had this strength? And above all, what can I do today so that no one anywhere has to live anymore that? Jeanne Delmas died in 2017, but his voice, it is immortal because
that you listened to it, because you you remember it and because now you are going to pass it on. Thank you for having been there, thanks for listening and above all thank you for never forgetting.
