06/03/2026
"She was eight months pregnant" - But what the German soldiers did to her before she gave birth was horrific.
There are some things you can't forget, even when you try. The sound of boots pounding the wooden floor of your house at three in the morning. The smell of gun oil mixed with male sweat. The sensation of a rough hand squeezing your arm while another pushes your six- month-old belly as if it were an obstacle in the way.
My name is Victoire de la Croix. I am 60 years old and for 60 of them I have kept a secret which 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 4, I was 33 weeks pregnant. My son was moving so much that I could barely sleep.
He was kicking my ribs as if he already wanted to get out, 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 afterwards was worse. They didn't take me alone. There were ten of us women that night, all young, all beautiful enough to attract attention.
Five of them were pregnant like me. The others were virgins, fiancées, young mothers. We were chosen like one chooses fruit at a market. They went into houses with lists, lists containing our names. This means that someone from our own village had delivered us. Someone we knew, someone who used to have coffee in our kitchen.
I lived in Tul, a working-class town in central France, known for its arms factories. My father worked at the arms factory. My mother sewed uniforms for the German army under forced occupation. We had learned to lower our eyes when soldiers passed by, not to answer when they spoke to us, to pretend not to exist...
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