05/28/2026
It hurts to open my mouth: that’s why the German soldiers spared the homosexual prisoners
In 1900, a doctor from Toulouse named Doctor Jacques Renard received an unusual patient. The man was sixty years old. He came in for chronic jaw pain that had plagued him for over 30 years. Pains that he had learned to endure, to ignore, to hide. But with age, she became unbearable. Dr.
Renard examined the patient's jaw . What he discovered left him perplexed. The temporaomandibular joint. The joint that allows the mouth to be opened and closed showed old damage, internal scarring, and bone deformities, as if decades ago someone had deliberately damaged this joint. "What happened to you?" the doctor asked. The patient hesitated for a long time, then he said something strange: "If I tell you, you won't believe me, and even if you do believe me, you won't understand why they did that." The doctor insisted.
The patient finally spoke. What he recounted that day was recorded in Doctor Renard's notes. Notes that remained in a drawer for twenty years until a historian discovered them in 1998 and began to investigate. Because this patient was not an isolated case. By searching through medical archives across France, the historian, a researcher named Philippe Morel, discovered 23 similar cases.
23 men, all survivors of N**i camps, all wearing the pink triangle, all exhibiting the same inexplicable damage to the jaw. They all told the same story, a story of pain, a story of forced silence and a story of survival. A survival that should not have been possible. Because these men should have died according to all the statistics, according to all the testimonies.
Homosexual prisoners had the highest mortality rate in N**i camps, even higher than political prisoners. 60 of them did not survive. But these 23 men had survived, all without exception. For what ? The answer lies in a phrase that each of them uttered when asked to tell their story. It hurts to open my mouth...
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