‘She was only 18 years old’ — What the German commander demanded of her in Room 13…
I was ten years old when a German officer entered the kitchen of my house, pointed at me as one chooses a piece of fruit at the market and declared to my father that I was requisitioned for administrative services at the prefecture of Lyon. My mother squeezed my hand so hard that I felt my bones crack.
My father couldn’t look me in the eyes. We all knew it was a lie. We all knew that I wouldn’t come back the same. And we all knew there was no choice. It was March, France had been occupied for three years and the Third Reich didn’t ask permission for anything. He simply took it. My name is Bernadette Martin, I am 80 years old and I am going to tell something that no history book has had the courage to write clearly.
Because when we talk about the Second World War, we talk about battles, invasions, and heroic resistance. But we rarely talk about what happened on the upper floors of requisitioned hotels, in numbered rooms, in beds where young girls like me were transformed into silent fuel for the German war machine.
I was not sent to a concentration camp. I did not wear the yellow star. I did not die in a gas chamber. But I was used in a way that for decades made me wish I had died at that time because surviving what happened in room 13 of the Grand Étoile hotel was not a liberation. It was a perpetual sentence within my own body.
They didn’t call it rape, they called it a service. They didn’t call us victims, they called us resources. And Optan commander Klaus Richter, a 20-year-old married man with three children in Bavaria, did not see himself as a monster. He saw himself as someone exercising a right of conquest. He chose the youngest ones. He said that fresh skin calmed the pressure of war.
And I, with my French peasant face, my long chestnut hair, my visible innocence in my eyes, was chosen to be his, exclusively his, for 8 months in room 13, every Tuesday and Friday, punctually at 9 p.m., like a medical appointment, like a bureaucratic routine, as if my body were a stamped form. When I say this now, sitting in this chair in front of a camera, I know my voice sounds cold.
I know I seem distant, but understand one thing. After sixty years of carrying this burden alone, after decades of pretending it never happened, after building an entire life on ruins no one wanted to see, the only way to tell this story is with the same coldness with which it was forced upon me. Because if I let the emotion in now, I won’t finish and this story needs to be told.
Not for me, for others. For those who went mad, for those who committed suicide, for those who gave birth to children they never asked to have, for those who returned home and were called traitors, collaborators, German, for those who never again managed to feel their own body without taste. This hotel was located on Rue de la République in the heart of Lyon, a city which before the war was known for silk and gastronomy.
The Renaissance beauty of these buildings. When the Germans occupied the free zone in November 1942, they transformed Lyon into a strategic center of operations. The Guestapo set up camp at the Terminus Hotel. Vertmart requisitioned dozens of buildings and the Grand étoile hotel, a five-story building with an art nouveau facade and tall windows overlooking the river, became what they called a Holungsheim rest home.
lie. It was a military mess disguised as a support service. Official German documents discovered decades later in the Nuremberg archives confirm the existence of hundreds of these houses spread throughout occupied Europe. He called them soldiers’ brothels, soldiers’ brothels. But these were not ordinary brothels, they were organized, hierarchical, medicalized structures.
[music] There were medical records, set schedules, daily quotas. There were rules, there was absolute control, and there were us women, some forcibly recruited like me, others brought prisoner camps, still others traded food for the protection of their families, for empty promises of future freedom. I knew nothing about any of this when I first entered this hotel.
I only knew that my life had ended the moment the officer pointed me out. In the military truck that took me there, there were five other girls. None of us spoke. The silence was as heavy as lead. It was raining. I remember it because the water hit the canvas tarpaulin and created a hypnotic, almost comforting rhythm, as if the outside world was still normal.
But when the truck stopped, when the doors opened and I saw that imposing building with Nazi flags hanging at the entrance, with armed soldiers on the sides, with that artificial elegance of a hotel that no longer served other ordinary people, I understood that I was entering a different kind of prison.
A prison where the bars were invisible. A prison where torture left no external marks. A prison where one died little by little from the inside while pretending to be alive on the outside. For the first few days, I tried to understand the logic of this place. There was a French woman, Madame Colette, who managed everything.
She was not German, she was a collaborator, one of our own . It hurt more than any direct violence. To know that a French woman was organizing the abuse of other French women. She explained the rules to us in a mechanical voice, like someone reading from an instruction manual. Strict hygiene, weekly medical checkups, total obedience, no resistance, no excessive crying, no visible marks.
The officers didn’t like drama. They wanted efficiency. He wanted quick relief. He wanted to return to war feeling like a man. And we had to provide that to them. Otherwise, there were punishments. She did not specify which ones. She didn’t need it. We all knew that punishment in this context could mean anything .
Transfer to a forced labor camp , summary execution, disappearance, simply ceasing to exist. I was assigned to the room. Third floor at the end of the corridor, dark wooden door with a gold number. Double bed with white sheets changed weekly. Crystal bedside lamp , wallpaper with delicate flowers, windows overlooking a narrow alley where the sun never penetrated.
There was even a painting on the wall, a French rural landscape that contrasted sharply with what was happening inside. As if beauty and horror could coexist in the same space, as if decoration could soften the violation. Madame Colette told me I was lucky. Being chosen by a single officer was better than serving several ordinary soldiers per night.
That HTMAN Richer was a distinguished, educated man who did not hit. that I should be grateful, grateful. That word echoed in my head for years, as if there were an acceptable gradation of abuse, as if gentle rape were a favor. The first time I saw Klaus Richter, he was wearing an impeccable uniform, polished boots, his hair combed back, and thin-framed glasses that gave him the look of a professor. He didn’t shout. He didn’t push me.
He entered the room, carefully closed the door, hung his coat on the coat rack, and looked at me like someone evaluating a newly acquired item. He said my name correctly, Bernadette. He pronounced each syllable. He asked me my age. He said I was pretty, that I had good posture, that I would be of good service.
Then he took off his glasses, placed them on the bedside table and began to unbutton his shirt. He didn’t ask, he didn’t wait for consent, he simply acted like someone who has an absolute right and I stood there, motionless, feeling my body disconnect from my mind. It’s something that only those who have experienced it understand.
We don’t leave our bodies. We disconnect parts of it. We just let the envelope do its work. The real self flees to an inner place, a mental basement where violence does not fully reach. At least, not at that time. Later, she returns. She always comes back. But during the act, one survives through dissociation, through the temporary death of consciousness.
This happened twice a week for 8 months, always on Tuesdays and Fridays, always at 9pm. Richter was punctual. Germans love punctuality. He never failed. Even when he was ill, even when there were Allied bombings nearby, even when the French resistance blew up a German train a few kilometers away.
He would come, perform his ritual, and leave. Sometimes he would talk, he would talk about his children, his wife who sent weekly letters, the war which, according to him, was being won. At other times, he remained silent. He simply used his body and left. There has never been any explicit violence. He never hit me. He never shouted.
But violence does not need to be physical to destroy. Systematic, ritualized, bureaucratic violence is even more devastating because there is no explosion. There is no single moment of trauma. It’s an accumulation, it’s an aeion. It is the slow death of the soul. There were other girls in that hotel. We never knew the exact number, maybe 20, maybe 30.
She didn’t let us speak freely, but we crossed paths in the corridors, in the communal baths, during medical examinations, and our glances said it all. Some were younger than me, 15, [music] 16 years old, others a little older, all with the same expression, emptiness, like wax dolls. There was a girl, Simone, who was years old and came from a farm near Grenoble.
She cried every night. She was crying softly, but the sound passed through the thin walls. One night, the crying stopped. In the morning, Mrs. Colette said that Simone had been transferred. Nobody believed it. We all knew what transfer meant. This meant that it had broken, that it was no longer useful, that it had been thrown away.
We never saw him again . Once, during a weekly medical examination, the German doctor, a 50-year-old man with cold hands and an indifferent look, found signs of infection in one of the girls. She was immediately isolated. She never came back. They had a panic-stricken fear of venereal diseases. Each of us was rigorously examined at the slightest sign of a problem; we disappeared because we were not human.
We were tools, and broken tools are replaced. As simple as that, this industrial logic applied to the female body was something the Reich executed with frightening perfection. There were documents, forms, statistics. Everything was recorded. [music] Everything was controlled like a factory, like a production line, like a slaughterhouse.
I did not try to flee. Some tried, they were caught, publicly shot in Place Belle Cour as an example. I didn’t want to die. Perhaps that makes me a coward. Perhaps that makes me an accomplice. I don’t know. All I know is that I survived. And surviving in this context required cold calculation. It requires disconnecting what makes us human, it requires accepting the unacceptable.
I became an automaton, a robot, a thing. And so I went through those months, one day after another, one Tuesday after a Friday, one violation after another, until the war began to turn, until the Allies landed in Normandy, until the French resistance intensified its attacks, until the Germans began to retreat.
In August 1944, Lyon was liberated. American troops have entered the city. The Germans either fled or were captured. And we, the girls from the Grand Étoile hotel, were finally freed. But why was he released? For where ? I went home. My mother hugged me while crying. My father didn’t say anything.
He simply looked at the ground. The neighbors were whispering. Some people spat on the ground as I walked by. He said that I had collaborated. that I had been the Germans’ [ __ ], that I had betrayed France as if I had had a choice, as if there had been a choice. Other girls had their heads shaved.
They had their heads publicly shaved, branded as traitors. I escaped that, but the invisible mark remained forever. Optan Klaus Richter was captured by the Allies. Tried in Nuremberg? No, it wasn’t important enough. He was released in 1947. [music] He returned to Bavaria. He resumed his life. He died of old age in 1982.
I know this because I looked it up. I needed to know if he had paid. He didn’t pay. None of them paid because what they did to us was not considered a war crime. It was considered part of the war. Collateral damage. Insignificant detail. I got married in 195. I had two children. I never told my husband anything. He died without knowing.
My children also don’t know, or didn’t know until this recording. I kept it like you would keep a deactivated bomb. [music] Carefully, with the fear that it will explode and destroy everything around it. I lived a normal life outside. But inside, I continued to inhabit that room. this hotel this Tuesday at 9pm.
My name is Bernadette Martin and I spent six years wondering if I had the right to consider myself a survivor. Because to survive is to continue, to move forward , to rebuild. But what I did during all those years was not survive, it was exist in apnea, holding my breath, waiting for someone to finally give me permission to breathe again.
That permission never came. So, I learned to live with half-full lungs. When Lyon was liberated in August 194, the church bells rang for hours. People in the streets. Tricolour flags sprang up from the windows like flowers after the rain. American soldiers were handing out chocolate and cigarettes. There was music, laughter, and tears of joy.
The nightmare was over. That’s what everyone was saying. The nightmare was over. But for me, it had barely begun in another form because the visible war had ended. But the invisible war, the one that took place in the bodies and minds of women like me, that one continued and it still continues today.
When the French authorities regained control of the city, they immediately began to identify collaborators, men who had worked for the Gestapo, officials who had signed documents, traders who had sold to the Germans, and women, especially women. Because a woman who had had relations with a German, whatever the reason, whatever the coercion, was automatically suspect, automatically guilty.
There was a word for us: horizontal collaboration. As if sleeping with the enemy had been a strategic choice. As if our bodies had been political weapons. As if we had betrayed our country by allowing ourselves to be raped. I saw women dragged around the public square, tied to chairs, their heads shaved in front of delirious crowds.
I saw mothers holding their mixed-race babies in their arms while they were being shaved, the children screaming in terror. I saw men spit on her, and women too. Everyone wanted to punish someone. And we were the easiest, most visible, most vulnerable targets because we couldn’t defend ourselves.
How can this be explained? How can we say that we had no choice? Nobody wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to know. It was easier to turn us into the guilty party, easier to direct the anger towards us rather than towards the real culprits who had already fled or who were in the protection of the new authorities. I escaped the public tent, not through justice, but through luck, because Madame Colette, the one who managed us at the big star, was quickly arrested and refused to give our names. I don’t know why.
Perhaps out of belated guilt, perhaps out of fear of German reprisals if she spoke too much. Perhaps simply because she knew we were innocent. She was tried, sentenced to fifteen years and died in her cell in 1953. She never spoke. Thanks to her, about ten of us were able to disappear into anonymity. To return home quietly, to resume our lives as if nothing had happened.
But nothing was the same. My village was small. Everyone knew everything. Even without official proof, people talked, they whispered, they made things up. My mother begged me not to say anything, not to confirm anything, to act as if I had simply worked in a German factory like thousands of other French women requisitioned for forced labor.
That’s what we said. That’s what I’ve been saying for decades. I lied. I lied to my father, to my friends, to the man I married 6 years later. I built my entire adult life on this lie, and this lie ate away at me from the inside like acid. My husband’s name was Henry. I met him in 1949. He was a carpenter, a good, patient, gentle man.
He didn’t ask any questions about the war. Many men didn’t take a step. Didn’t you want to know? It was easier that way. We got married in 1950. I was 25, he was 30. We had two children, a boy in 1951, a girl in 1954. I was a good mother, a good wife. I cooked, I sewed, I took care of the house, I smiled when it was necessary.
But every time Henry touched me, even tenderly, even lovingly, I found myself back in Ward 13. Every time he kissed me, I smelled like German cologne. Every time he took me in his arms, I turned into a statue. I was dissociating exactly as I had done during the war. Henry didn’t understand why I was so distant, why I never felt pleasure, why I sometimes cried after making love.
He thought it was his fault, that I didn’t really love him, and maybe he was right. Maybe I was never really able to love anyone after what happened because love requires vulnerability, requires surrender, requires trust, and all those things were stolen from me in that damned hotel. They were never returned to me.
My children have grown up, they have left home, they have started their own families. Henry died in 199 of a heart attack. We had been married for years and for 48 years he had slept next to a woman he didn’t really know. A woman who wore a permanent mask. A woman who had died at 18 and who had spent the rest of her life pretending to be alive.
I thought about suicide several times, not immediately after the war. At that moment, I was too numb to feel anything. But later, in the 60s, in the 70s, when my children were adults and I no longer had any reason to stay strong for them. When Henry was there, but elsewhere, lost in his own thoughts, in his own regrets, when I woke up at night gasping for air, certain that I was back in that room, that Richter was going to come in, that it was all going to start again, I thought it would be simpler to leave, to put an end to this charade, but I never had
the courage. Or perhaps I had too much of it , too much courage to continue, not enough to finish. In 2005, something changed. A French documentary filmmaker working on the occupation found German archives in a Berlin museum, administrative documents concerning soldiers in brothels, lists of names, medical reports, statistics on the number of women used in these establishments across occupied Europe. The figure was staggering.
It is estimated that between and more than thirty women were forced to serve in these military brothels. 34000. [music] Most of them never testified. Many died during the war. Others committed suicide afterwards. Others have simply disappeared into silence, like me. Documentary filmmaker Thomas Berger managed to find some survivors.
He wanted to make a film. to give a voice to someone who had never had one. Someone gave him my name, I don’t know who. Perhaps a former daughter of the great star who had survived and knew where I was. Thomas wrote me a letter. A polite, respectful letter in which he explained his project.
He said he did not want to exploit our pain, that he simply wanted the world to know, for history to know, for this atrocity not to be forgotten like so many others. It took me 3 months to respond, 3 months to weigh the pros and cons, 3 months to wonder if I had the strength to relive all that, if I had the right to destroy the image my children had of me.
If I had the courage to betray the lie that had protected me for six decades. Finally, I said yes, not for myself, but for others, for those who had not survived, for those who had survived but could not speak, so that their voices would finally be heard through mine . The interview took place at my home in my small apartment in Villeurbanne in November 2005.
Thomas came with a small team, a camera, a sound recordist, no aggressive spotlight, just soft, natural light. He asked me questions that were never brutal, always respectful, but each answer tore me apart. Each memory rose up like vomit, like poison held back for too long. I spoke for 4 hours. I’ve said it all. Forced recruitment, the hotel, Madame Colette, the Richer square, the other girls, Simone, the medical examinations, the routine, the dissociation, the liberation, the shearing, the silence, the marriage, the children, the
lie, the pain that never goes away. And when I finished, I cried for the first time since 1944. I cried like one vomits, like one expels something toxic, like one empties oneself. Finally, Thomas thanked me. He told me I was brave. I replied that courage had nothing to do with it, that I had nothing left to lose, that I was old, that my children were adults, that I no longer cared about what others thought, that I just wanted the truth to exist somewhere, even if no one looked at it directly. The documentary
was released in 2007. It was called The Forgotten of the War. It was broadcast on a French public channel on a Tuesday evening at 10:30 pm. Few people saw it, but those who saw it understood. Some cried, others sent letters, letters of support, letters of anger against a system that had abandoned us, letters from other women who had experienced the same thing and who felt less alone.
My children discovered the truth by watching this film. They didn’t tell me anything for two weeks. Then my daughter came to see me. She was crying. She asked me why I had never told them. I told him that I didn’t want him to see me differently, to see me as a victim, to carry that burden. She hugged me and told me she understood.
My son never came. He never spoke to me about it again. I don’t know if he’s angry with me, if he ‘s hurt, or if he prefers to lie. I never asked him. I am 80 years old now. My body is tired, my hands tremble, my eyesight is failing, but my memory remains intact. Every detail, every smell, every sound, as if my brain had decided that this and only this deserved to be preserved.
As if all the good things, the laughter of my children, the walks with Henri, the family meals had been erased to leave only this, in the 13th quarter, in Richter, in this cursed room. Historians rightly talk a lot about the Shoah; it was an absolute horror, an industrialization of murder, an attempt at total extermination.
I am not comparing, I am not minimizing, but there were other horrors during this war, horrors less visible, less documented, less recognized. And among them is what happened to us. To us, the women of the military brothels. We were not gassed, we were not shot, but we were destroyed methodically, systematically. And after the war, we were erased by shame, by guilt, by indifference.
There are very few archives on soldiers in brothels in France. The German army destroyed most of the documents before fleeing. Those that remain are scattered in museums and archives, often uncatalogued. For decades, no one looked into it, no one wanted to know because acknowledging what had happened to us would have meant acknowledging that France had let it happen , that the French authorities, even under occupation, could have done more, that some French people had actively collaborated in our exploitation, that French women
like Madame Colette had managed these establishments. It would have been easier to forget about us, but history always resurfaces. In the 2000s, several historians began to work on this subject. They unearthed testimonies, found survivors, analyzed documents and little by little, a more complete picture emerged, a terrifying picture because what happened in these military brothels was not anarchic.
This was not the work of a few violent soldiers acting individually. It was a system, a system conceived, organized, and legitimized by the high command. [music] There were rules, protocols, mandatory medical examinations, planned rotations, punishments for those who resisted. [music] Everything was recorded, everything was controlled.
Optan Klaus Richter was not an isolated monster. He was a cog in a machine, an ordinary man who, placed in a context of total war, absolute impunity, and systematic dehumanization of the enemy, did what the system allowed him to do. He did not see himself as a rapist. He saw himself as a tired soldier, using a service made available to him by his superiors.
And that’s the scariest thing, not the existence of monsters, but the existence of systems that transform ordinary men into monsters without them realizing it . After the documentary aired in 2007, I received a letter. A letter from Klaus Richter’s daughter . Her name was Elga. She was 70 years old.
She had seen the film by chance when it was broadcast on a German channel a few months later. She recognized her father’s name. She wrote to me to tell me that she knew nothing, that her father had never spoken to her about the war, that he had returned in 1947, resumed his work as a schoolteacher, had been a loving father, a devoted grandfather, and that he had died peacefully in 1982, surrounded by his family.
She was asking for my forgiveness, not in the name of her father. She knew she didn’t have that right, but for herself, for not having known, for having lived in ignorance, for having loved a man who had done that. I have read this letter 10 times. I cried. No anger, no sadness because Elga was innocent, [music] because children are not responsible for the crimes of their parents.
Because she too was a victim in a way. a victim of illusion, a victim of silence, a victim of a story that had been hidden from her. I replied to her, I told her that I didn’t blame her, that I didn’t hold her responsible, that the only thing I wanted was for people to know, for history to know , so that it would never be possible again.
We corresponded for two years, long, profound letters in which we tried to understand each other. She was telling me about her father, the man she had known. Kind, patient, passionate about literature, adoring his grandchildren. I was telling him about the man I had known, cold, methodical, indifferent to my suffering.
And we try to reconcile these two images, to understand how a man could be both at the same time, how war could create this moral schizophrenia. Elga died in 2009. She left me a final open letter after her death, written by her own daughter. In this letter, she thanked me. She said that our correspondence had allowed her to make peace with her family history, that she had finally been able to see her father as a complete human being with his dark sides, that she had stopped idealizing him, that she had understood that the love she had
for him did not oblige her to deny his crimes, that one could love someone and recognize that he had done unforgivable things. This letter moved me deeply because it revealed something rare, something precious. The ability to face the truth without destroying oneself. The ability to bear the weight of history without collapsing.
The ability to pass on this memory to future generations without hatred but with lucidity. Today, in 2010, I know that I don’t have much time left. My heart is tired, my body is giving out. But before leaving, I wanted to leave this full account. Not just the four hours of the documentary, but the whole thing.
Every detail, every nuance, every contradiction because history is never simple, because victims are not always pure, because executioners are not always obvious monsters, because war reveals the worst of humanity, but sometimes also, strangely, the best. There was a girl named Marguerite at the big star. She was 22 years old.
She came from Marseille. She had been arrested for helping the resistance. Instead of shooting her, the Germans had sent her there as punishment, as humiliation. Marguerite refused to break. She sang softly at night when the officers were not there. She sang French songs, songs of freedom, songs of hope.
And we, the other girls, listened to him. And for a few minutes, we were no longer objects. We were human again. Marguerite survived. She returned to Marseille. She joined the Communist Party. She became a trade union activist. She fought all her life for women’s rights, for war victims, for those forgotten by history. She died in 199.
I attended her funeral. There were hundreds of people, workers, activists, young people. [music] All came to pay tribute to this woman who never gave up . And I, standing at the back of the church, was thinking about the X3. I was thinking about that girl who sang in the dark. I was thinking about the strength it took to remain human in the inhuman.
If I had to sum up these 62 years in one sentence, I would say this. I have spent my life trying to become the girl I was before March 1943. That 18-year-old girl who ran in the fields, who helped her mother make bread, who dreamed of a simple future, a husband, children, a house. Nothing extraordinary, just a normal life.
That girl died in the quarter of the great star. And the one who emerged 8 months later was no longer herself. It was someone else, someone I didn’t recognize. For a long time, I was ashamed. Ashamed to have survived. I’m ashamed I didn’t resist. Ashamed of having obeyed. I was ashamed of my own body, which had continued to function despite everything.
Because that’s the worst kind of torture. Not what they do to us, but what it does to our relationship with ourselves. We become strangers to ourselves, we disgust ourselves, we despise ourselves, we punish ourselves and nobody understands because from the outside, we look normal, we smile, we work, we raise children.
But inside, we’ve been dead for a long time . It took me decades to understand that I was not guilty, that the shame had to change sides, that it was not up to me to bear the weight of what had been inflicted upon me. But it’s not something you learn easily, especially when all of society tells you the opposite, when people look at you with contempt, when even your own family prefers not to talk about it, when silence becomes the only acceptable option.
After the documentary aired, I received hundreds of letters, some kind, others hateful. There were people who called me a liar, who said I was making everything up to get attention, who claimed that military brothels had never existed, that it was anti-German propaganda. These letters hurt me, but they also confirmed something important to me.
Holocaust denial is not just about the Holocaust; it concerns all atrocities that some prefer to deny because they disturb their worldview. Fortunately, there were also some wonderful letters, letters from women who had experienced the same thing. Not necessarily in France, but in Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, [music] in Greece, everywhere the German armies had passed through, there had been these brothels.
And everywhere, women had been silenced after the war. But now, thanks to documentaries, thanks to historical research, thanks to some voice that finally dared to speak, the silence was cracking. A woman wrote to me from Warsaw. Her name was Irena. She was 82 years old. She had been locked up in a military brothel for 3 years. 3 years.
I had been there for a month and I thought I was going to die. She is three years old. She told me that she had never spoken, not even to her family. But seeing me testify made her feel less alone. She thanked me for having the courage she hadn’t had. I replied that it wasn’t courage.
It was just that at 80 years old, you have nothing left to lose, you can finally tell the truth because fear no longer has a hold. Irena and I corresponded until her death in 2008. She sent me photos of her family, her grandchildren, her garden. She was telling me about her life. and mine and we shared this strange sisterhood, this sisterhood of the broken, of the survivors, of the living ghosts.
It was comforting to know that we were not alone, that others understood, that others carried the same burden. One day, a young French historian, Maxime, came to see me. He was preparing a thesis on sexual violence during the Second World War. He wanted to interview survivors. He was respectful, sensitive, intelligent.
[music] He asked me questions that no one had ever dared to ask. Questions about long-term consequences, about sexuality after trauma, about motherhood, about the couple, about silence, about guilt, about resilience. I told him everything without filtering because he needed to know, because future readers of his thesis needed to know because history cannot be satisfied with numbers and dates.
She needs flesh, blood, human voices. She needs to understand what war really does to people. Not just at the time, but afterwards, years later, decades later. Maxime asked me if I had forgiven him. That’s a question I’m often asked. As if forgiveness were a moral obligation, as if it were the only way to heal.
I replied that I didn’t know , that I didn’t know what forgiving meant in this context. Forgive Richter. He died without ever acknowledging what he had done, without ever expressing the slightest regret. How can you forgive someone who asks for nothing, who acknowledges nothing? Who has lived and died thinking they had done nothing wrong? Forgive the system, the Reich, the German army? These are abstractions.
We do not forgive structures, we forgive individuals. And almost all the individuals responsible are now dead. So, who should we forgive? To the French who despised us after the war? to the authorities who have forgotten us, to the society that perhaps preferred to turn a blind eye . But forgiveness does not erase what happened.
Forgiveness does not heal wounds. It just makes them a little more bearable. What I did is not forgiven. It’s accepted. Accept that it happened. Accepting that it has changed me. Accepting that I will never be the girl I was before. Accepting that it’s a part of me, even if I hate it. Accepting that I can live with it, that I can move on.
Not intact, [music] not happy, but alive in my own way. In February 2010, I had a heart attack. Nothing serious, just a warning. My body was telling me it was time, that the end was approaching. I am not afraid of death. On the contrary, sometimes I look forward to it because death will be the end of memory, the end of nightmares, the end of this weight I have carried since 1943.
But before leaving, I wanted to do something, something symbolic. I decided to return to Lyon, to go back and see the big star. I didn’t even know if it still existed. 67 years had passed. Perhaps it had been destroyed. Perhaps it had been transformed. It doesn’t matter. I had to go. I took the train.
My daughter wanted to come with me. I refused. It was something I had to do alone. The journey lasted two hours. I watched the passing landscape, the fields, [music] the hills, the small villages, peaceful France, today’s France, so different from that of 1943. And yet, for me, nothing had really changed.
Time had passed, but the past remained frozen, intact, eternal. Having arrived in Lyon, I walked to Rue de la République. My legs were trembling, my heart was beating fast. I was afraid of what I would find or what I wouldn’t find. And then I saw him. The building was still there, still standing, the art nouveau facade, the tall windows, everything was identical, except that it was no longer called grand étoile.
It had become an apartment building. People lived there, families, children. They were asleep. He ate and laughed in rooms where we had been raped. They knew nothing, he suspected nothing. I stood there on the opposite sidewalk for an hour just watching, remembering. The ghosts were everywhere. I saw the military truck park in front of the entrance.
I saw Madame Colette open the door. I could see German soldiers going in and out. I could see the girls at the windows, their gaze empty. I could see everything. as if time did not exist, as if superimposed, a man in his fifties came out of the building . He saw me standing there and asked me if I was okay, if I needed any help.
I almost told him everything , told him what this building had been like, told him what had happened here. But I kept quiet. What would I have gained? He would have been horrified, or he wouldn’t have believed me, or he would have been uncomfortable . So, I simply said that I had come to see a place from my youth.
He smiled politely and left . I entered the hall. Nobody stopped me. I climbed the stairs slowly. My knees were hurting. Each step felt like an eternity. Pray floor, second floor, third floor, corridor on the right and there at the end the door, the one that used to bear the number 13. Now it bore a common number. Apartment 3C, a modern plaque, a doorbell, the sounds of a television inside, normal life.
I placed my hand on the door, closed my eyes, and felt everything coming back again. The smell, the cold, the dim light, the bed, the richness, his breath, his weight, his voice, everything. As if seven years did not exist, as if I were still years old, as if I were a prisoner again. I cried. There, in that ordinary corridor of an ordinary building in Lyon, I cried all the tears I had never shed, all the tears held back for decades, all the forbidden tears.
And when I had no more tears, I left . I went down the stairs, I left, and I swore to myself that I would never come back . That night, in my hotel room in Lyon, I had a dream, a strange dream. I was in the 13th quarter again, but this time I was old. I was years old. Ricter entered, but he too had aged.
He had become a frail old man. He was looking at me and for the first time I saw fear in his eyes. Not arrogance, not indifference, but fear. And I understood that this fear was the fear of memory. The fear that what he had done would never be forgotten. that his name will remain associated with that forever.
I woke up feeling peaceful, as if this dream had given me an answer. The only possible revenge was not death, was not prison, was not physical punishment, it was memory, it was testimony. It was about ensuring that what had happened would be known, recorded, passed on, that future generations would know, that the wealthy of the world would know that their actions do not disappear with them, that they remain engraved in history, in testimonies, in archives forever.
I went home and called Thomas the documentary filmmaker. I told him that I wanted to have one last, longer, more comprehensive interview. An interview that would be archived, accessible to researchers, historians, and students, that would become an official document, not just a film broadcast once on television, but something permanent, indestructible.
He agreed. We filmed for 3 days. I’ve said everything, absolutely everything. The details I had the first time. Things that are too intimate, too painful, too shameful. I said them because history needs everything, not just the big picture, but the details, the nuances, the contradictions of humanity in all its complexity.
This interview is now deposited in the national archives of France. It is accessible, available for consultation, it will exist after me. This is my only victory, my only revenge. Richter died peacefully. I will die knowing that his memory is tarnished, that his name is associated with shame, that his grandchildren, if they search, will find and know and bear this burden.
Is this cruelty? Maybe. But cruelty cannot be erased by forgetting. It is canceled out by memory, by recognition, by justice, even if belated, even if imperfect. And if I cannot have justice for myself, at least I can have it for history. Today, as I record these last words, I know I don’t have much time left.
My body is giving out, my heart is tired, but my mind is clear, clearer than it has been for decades because I did what I had to do. I spoke, I testified, I left a mark. To those who will read or hear this in the future, to the women who have experienced similar things, I say this: “You are not alone. Your pain is real. Your trauma is legitimate, and you have not brought shame upon yourself.
Shame belongs to those who did it, not to those who suffered. Speak if you can, bear witness if you have the strength, but if you cannot, know that others have done it for you, that your silence is understood, that your survival is already a victory.” To future generations, I say this: “Study history, all of history, not just the history of battles and treaties, but the history of bodies, of women, of the invisible, because that is where the truth of war lies, not in military strategies, but in what it does to the most vulnerable.”
And make sure that it never happens again , not in this form, not in any other. To my children, if you are listening, I ask for your forgiveness. I apologize for lying to you for so long. I’m sorry I wasn’t the mother I wanted to be. I apologize for being so distant, so cold, so absent at times. It wasn’t your fault.
It wasn’t for lack of love. It was just that I had nothing left to give, that everything had been taken before you were even born. And to you who are listening to this testimony, whatever the reason that brought you here, I ask you one thing: do not look away. Don’t forget , pass it on. Because as long as we remember, the victims do not completely die.
They continue to exist in the collective memory, and that is the only immortality that truly matters. My name is Bernadette Martin. I was years old . I survived a quarter of the great star. I survived Klaus Richter. I survived the war. I survived the silence. And now I can finally leave in peace because my voice will remain, and with it, the voices of all the others, forever.
Bernadette Martin passed away in February, five years after recording this testimony. She left without regret. without fear, but with the certainty that her voice would continue to resonate long after her last breath. She had understood something essential. As long as someone remembers, as long as someone listens, as long as someone bears witness, the victims never truly die .
They continue to exist in the collective memory, in the hearts of those who refuse to look away. This documentary is not simply a story of the past. This is a warning for the future. It is a reminder that behind every war, there are broken bodies, destroyed souls, lives reduced to ashes by systems that transform humanity into machines.
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Tell us where you are looking at us from. Tell us what this story evoked in you. Share your thoughts, your emotions, your own connection to this story because every comment is another stone in the edifice of collective memory. Bernadette left us much more than a testimony. She entrusted us with a responsibility: never to forget, to pass on the message, to refuse to let the horror be normalized, trivialized, erased.
So, before you leave this video, take a moment, breathe, think about what you just heard and ask yourself what you will do with this memory? How will you honor these voices that had the courage to break the silence? The answer is up to you. But know that every share, every comment, every gesture of support makes Bernadette live a little longer and with her all the others, those who have never been able to speak, those who are still waiting for justice.
Thank you for listening until the end. Thank you for being here. Thank you for remembering.
