This testimony was delivered by Agnès Bélavoine in the early 2000s, more six decades after the events which marked his youth. For 63 years she kept silent about everything she experienced while she was just a young French girl of 21 years old in a place from which few have returned with a voice.

Without fear and with nothing left to protect, she decided to speak no to be remembered, but so that what has been done don’t disappear with her. These are the words of a woman who survived when it was deemed useful. Listen until the end. Some stories don’t demand attention. She demands it. [music] I was 21 when I discovered that my body no longer belonged to me.

This wasn’t when I was taken from my home me, nor even when the walls of my room shook under the cuts of cross. Nor was it when we tattooed a series of numbers on the tender skin of my forearm, transforming my identity into one administrative equation. No, it was the precise moment when I saw a German doctor examine me with the same distanced expression as we used to evaluate a tool in a hardware store.

He showed no anger. There was no trace of perverse desire in his eyes, nor even ideological hatred. There was only one technical interest, cold and calculated. He wrote something down on an index card rigid cardboard. He made a mark sharp with a red fountain pen next to it of my name and then he smiled slightly. An almost imperceptible smile like that of an engineer who comes from find the exact spare part that he was looking for for his machine.

At that moment, in this room white tile that smelled of sluggishness, I didn’t yet know what meant this mark. I didn’t know not that there was a secret protocol written in cozy offices Berlin, far from mud and blood. I I didn’t know there were criteria precise medical, tables of measurement and endurance tests psychological.

I didn’t know he divided us one into invisible categories. That in the eyes of this system, the majority of women were considered material discartabé until the rupture and that others others like me were deemed useful. I didn’t understand why I was separated from the line principal of the prisoners in this gray morning in April 1943.

Why had I been taken to a annex building far from the barking of dogs? Why had I been weighed, measured, photographed from three angles different? Why did we test my ability to remain in absolute silence for 30 seconds, stopwatch in hand ? It was only later, much more late, when innocence had been charred, that I understood that this There was nothing random about the examination.

It was not a health sorting, it was a high-level selection. And the most terrifying, it wasn’t about failing, it was to have succeeded. I had passed the test. My name is Agnès Bélavoine. I have today qu years. Meanwhile, I carried this story as one carries a shard of Bu lodged near an artery vital, a sharp object buried under the skin, impossible to remove without cause fatal hemorrhage.

I don’t I didn’t tell my sons who grew up thinking their mother was just a silent woman. I don’t have it not told to my grandchildren who see in me a cake grandmother. I’ve lived a whole life doing pretending, compromising normality, pretending that this April night had never existed. But the body never forget.

He remembers the cold, he remembers the smell, he knows the truth. And now, sitting in this modest room in the heart of the French countryside, while the light the afternoon is waning and I know As my own time comes to an end, I speaks. I speak because there are things that must not die with me, because there was a system, because there were marked women as useful for supporting a machine which did not run on fuel hatred, but that of an effectiveness freezing and because I was one of them.

This story is an archive alive, a fragment of truth that the time tries to erase. If you think that it is crucial that these voices still reason today, show your support for this work of memory. by leaving a like on this video and tell us in the comments below from which city or which country you listen to the testimony of Agnè today.

Your presence here is a form of resistance against forgetting. You need to understand who I was before the sky falls on me head. I was not a resistance fighter heroic who derailed trains. I was not a spy sophisticated. I was Agnè, just Agnès.I lived in Rouan, near the cathedral whose arrow seemed to pierce the low clouds from Normandy.

My world was limited to the workshop of sewing my tent and going for walks along the stage on Sunday. I loved the smell of warm bread, the sound of rain on the slate roofs and cheap novels that I read in hiding place. I had tiny dreams, ordinary. I dreamed of a dress in itself blue.

I dreamed that a boy named Pierre looks at me. I dreamed that the war, this distant thing from which the adults spoke in low voices, ends up evaporating like a mist morning. I was guilty of only one thing, naivety. I thought if I didn’t watch the war in the eyes, she wouldn’t see me not. I was wrong. Everything changed on a Tuesday, not with explosions, but with a blow to the door. Three blows, sharp, authoritarian.

The sound of wood being knocked at 4 a.m. is a sound you never forget. He rumbles in your stomach before to reach your ears. When my mother opened, I didn’t see any monsters. I saw uniforms perfectly ironed, polished boots. It’s the order that scared me, not the chaos. Chaos. We can try to get there subtract. The order surrounds you.

They were looking for resources. It was the word they used. Not prisoner, not slave, resources. I was taken with a small suitcase containing two shirts and a photo of my father. I got into a truck tarpaulin where other women were crying. I wasn’t crying. I was frozen in a stupor, convinced that it was a mistake administrative, that someone was going realize that Agnè Bévoine had nothing to do there.

The journey lasted days or maybe hours. The time is distort when you are afraid. We finished by arriving in this place which was not an ordinary concentration camp, but a logistics sorting center, a node railway transformed into a zone of quarantine. This is where the selection useful started. We have been aligned in a courtyard beaten by the winds.

He it was humid cold which penetrated to the marrow. Around we, guards with dogs, but they stayed behind. In the center, tables, doctors in coats white, secretaries with portable typewriters, noise keys clicking on paper. Slap, slap, slap. This noise haunts me again. It was the sound of our lives being cataloged.

I saw a woman in front of me to be rejected. She had varicose veins on his legs. The doctor made a vague hand gesture and it was directed to the left, towards the trucks which were leaving for east, towards the smoke. Then my turn is came, I moved forward. I was ordered to undress myself. Not with violence, but impatiently.

As we ask a patient to speed up a consultation naked, shivering, under the gaze of three officers and a doctor. He doesn’t wasn’t looking at my nudity, he was looking at my structure. “Good bone,” one of them murmured as he German. “I understood a little language learned at school. Steady hand, no visible scar, clear look.

The doctor approached me. He has took my chin between his thumb and his index finger, turning my face towards the harsh light from an electric lamp. He looked at my teeth then my eyes. He has asked a strange question in a voice soft. If I ask you to hold this wire without moving for an hour, can you do it? He handed me a hair-thin sewing thread.

My hands trembled with cold, but one part of me, a part of survival reptilian has taken over. I took the thread, I blocked my breathing, I frozen my muscles. The wire didn’t move. He looked at the timer. 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds. The silence in the room was total, heavy, oppressive. 30 seconds. Gut, he said simply.

That’s where he picked up his red pen. I was directed to the right towards a small group of women who seemed all young, healthy and terrified. There were only a dozen of us out of the hundreds who arrived that day. We were taken to a red brick building away from wooden barracks. It was more clean.

There were windows windows. That should have reassured me. But as I entered I smelled a smell particular. Not the smell of death. who smells earth and rot. It was a chemical smell, a smell of laboratory, developer photographic and pure alcohol. And at down the hall, I heard a sound, a constant mechanical hum, rhythmic. We were taken into a room waiting.

A woman in a gray uniform, an assistant, looked at us with a contempt that I didn’t understand. She told us here you are no longer women, you are components. If you function, you live. If youbreak down, we’ll replace you. Is it clear? Nobody answered. We had lost our voice. She has distributed outfits, not pajamas striped ones that we see in the movies.

They were blouses. Blouses of gray work, thick, buttoned up to the neck like that of the workers factory or laboratory workers. When I put it on, I felt like I was putting a linen alone. I looked at my neighbor, a red-haired girl who was crying silence. She had the same red mark on his file.

The door at the bottom of the room opened. The hum mechanics became stronger, more violent. A blinding white light was escaping from inside. The doctor reappeared. He called first name, not mine, the girl’s redhead. She stood up, her legs shaky. She walked towards the light. The door closed behind her. We waited 1 hour, two hours. The hum continued.

And then suddenly he arrested. Absolute silence fell. The door opened again but the girl redhead didn’t come out. It’s the assistant who appeared holding the girl’s gray blouse in her hands, folded neatly. She called my name. Beautiful oats, to you. I got up. My legs no longer carried me. It was the fear that pushed me forward.

I have crossed the threshold and what I saw of the other side of this door was not a medieval torture chamber. It was much worse. It was a room production, immaculate workbenches, precision instruments and women sitting in a row working with a terrifying concentration on objects that I didn’t recognize yet. They didn’t look at me.

None of them raised their eyes. They were absorbed, merged with the machine. The doctor pointed me to an empty chair in front of a microscope and a stage filled with tiny glass lenses. “Sit down!” he ordered. “Today we’re going to see if your eyes are as useful as I think.” I sat down. I put my hands on the cold metal of the workbench and it’s there I understood.

We were not there to die. We were there for become the eyes and hands of someone monstrous thing. I had become a centerpiece in the secret gear of the Reich and I did not yet know that the price of this usefulness would be my humanity. He didn’t tell me took only three days to understand that hell was not necessarily a place where people burned.

hell could be white, immaculate, silent and perfectly tempered. Workshop 4B, as he called it, was an aberration in the middle of the camp. Outside, a few hundred meters away, there was the mud, the tifus, the barking and black smoke that escaped from the chimneys day and night. But inside these walls of brick, time seemed suspended in a bubble of terrifying sterility.

We We were no longer prisoners. We had become organic extensions of their precision machines. My position work was number 18. metal chair, wooden workbench varnish, a ze binocular microscope and a tray lined with black velvet. My task was deceptively simple. Final polishing and assembly of the antioptic intended for the system of aiming of bombers.

We don’t hadn’t said it explicitly. Of course, military secrecy reigned. But when you spend sweet hours a day manipulate prisms capable of deflecting light with precision surgical, you quickly understand that they are not intended for devices vacation photos. I held between my fingers, damaged by chemicals but strangely stable, the eye of the predator.

I created the clarity that would allow to a German pilot somewhere above London or Stalingrad its deadly charge in the right place. It’s where the real torture lay psychological. It wasn’t the end, even though our bellies cried out for famine under our blouses gray. The torture was there complicity.

Every lens I validated, each glass that I cleaned until it was invisible was a death sentence for someone somewhere else in Europe. I was become a vital cog in the machine that was destroying my own world. And yet, I polished, I rubbed. I calibrated because the alternative was window, not to jump, but to look out towards the shovel yard where useless women collapsed of exhaustion in the muddy snow before to be dragged towards the gas trucks.

The warmth of the workshop was our pot of wine, survival was our salary and Guilt was the price to pay. The atmosphere in the room was suffocating with silence. The word was prohibited, except for questions techniques. We were thirty women leaning over our microscopes likecopyist monks devoted to a religion of glass and steel.

The only noise was purring of the ventilation and the infinitely soft crunch of paper polishing. Sometimes the supervisor came by. He wasn’t an SS man with a riding crop. He was a civil engineer, a man around fifty years old with round glasses and a smell of tobacco cold blowjob. His name was RK. He walked gently behind us, looking at our hands over our shoulders. He never shouted.

If a part was poorly assembled, it was content to tap the workbench with his index finger twice. Knock. Knock. It was the signal. The girl had to start again. If this happened a second time, [music] he noted the number of the extension in his notebook. There was never third time. The next day, the chair was empty then occupied by a new arriving with a terrified face.

I remember one afternoon November. The light faded early and the lamps industrial above us buzzed. To my left at the station there was a Polish girl named Elsbietta. She had long piano fingers and untied, perfect for this job. We had never exchanged more than furtive glances, but I knew the rhythm of his breathing.

That day, his rhythm was broken. She was trembling, not from the cold, but from the fever. I saw the sweat beading on his forehead and taste dangerously close to pristine lenses. She was trying to controlling his spasms, biting his lips until they bleed so as not to cough. Everything jumped on an optic of precision.

It was the stain of microparticles. It was sabotage. RK entered. He started his rounds. I felt the tension building in part like an electric charge. Elsbietta held her breath. His hands manipulated a convex lens large diameter. I prayed internally, a secular rosary of despair. Hold on, don’t move, he will pass.

The engineer stopped behind her. He observed. The silence stretched. Unbearable. Elsbieta has managed to place the lens in its accommodation. It was perfect. nodded, a rare sign of approval and took a step towards my post. As he turned away, the body of Els Biieta has it. A violent, irrepressible sneezing exploded.

She didn’t have time to put your hand over your mouth. From tiny droplets of saliva landed on the velvet tray and on the assembled optics. The time has arrested. Nobody moved. Elsbietta looked up the engineer. The drained face of all color. She knew. We knew all. Her turned around slowly. He looked at the dirty lens.

He doesn’t have not screamed. He didn’t raise his hand her. He just took out a tissue from his pocket, wiped his own glasses and said in a calm voice, almost sad, “Contamination is the enemy of perfection. The component 17 is defective.” He wasn’t talking about the lens. He spoke about her. Two guards entered, called by a discreet sign.

They have took Elsbieta by the arms. She doesn’t have cried, she didn’t beg. She told me took one last look. It wasn’t fear was an excuse. She apologized for breaking the rhythm, for remembering our fallible humanity in this temple of mechanics. When the door closed, turned towards me.

My heart was beating so hard that I I was afraid it would vibrate my established. “Clean his station number 18”, he ordered and resumed his work. “We have a quota.” I got up, my legs were cotton. I took the rag and the alcohol. I have erased the traces of Elsbieta’s life. I cleaned his sweat, his fear, his existence. And I sat down at her place to finish assembly.

I have cried inside, dry tears that burn my throat, but my hands did not tremble. I finished the lens. She was perfect. This is what that evening, returning to the reserved dormitory to the specialists that I understood that we were losing something something more precious than our freedom.

We were losing our soul piece piece by piece, polished and abraded until disappear. The other prisoners of camp hated us. She us called to protect them, collaborators. She saw our hands clean, our faces less sunken and she spat at us with her eyes. How to explain to them that we were deader than her? She died in victim, we survived in accomplishment.

But the horror had degrees that I hadn’t explored yet. Some weeks after Elsbeta’s disappearance, production has changed. We have brought new plans, new crates. The lentils were different, thicker, treated with a special lead coating. and the metal boxes which accompanied woreinscriptions that I had never seen.

It was no longer for planes, it was for something on the ground, something heavy. One day, during a break forced to have a power cut, I found myself near the area of storage. A crate was ajar. I saw a technical photo slipped into an assembly sheet. It was not a bomber sight, it was a riflescope for precision rifle long range.

And next to it, a note handwritten in German. Clinical trial required on moving target. My sense was frozen. Moving target, he wasn’t talking about cardboard targets on a shooting range. I I had just realized that the instruments that we assembled with so much care were not going to go to the front from the east. They stayed here.

They were intended for guard towers. I made the glasses that went used to kill the women on the other side fence, those who tried to running away or simply collapsing when shoveling. I looked at my hands. They were clean, without a trace of mud. But in this moment, I saw the blood, liters of invisible blood flowing from my fingers to the concrete floor.

I have almost vomited. I wanted to run, to scream, break the lentils. But the instinct to survival, this cold monster who lived now inside me, pinned me to the spot. I closed the box, I am returned to my post and when the light came back, I started again work. But something had changed. I no longer polished for survive, I polished to remember.

I memorized every fault, every microayure, each serial number. I made a silent promise to myself. If I get out of here, I not only have told what they did to us. I I’ll tell you what they did to us do. However, I didn’t know that the real test was not technical. He was approaching. The chief engineer would soon demand more of us than of labor.

He was going to demand a active loyalty and for that, he had prepared a special test, one night where workshop 4B would cease to be a factory to become a theater of cruelty pure. It is often said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. But in the workshop 4B, I learned that the eyes can also be a simple variable mathematics, an optical problem to resolve.

After my discovery in the storage crate, something had broken inside me. I wasn’t polishing more glass. I polished death. Every convex lens I held between my brussels tongs seemed to me heavy as if it already contained the weight of the lives she was going to help erase. I tried not to think, take refuge in pure technique, refractive index, curvature, diopter.

I repeated these words to myself like mantras to stifle the cry that was growing in my throat. But the system, in its perversity does not did not leave the luxury of abstraction. We had to see. The winter of 1943 arrived with brutality that froze the whole of Europe. Even inside our workshop heated, the windows become covered with frosts.

One night, while the wind howled outside like a wounded animal, the quiet routine of our production has been interrupted. It was 2 a.m. morning. Fatigue made our movements slower, our eyelids heavy. The main door opened with smash. letting in a whiff of icy air which made the papers on the workbenches. RK entered followed by two SS officers that we didn’t know.

He was not wearing crates of components this time. one of them carried a long leather sheath dark. The silence in the room became absolute. Even the hum of the ventilation seemed to have stopped respect or out of fear. Erka looked nervous, which was unusual for this iceman. He looked around the room, his eyes sliding down the front rows lowered before stopping on me.

“Number 18,” he said. His voice was not not strong, but it slammed like a whip. Come closer. Bring your prize finished. I stood up, my legs were shaking but I took the velvet tray containing the six riflescopes that I had assembled during the day. I approached the big table central under the harsh light of lampsques.

The SS officer put down the case on the table and opened it. To inside rested a mower car rifle 98K but modified. The wood was polished, the heavier gun. It was a weapon of sniper, hunter weapon of man. Mount the optics, ordered the officer. He didn’t look at me. For him, I was a mechanic, not a person. RK nodded at me imperious.

I had to take one of my glasses. My hands, these traitors docile, knew exactly what to do. I slid the optic onto the railassembly. I tightened the fastening lives with the precision screwdriver. Click. click. The sound of metal against metal reasoned in the dead silence of the workshop. The weapon was complete, it was beautiful, obscenely beautiful and functional.

Now the calibration, the officer said. He took the weapon and headed towards the back window, the one that overlooked zone C, the part of the camp where the newcomers were parquet before triage. He opened the window. The cold invaded the room, biting our faces. He placed the rifle on a bag of sand placed on the edge, the barrel pointed towards the night.

Projectors mighty ones swept the outer court, cutting out cones of white light in the dark. The officer pressed his eye to the telescope. He grunted something in German. Vague ! There is aberration on the edges. He stood up and pointed at me. with the finger. You, sort this out right away. I thought I was going to pass out.

He me asked to look. He asked me to aim. Rk gently pushed me towards the window. Focus 18. Don’t waste our time. I I leaned over the weapon. I felt the smell of gunsmithing oil and officer’s tobacco. I approached my rubber eyepiece eye and I seen. The quality of the optics was perfect. It was my masterpiece cursed.

The image was crystal clear crystal clear, luminous, magnified four times. In the aiming circle, I saw the snowy yard. I saw the barbed wire and I saw a group of women 300 m away from there unloading stones of a wagon. They were in rags, living skeletons that moved slowed down. Thanks to the telescope, I could see intimate, terrifying details.

I saw the steam coming out of them mouth. I saw the pleasures on their bare hands. I saw the terror in their eyes when a guard looked up voice. Well, barked the officer, paralax, I had my hand on the dial adjustment. I saw the black crosshairs, this thin cross, superimposed on the back of an old woman who stumbled in the snow.

I was connected to her by this tube of metal and green. If I adjusted the sharpness, I condemned it. If I claimed that the optics were defective, I signed my own judgment of death and that of my companions workshop. It was the ultimate dilemma of devil. technical excellence in service of absolute evil. I felt a tear, a single flow down my plays.

It froze before it reached my chin. I turned the dial gently. The image has become again sharper. I could make out the flakes of snow on the prisoner’s shoulders. I could see she had no shoes, just rags surrounded strings. I rendered his image perfect for the killer. It’s clear, I whispered. My voice was dead. The officer told me brutally pushed back.

He resumed his place. He aimed. I closed my eyes. I prayed he wouldn’t shoot. I have prayed that he would just check the material. Bang. The shot was deafening in the enclosed space. The smell of burning powder replaced the sterile smell of the workshop. I don’t have didn’t open my eyes again, but I heard the officer’s laughter.

Perfect, [music] he said, good job. He took the scope apart, put it back in velvet. They left as they had become, leaving the window open and a smoking socket on the ground. RK closed the window without a word. He turned towards us, towards me who was petrified, clinging to the edge of the table so as not to fall.

The continued production, he said, “clean this socket. I’m returned to my place. I took back my tools. But from that night on, something has changed in the workshop 4B. We no longer looked at each other. We we all knew. We were not only slaves. We were the eyes of the monster. I helped kill this unknown woman as surely as if I had pulled the trigger.

The guilt became a second skin, heavy, sticky, suffocating. Yet it’s in this darkness total as the first spark of resistance was born. Not a resistance heroic with weapons and plans sabotage. No, it was a tiny resistance, invisible. When cleaning the bezel next day, my hand slipped. Voluntarily, I created a microayilture on the internal lens, invisible to the naked eye during quick inspection, but sufficient to create a diffraction of light case of strong sunlight, making the shot inaccurate by a few centimeters to

long distance. A few centimeters. The difference between a heart and a shoulder. The difference between death and an injury. It was ridiculous, it was suicidal. If RK had seen it under the microscope, I would have finished in the crematorium in the eveningeven. But he didn’t see it. And for the first time in months, I breathed.

I had found a way to take back a fraction of my power. I couldn’t save the world, but I could maybe, just maybe, miss a shot. I thought I had reached rock bottom, having seen the worst. I I was wrong again. The true purpose of workshop 4B was not only produce weapons. It was a incubator for a much more project dark.

A project that required no only our hands but our bodies whole. A few weeks later, the order has arrived. They no longer had need thirty technicians. They needed five subjects to test the resistance of the human eye to new night vision drugs. And my name was first on the list. They took off my worker’s blouse to give me a cotton hospital gown rough open in the back.

I wasn’t plus number 18, the technician at golden hands. I had become the subject, a cluster of cells and nerves disposition of Reich science. The transfer to the medical block was done in pouring rain, water black woman who seemed to want to wash the world but which only spread the mud. Upon entering this building, the smell has changed.

It was no longer oil and metal. It was a smell sweet, tangy, a mixture of lands, coagulated blood and fear animal. If the workshop was the brain of the camp, here [music] were the entrails. The five of us were driven selected in a windowless room painted pale green. There were dentist chairs with straps leather on the armrests and headrests.

A new doctor was waiting for us. He doesn’t didn’t look like the cold engineer from the workshop. This one was young, too young, with a smooth face and eyes brilliant with fanatical curiosity. He explained to us, with pedagogy of a school teacher, that fury required soldiers capable of fight the night so effectively than in broad daylight.

“The darkness is the enemy,” he said. We are going there conquer and you will show us the path. They tied me to the chair. The straps tighten my wrists until it cuts off traffic, but I felt almost nothing. I was gone elsewhere, far away, in a remote corner of my mind where I still cultivated roses. The doctor looked at me. He was holding a pipette filled with a amber, viscous liquid.

“Open up, big guy!” he whispered. A assistant held my eyelids spread with metal spacers cold. I couldn’t blink anymore eyes. I was forced to watch the ceiling, the lamp, the face of the executioner. The first drop hit my horny like a glowing ember. It wasn’t a liquid, it was liquid fire.

I wanted to scream, but cry stuck in my throat, suffocated by a cotton ball that he shoved it in my mouth. The pain was absolute, white, blinding. It radiated behind my eyes, burning the optic nerve, invading my skull as if there poured acid. “It’s normal”, [music] said the voice far from the doctor. The solution stimulates the retina.

She forces it permanent expansion. Don’t try to close your eyes. For hours or maybe days I stayed in this state of sensory torture. They locked us into what they called the darkroom. It was a completely airtight room light, padded. We were all the five in there, blind in the black, groaning in pain, our eyes unable to close due to inflammation. The drug was taking effect.

My pupils were dilated maximum, absorbing the slightest particle of non-existent light. And that’s where the hallucinations have started. The product was not satisfied not to open the eye, it opened the mind. In the pitch black I started to see. I saw geometric shapes floating in front of me, fractals of neon color that pulsed to the rhythm of my distraught heart.

Then the shapes are become faces. I saw my mother. I saw Pierre. I saw the woman that I aimed with the rifle scope. She looked at me with her empty eyes and she smiled. “You see now, Agnes,” she seemed to say. “you see this that we see.” I was scratching the ground with my nails until they break, trying to find an anchor in the reality, but reality had melted away.

The test took forever. Regularly, the door opened, letting in a ra of light which struck us like a stab in our hyper eyes sensitive. The doctor entered with a Very low intensity flashlight. It projected tiny letters onto the wall, maps, photos of aerial reconnaissance. “Read”, he ordered. “And the worst, the unbearable thing is that I couldread.

I saw in the dark, I saw the grains of the paper, I saw the suspended dust. My humanity had been hacked to make me a alley cat, a nocturnal monster. For each correct answer, he noted it. To each wrong answer, it increased the dose. [music] One of my comrades, a young Belgian named Claire, did not supported.

His mind cracked before his eyes. She started screaming that she saw the devil in the corner of the room. She screamed continuously. A raw, animal sound. The doctor has sighed, annoyed by this lack of discipline. He made a sign. Two guards took him away. I heard it shouting again in the hallway. Then a brutal silence fell. I knew that I won’t see her again.

We There were only four of us left. My eyes were literally bleeding. Tears of Blood and pus ran down my cheeks. But I continued to decipher their code in the dark. I did it because a voice inner life, that of survival, whispered. If you go blind, you become useless. If you are useless, you are dead. So I forced my vision.

I have forced my burned eyes to focus point on the horror. I learned to live in the dark, to become a creature of the shadow. But outside, the world was changing. [music] We were at beginning of 1944. The walls of the dark room were shaking more and more often. At the beginning we thought it was the effect of drugs, but the vibrations were real.

It was the bombs, the allies approached, the factory, our workshop, this campit, all this had become a target. For the Germans, this meant urgency. Panic was starting to seep into their iron discipline. The tests are become more brutal, more rapid. He wanted results before the sky does not fall on their heads. One morning, after a particularly session excruciating, the doctor looked at me closely.

My eyes were bloodshot, the almost invisible iris under the pupil black dilated. Topic 18. Severe photophobia. Start of retinal detachment,” he said. diagnosed coldly. He closed his file. This gesture, I knew. It was the gesture of rejection. I had reached the limit of usefulness physiological. My eyes were destroyed.

I had given my sight for their war and now I was no more than indiscriminate waste. “Transfer her to bara nine,” he said to the assistant. The new barracks, the death room, the antechamber of the crematorium. This was where we put those who could no longer work while waiting that gas is available. I felt the cold invade me more intense than that of winter.

It was finished. I had survived the selection, the workshop, to complicity, to torture to end up thrown away like a blister grilled. The guards grabbed me. I don’t saw almost nothing. Daylight was an unbearable attack which turned the world into an inferno white. and blurry. I tripped, he was hanging around.

But while we we crossed the courtyard, the sky torn. Not by the rain, but by the roar of engines. Hundreds of engines. The sirens of the camp started to scream. A mechanical cry desperate who mingled with the barking dogs. It was an air raid, a real one. The Chaos broke out instantly. The guards let go of my arms to run towards the shelters.

I fell into the mud, blinded, alone in the middle of the apocalypse which began. I didn’t see the planes, but I felt the explosions. The earth jumped under my body. The heat of explosions hit my face. And there, lying in the frozen earth, unable to see the sun, with my eyes destroyed by their cursed science, I realized something.

I wasn’t not dead. And for the first time, the chaos was not my enemy. The chaos was my only chance. I had to rise. I had to run even though I didn’t know where. I had to flee this black man that I now knew better than anyone. It’s at this moment accurate as the world fell apart around me in an iron din and of fire that I felt a hand grab my ankle, a firm hand.

I believed that it was the end. I thought it was death coming claim me, but a voice whispered to my ear, a French voice, rque and pressing. Don’t move, little one, if you move, he sees you. Wait for the smoke. I didn’t know not who it was. I only saw one blurred shadow. But in this hell, this voice was the first human thing that I heard for years and she offered me the impossible, a choice.

It’s understood. Here is the last chapter. The outcome of this tragedy. It’s time for resolution, right not as a resounding victory, but like a painful survival. The text is dense, emotional and firm the narrative loop with power reflexive.Chapter 5. Legacy of Shadow. The hand that held my ankle did not let go. It was that of a man, a prisoner French politician assigned to maintenance railway tracks which had benefited from confusion to throw oneself to the ground near of me.

Around us the world was more than a crash. Allied bombs fell on the factories, on the depots ammunition and on workshop 4B. The earth rose in waves like a raging sea made of earth and metal. But the most terrifying thing was not the noise was smoke. A smoke black, thick, oily, from fuel tanks on fire, invaded the yard in seconds.

She has swallowed the sun. She transformed the day into an artificial night, impenetrable to the normal human eye. The guards were screaming, lost, shooting blindly in this toxic fog. The man next to me was coughing, panicking. We are trapped, he said. I don’t see not to a master. We’re going to get killed here.

And this is where the greatest irony cruelty of my existence was revealed. The medical protocol, this torture destined to make me a creature of the night, suddenly took on all its sense. My eyes burned, dilated beyond reasonable, unable to bear the light of day, have found their element. In this darkness follows and ashes, I saw. I didn’t see as you and I see today.

I saw in a spectrum of grays and violent contrast. The flames in the distance draws sharp shadows. I I could see the silhouettes of the guards who stumbled and above all I saw this that man could not see, a breach. The blast of an explosion had twisted the electrified fence 50 m from us.

The path was open but it had to cross a debris field invisible to others. I squeezed the human hand. It’s me who has it fired. I, the blind, the broken, the scrap. Get up, I yelled at him over the whistle of a bomb. I see the exit. Follow me. We have ran. I guided him through the apocalypse, avoiding craters smoking and bodies lying down.

My eyes made me suffer martyrdom. Each smoke particle was like glass crushed under my eyelids. But I don’t wouldn’t close. I stared at this gap in the fence as if it were the door of paradise. We passed. We have ran into the forest, leaving behind we the factory in flames, the workshop the horror and the ashes of those who didn’t have a chance.

We have ran until our lungs burned as much as my eyes. Then we collapsed in the snow, free but destroyed. I don’t remember the days that followed. I was told more late that I had been found by a delusional American patrol, the blindfolded with dirty rags. I woke up three weeks later in a military hospital in Lyon.

Everything was white, too white. I screamed let’s turn off the light. A nurse ran to close the curtains. It’s finished, my darling,” she said. “The war is over.” She was wrong. The war of weapons was finished. Yes, but mine was what to start with. The diagnosis of ophthalmologists were clear. My retinas were irreversibly burned by chemical agents.

I will not be not blind, no, but I would be condemned to live in darkness. The direct sunlight became me unbearable. physical pain acute which has never left me. I returned home to Rouan. My mother didn’t recognize me. I was gone naive young girl. I came back ghost with dark glasses. I tried to resume a life. I met a good man, a patient man who accepted that I live to fly closed.

I had children. I sewed clothes for them in the light of a lamp weak. I learned to smile on family photos, even if behind my smoked glasses, my eyes were crying without ceases. A reflex reaction that never really stops. But I don’t have never spoken. Never. Why? Because that how to explain the inexplicable? How to tell my husband who found me beautiful that I had been useful to the Nazi? How can I admit that I had polished them lenses that killed our own soldiers? How to tell that I had survived because I agreed to

become a monster? Shame is a cement stronger than silence. I felt guilty for being alive, guilty of passing the tests, guilty of seeing in the dark when the others died in the light. I buried workshop 4B deep of me. I let the world celebrate the heroes, the resistance, the landings. I was none of that. I was a victim accomplice, a piece detached which had survived the machine.

So why talk today? Why at 80 break this jumpsixty years? [music] Look around you. Look at it world today. I listen to the news. I smell the air time and I recognize this smell. Not the smell of gas or powder, but the smell of cold rationality. I hear people talking again of human beings in statistical terms, cost, utility.

I hear about sorting. I hear about effectiveness detriment to humanity. The system that broke me didn’t started with gas chambers. He has started with Excel tables. He has started by doctors and engineers who decided that certain lives are worth living and others don’t. based on criteria techniques.

They transformed evil into an administrative procedure. They have made the horror clean, clinical, justifiable. I speak because I am living proof of what happens when we treat the human being as a tool. I speak because my eyes, these eyes destroyed which no longer support the sun, have seen what man is able to do when he forgets that the other is his brother so as not to see in him only a resource.

I’m going to die soon. My hortancias will flower without me next year. But before leaving, I wanted you leave this testimony. Never, ever let yourself be reduced to a number. Never let anyone tell you that your worth depends on your usefulness. And above all, beware of those who offer you a world perfect, orderly and efficient if they do not are not able to look at you in eyes with compassion.

My name is Agnès Bellavoine, I was the subject and today finally I take my name back. I no longer live in the black. By telling you this story, I feel for the first time since 1943 to finally see the real light, that of truth. The story of Agè Bellavoine never fades away not when the screen goes dark. He remains suspended in the heavy silence which now fills your room.

What we have just heard is not only an echo of the past, it is a pitiless mirror held up towards our present. Agnes sacrificed her own sight to survive a world that placed utility above life, we leaving one facing the most difficult question haunting of all. How far are we ready to go when the cruelty is draped in the clothes of technical efficiency? Today, you were not a simple spectator passive of a historical drama.

In listening to Agnè’s trembling breathing and by bearing witness to the darkness she has inhabited for decades, you are become the guardian of this memory. Oblivion is the second death of the victims and the algorithm of modern life is designed to erase what is painful. But your presence here until the very last second is a act of resistance.

You chose to look just like she was forced to tell the truth naked and raw of the human condition. I invites you to break the silence that Agnè kept for 63 years. Go down in the comment space and write down what this story awakened in you. Don’t write an empty sentence. Share your thinking. In a world that tries to us transform into figures and data, your human voice, your empathy and your thoughts are the most useful tools powers we have.

Tell us what aspect of this utility icy weather upset you the most? From what corner of the world are you watching this documentary today? This chain does not exist simply to tell stories. It exists for exhume the souls that history has attempted to bury. Our investigative work, writing and production is animated by a single mission.

Prevent the past becomes only a simple note of footer. If you believe in the importance of keeping these voices alive, if Agnè’s courage touched something deep in you, I asks you to subscribe and to activate notifications. Don’t do it for the algorithm, do it for the memory. Agnes Belavoine lived in darkness for that we can see the light of truth.

From now on, the responsibility of keeping this flame lit is between your hands. Share this documentary with someone who needs to know that history is made of people and not of statistics. Thank you for watching, for feeling and above all for having chosen you memory. See you for the next one story that the world has tried to forget.