It Will Be Quick: The Grueling and Cruel Practice of German Soldiers Against French Women!

It Will Be Quick: The Grueling and Cruel Practice of German Soldiers Against French Women!

I still hear it, even now, years old, sitting in this silent living room where the afternoon light enters gently through the curtains, I still hear the sound of this hellish door closing behind me this night of April 1944. It’s not a memory, it’s a presence. The cold of the metal against my bare back, the smell of musty sweat and masculinity impregnated in the walls, the heavy breathing of someone who didn’t see my face as human.

I have spent years trying to erase this. But some memories don’t die. They just wait, lurking in darkness until you are alone enough to face them. My name is Isolde Marivot and what I will tell now does not appear in history books. It’s not in official reports on the Nazi occupation in France because what they did to us—45 women snatched from their homes in one sweep—was deliberately erased, buried, reduced to silence for decades.

But I have survived and as long as my voice works still, the truth will not die with me. I was born in 1920 in a small village north of Lyon, surrounded by vineyards that my grandfather cultivated since he was a child. Life there was simple, predictable, punctuated by the seasons and by the church bell which rang three times a day.

My father was a blacksmith. My mother sewed dresses for local women. I was the oldest of three sisters. I learned early to take care of the house, preparing bread, washing clothes in the icy river during the winter. We didn’t have much but we had dignity. We had a name, we had a face. I was an individual, not a number, not an object. I was a person.

When the war started in 1939, I had anxiety, but Germany seemed distant. Something that was happening in Paris, in the big cities. But war has a way of spreading. Like a stain of oil on clear water, it contaminates everything. In 1943, German soldiers arrived in our region. They installed a command post in an abandoned mansion three kilometers from the village.

Suddenly there were gray uniforms in the streets, harsh voices in German echoing in the squares, orders shouted to people who didn’t understand, and there were looks—looks that roamed our bodies as if they were evaluating cattle. I still remember the day when everything changed. It was April. One Tuesday, the sky was low, heavy with gray clouds that seemed to portend something terrible.

I was helping my mother hang laundry in the yard when I heard the sound of a truck approach. These were not the transport trucks for foodstuffs that we knew already. They were bigger, heavier and they moved slowly as if they were looking for something. My mother stopped what she was doing and looked at me with that type of fear that only a woman who has experienced war can recognize. She didn’t say anything.

She just grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the inside of the house. But it was already too late. The trucks stopped in front of our door. I can still hear the sound of boots descending, hitting the paved ground, approaching. The door was broken down with a single kick. Three soldiers entered.

One of them carried a list. My name appeared there: Isolde Marivot, 24 years old, single, in good health, fit. They didn’t explain anything. They just pointed at me and said something in German that I didn’t understand. My mother started screaming, grabbed my arm, begged in French that they let her stay. One of the soldiers pushed her with such force that she fell to the ground.

My little sister Margaut started to cry. My father was not in the house. He had gone to the market in the neighboring town. I never saw him again. I was dragged outside the house. I didn’t have the time to take anything, nor a coat, nor a photograph, nor a last embrace. I was thrown to the back of a truck covered in a dark tarpaulin where other women were already piled up.

Some were crying, others were silent, their eyes glassy, as if they had already understood that crying wouldn’t change anything. I recognized some of them: Mary, the baker’s daughter; Simone, who worked at the school; Hélène, who had gotten married three months ago. In total, we were 45. The youngest was 17, the oldest 42. Age didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter that we were mothers, wives, daughters; it mattered little if we had dreams, projects, families who were waiting. There, in that dark truck that smelled of fear and urine, we stopped being people. We became cargo. The journey lasted hours, I don’t know how long. I lost the notion of time.

The truck swayed violently on broken roads. Some women vomited, others fainted. I remained motionless, leaning against the rough wood wall, feeling the cold entering through the holes in the tarpaulin. I tried to memorize the path by sounds: the sound of gravel, the sound of a river, the distant whistle of a train, anything that could help me come back one day.

But the truth is that I already knew. I already knew that I would not come back the same person. When the truck finally stopped, the tarpaulin was torn off suddenly. The late afternoon light blinded me for a few seconds. When my eyes adjusted, I saw where we were. A camp surrounded by barbed wire, lined up wooden barracks, watchtowers, armed soldiers at each corner and, at the back, a larger gray stone building with narrow windows and iron bars.

This was not a labor camp, it was no ordinary prison, it was something else. Something that official records have never admitted to exist. We were forced to go down one by one along the wire, without speaking, without looking to the sides. A tall German officer in an impeccable uniform walked slowly in front of the file.

They watched us as if inspecting merchandise. They stopped in front of some, lifted their chin with the tip of a leather glove, turned their faces to one side then the other. When he arrived in front of me, he stopped. I smelled tobacco and expensive cologne. He said something in German to another soldier who noted something on a clipboard.

Then he continued. I didn’t yet know what it meant, but I would soon find out. We were taken inside a barracks. The ground was beaten dirt. There were rough wood berths, torn thin coverings, and a single bucket in the corner which served as a latrine. The roof had holes. We could see the sky.

This first night, no one slept. We stayed awake, huddled together against one another, trying to understand what was happening. Some prayed, others simply trembled. I stood looking at the ceiling, the stars that appeared through the holes, and I thought of my mother. I wondered how she was doing at that moment, if she was still crying, if my father had returned, if Margaut was afraid.

And then I heard a cry coming from the stone building, a sharp, desperate cry that was stifled suddenly as if someone had covered the woman’s mouth by force. Then silence. If you listen to this story now, wherever you are in the world, know that what I am going to tell then was not recorded in any court.

It is not in any museum. There is no commemorative plaque. But it happened. And if there is anything I learned in twenty years of life, it is that silence only protects the guilty. The truth must be said, even if it hurts, even if no one wants to hear it. The next morning, it started.

At 6:00 in the morning, the door of the barracks was opened violently. A soldier shouted names in German, reading a list. Five women were called. Among them was Marie, the baker’s daughter. She was only 19 years old. Blonde hair, light eyes, delicate face. She looked at me before she went out with that kind of look that asks for help without words. But I couldn’t do anything. Nobody could.

They were taken to the stone building. They came back three hours later. They didn’t speak. They simply lay down on the bunks, turned toward the wall, trembling. Mary cried softly, her face buried in the dirty pillow. I approached her and put my hand on her shoulder. She curled up as if my touch was burning.

At that time, I understood everything and I felt a different fear. Not the fear of dying, but the fear of losing something that could never be recovered. My name was called three days later. I still remember the sound of that German voice, dry and precise, distorting the syllables of my first name: “Marivau, Isolde.” I felt my legs weaken.

Around me, the other women lowered their eyes. Nobody said anything. But I saw in their eyes what they thought. It was my turn. I got up slowly. I walked toward the door of the barracks as if I were moving toward a precipice. The soldier who waited for me was young, maybe 20 years old, hard face, empty eyes. He motioned for me to follow him.

We crossed the watchtower courtyard. The ground was muddy from the rain of the night. My feet were sinking into the cold earth. I still wore the same dress as the day they took me from my house. It was dirty, torn at the hem. I felt the icy wind pass through the thin fabric, but the physical cold was nothing compared to what was waiting for me.

The stone building was different on the inside. There was a long, dark corridor lit by yellow bulbs hanging from the ceiling, with massive wooden doors on each side, all closed. I heard muffled noises behind some: moans, cries, masculine voices. The soldier pushed me toward a door at the end of the hallway. He knocked twice.

A voice responded in German. The door opened. Inside, there was a small room, an iron bed, a chair, a table with a bottle of schnapps and a glass, and a man—an older officer. Gray hair cut short, uniform impeccable. He looked me up and down slowly, as one evaluates an animal.

Then he said something in German to the soldier, who went out and closed the door behind him. I heard the lock slide. And there, in that overwhelming silence, I understood that no one would come, that no one would hear me, that whatever was going to happen in this room would remain within these four walls. The officer approached me.

He smelled of alcohol and tobacco. He held out his hand and touched my hair. I instinctively backed away. He smiled—not a smile of pleasure, a smile of power. He said something in French with a heavy accent: “Don’t be afraid, it’s going to be quick.”

These words, these four words, I heard them dozens of times later. Every time I was called, each time one of us was taken to this building: “It will be quick.” As if the speed made it bearable, as if time was the problem. But this was not a question of time; it was about destruction, about reduction, about transforming a human being into an object, into silence, into nothing.

He ordered me to undress. I hesitated. He repeated the order stronger this time. I started to remove my dress. My hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t undo the buttons. He grew impatient. He grabbed the collar of my dress and tore it with a sharp blow. The buttons flew onto the ground. I was naked, exposed, vulnerable. I covered myself with my arms.

He laughed, a short, contemptuous laugh. Then he pushed me onto the bed. I remember the cold metal against my skin, the smell of stale sweat on the sheets, the weight of his body, the pain, and above all, I remember the silence. This silence in which I locked myself to survive. I wasn’t screaming, I didn’t cry, I didn’t say anything.

I stared at a point on the ceiling, a crack in the plaster, and I was trying to convince myself that it wasn’t me, that it was someone other than me, that my mind was elsewhere, far away, in my grandfather’s vineyards, in my mother’s kitchen, in any place that was not this room. When it was over, he recovered calmly.

He poured schnapps into a glass and drank it in one gulp. Then he opened the door and called the soldier. I stayed lying on the bed, unable to move. The soldier came in, threw my torn clothes in my face, and ordered me to get dressed. I stood up, my legs trembling. I put my dress back on as best I could, holding the pieces of fabric together with my hands.

The soldier took me back to the barracks. The other women looked at me as I entered. They knew, they knew exactly what happened because it had happened to them too or because it was going to happen to them. I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes, and for the first time in days, I cried.

No sobbing, just silent tears that flowed down my cheeks because I had just understood something terrible. It was not finished, it was only the beginning. The following days, the routine was installed. Every morning, names were called. Sometimes two women, sometimes five, sometimes 10. We never knew who would be next. This uncertainty was self-torture. Some women prayed not to be called. Others seemed to have resigned themselves.

Mary, the young girl with blond hair, was called seven times in two weeks. On each return, she was a little more absent, a little emptier. One evening she sat next to me. She looked at me with eyes that no longer cried. She told me in a blank voice that she had stopped counting, that counting made things worse, that the only way to survive was to no longer think, to no longer feel, to become an empty shell.

I wanted to tell her something comforting, but I had nothing to say because she was right. There were unwritten rules in the camp: never look officers in the eyes, never resist, never cry in front of them. The one who resisted was punished. Hélène, the young bride, tried to refuse one evening.

She begged, screamed, tried to escape. They dragged her by force into the building. She came back the next day with purple marks on her neck, split lips, one eye closed by swelling. She didn’t speak anymore. She was staring into space. Two weeks later she hanged herself with a rope made of pieces of fabric. We found her body early in the morning hanging from a beam in the barracks.

The soldiers removed the body without ceremony. They burned the rope and that same evening, her name was replaced by another on the list as if she had never existed. But what still haunts me today are not the rapes themselves; it’s the organization, the coldness, the systematization. These were not impulsive acts of drunken soldiers.

It was planned, controlled. There were schedules, lists, rotations. The superior officers had priority. Some had their favorites. They asked for the same women again and again. Others still wanted new ones. There was even a military doctor who examined us once per month, not to treat us, but to check that we were in good condition.

If a woman became pregnant, she disappeared. We never knew where. Some said they were sent to hospitals. Others thought they were killed. I still don’t know. What I know is that three women disappeared like this during the months I was there and that none ever returned. One evening, a drunk officer said something to me that I will never forget.

He was lying on the bed after finishing. He smoked a cigarette looking at the ceiling and he said almost to himself in broken French: “You are not women, you are tools. And when a tool is broken, we throw it away.” There was no anger or cruelty in his voice, just an observation as if he were stating a fact.

And that is perhaps the most terrifying part. It wasn’t hatred, it was indifference. We were not enemies to destroy, we were things to use. And when we served no more, we ceased to exist. The weeks turned into months. I lost track of time. The days were all the same: wake up at dawn, calling of names, waiting, fear, then return to the barracks.

The body broken, the mind elsewhere. Some women were going crazy. Simone, the teacher, started talking all alone. She recited poems in a loud voice, nursery rhymes for children, prayers in random order. She was no longer sleeping. She walked in circles in the barrack all night until the soldiers came to beat her to make her silent.

One morning, she didn’t respond to the call of her name. She was curled up in a corner, eyes wide open but empty. She was still breathing, but she was no longer there. They took her away. I never saw her again. I survived by splitting myself. I can’t explain it otherwise.

When I was in this room, on this bed, under these men, I was no longer Isolde. Isolde was elsewhere. She was in her grandfather’s vineyards, her hands stained with grape juice. She was in her mother’s kitchen, kneading the bread dough. She was sitting by the river, feet in the cold water, looking at the dragonflies. The girl on the bed, the one who was suffering, it wasn’t me. It was a body, an empty envelope.

And when I came back to the barracks, I put the pieces together. I reconstituted just enough to last until the next day. This is how I survived, by dividing myself, by becoming many: Isolde from before, Isolde during, and Isolde after, trying to make the connection between the two.

There were times when I thought I wouldn’t last, moments when the temptation to do as Hélène did was almost irresistible. But something inside me refused, a stubborn little voice that said: “Not yet, not today.” I don’t know where that voice came from. Maybe from my mother, maybe from my grandmother who survived the first war, perhaps from all the women before me who had endured the unimaginable and who had continued.

I told myself that if I died here, they would have won. They would have completely erased me and I refused to give them that. So, I held on. Day after day, rape after rape, I held on. And then in August 1944, something changed. The soldiers were nervous. There was more coming and going than usual, trucks leaving loaded with boxes, officers shouting contradictory orders.

We didn’t understand what was happening, but we felt that something was different. One morning, the Allies bombed a German position a few kilometers away from the camp. We heard the explosions, felt the ground shake, saw the black smoke rise into the sky. Some women cried with joy.

Others were afraid that the camp would be bombed too. I felt nothing. I was too tired to hope. A few days later, in the middle of the night, the soldiers came to wake us up. They opened the doors of the barracks and shouted that we had to leave immediately.

We were pushed out into the cold of the night. There was no more list, no more order. It was chaos. Some women tried to escape into the darkness. I heard gunshots, screams. I don’t know how many were killed that night. We were forced to walk miles and miles in the dark without knowing where we were going.

Many women fell exhausted, hungry, sick. Those who could no longer walk were left on the side of the road. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they froze to death? Maybe they were shot? I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. I had to keep walking.

Toward early morning we reached a station. The soldiers crowded us into cattle cars. No seats, no windows, just a dark and stifling space. The train ran for hours. We didn’t know where it was taking us. Some thought that we were going to be executed. Others hoped that we would be released. I didn’t think anymore. I sat in a corner of the wagon, knees to chest, and closed my eyes.

When the train finally stopped, the doors opened abruptly. The light of day blinded me. I heard voices, but not in German—in French. French soldiers, resistance fighters. We were free. The Germans had fled. They had abandoned us there, in this train, in the middle of nowhere. Some women laughed, others cried.

I stayed seated. I didn’t know what to feel because even if my body was free, something inside me was still a prisoner. The return to normal life was impossible because there was no longer a normal life. Lyon had been liberated, but the city bore the scars of war: destroyed buildings, broken families, and everywhere silence. A thick silence, full of secrets that no one wanted to hear.

When I returned to my village, my mother hugged me and cried for hours. She squeezed me so tightly that I had difficulty breathing, but I let her because I knew she was crying not only for my return, but also for the daughter she had lost. My father didn’t look me in the eye for the first weeks. He remained in his blacksmith workshop from morning to evening, hammering the iron with a violence that did not exist before.

One evening, I went to see him. He was alone, his face reddened by the heat of the fire. When he saw me, he put down his hammer. Then he opened his arms and for the first time since my return, I cried in my father’s arms. Margaut, my little sister, asked me questions I couldn’t answer: “Where were you? What did they do to you?”

I didn’t say anything because to speak would have been to live it again, and to live it again would have been to die a second time. The first weeks, I tried to resume my life before. I helped my mother around the house. I kneaded the bread dough as I had done hundreds of times. I went to the market, but everything was different. My hands moved mechanically as if they belonged to someone else. Sometimes, in the middle of a task, I froze.

My mother found me like this, with a blank look, and she gently placed her hand on my shoulder: “Isolde, come back.” And I blinked. I was coming back, but every return was more difficult than the previous one. People looked at me strangely, some with pity, others with malicious curiosity, and a few with contempt.

Because in the minds of some, women who had been in these camps were no longer completely respectable, as if what had happened to us was our fault, as if we had chosen it. One day at the market, a woman I had known since childhood told me: “It’s a shame what happened to you, but at least you’re alive. Others had it worse.”

I smiled politely and left. But these words remained in me like poison. “At least you are alive,” as if surviving was sufficient. As if being alive erased everything else. The nightmares started a few weeks after my return. Every night, I woke up in a sweat, my heart beating, feeling suffocated.

I saw this room again, this bed, these men. I heard their voices, I felt their hands. Even when awake, memories haunted me. A slamming door, a smell of tobacco, a man in uniform on the street—no matter what, it could bring me back there. And when it was happening, I froze. My body froze. My breathing accelerated, I couldn’t move anymore. Sometimes that lasted a few seconds, sometimes several minutes.

My mother didn’t understand. She thought I was sick. She wanted me to see a doctor. But how to explain to a doctor that the body remembers even when the mind tries to forget? I tried to speak once to a childhood friend, Jeanne, who had also returned from the war. She had been a nurse in a field hospital. She had seen horrors.

I told myself she would understand. We were sitting in a café on a gray November afternoon. I started to tell her—not everything, just fragments, the camp, the calls, parts. She listened to me in silence and when I finished, she placed her hand on mine and said to me slowly: “Isolde, you must forget. You need to turn the page. Otherwise, you will never be able to move forward.”

She thought she was doing well, but her words broke me because she didn’t understand that I couldn’t forget, that it was impossible, that these memories were engraved in my flesh, in my bones, in my soul. So I stopped speaking. I decided that if no one wanted to hear, I would keep everything in me.

The years passed. I learned to live with silence. I got married in 1952 to a good man, a carpenter who didn’t ask questions. Henri was patient, gentle, he did not rush me. I never told him about the camp. He knew that I had been a prisoner during the war, but not the details, not what really happened.

We had two children, a girl then a boy. I raised them as best I could. I gave them my time, my care, my love. But there was always a distance, as if a part of me was inaccessible. My children felt it, I think. My daughter sometimes asked me: “Mom, why are you sad?” And I replied: “I’m not sad, my darling, just tired.”

But she knew; children always know. My husband felt it too. Sometimes he looked at me with a sadness that I could not console because I couldn’t give him what I didn’t have anymore. The woman he married was only a half. The other half had remained in this camp, on this bed, in this room.

The decades passed, my children grew up and had their own families. I became a grandmother and slowly, very slowly, I built a life—not the life that I should have had, not the one I would have had if the war had not existed, but a life nonetheless, with moments of joy, laughter, little joys, and always in the background the weight of the past like a shadow that never left me.

My husband died in 1998 of a sudden heart attack without warning. At his funeral, I cried. But not only for him. I cried for everything I never told him, for all the secrets I had kept, for the woman I could have been if they hadn’t stolen it from me. And I understood, standing in front of his grave, that the silence hadn’t protected anyone.

It had just imprisoned me a second time. In 2007, 63 years after my release, a historian came to see me. His name was Thomas. He was young, in his thirties maybe, with round glasses and a notebook always in hand. He was doing research on the detention camps in France during the occupation. He had found my name in German military archives which had been declassified a few years ago.

Lists, registers, documents that no one wanted to look at for decades. My name appeared there: Isolde Marivot, 24 years old, arrested on April 12, 1944, detained until August 23, 1944. He wanted to interview me, he wanted me to tell my story. I refused at first. I was 87 years old. I was tired. My bones hurt. My hands were shaking.

I lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of Lyon, surrounded by photographs of my children and grandchildren. I just wanted to finish my days in peace. I didn’t want to reopen these wounds. I didn’t want to plunge back into this darkness that I had spent my whole life trying to forget. But Thomas came back a week later, then two weeks after, then a month.

Every time he knocked on my door with the same gentleness, the same respect. He never forced it. He was just posing a question: “Madame Marivot, would you agree to talk to me? Just a few minutes.” And every time, I refused. But he came back anyway. One day he brought me flowers, blue irises, my favorite. How did he know? I don’t know.

Maybe he had spoken to my neighbors. Maybe he had simply guessed. He put them on my kitchen table and told me with a sincerity that touched me: “Madame Marivot, I am not here to make you suffer. I know that what you experienced is beyond words. But there are dozens of women like you who suffered the same thing and no one talks about it.”

“This part of history has been erased, forgotten, denied. History books mention the concentration camps, deportations, executions, but they never mention what happened to you. And if you don’t testify now, if the last survivors don’t speak, the truth will die with you and those who did this to you will have won a second time.”

These words touched me because he was right. I was one of the last. Mary was dead for a long time. Simone too. Hélène hanged herself in 1944. So many others had left without ever telling. What if I die without speaking, who would remember? Who would know?

So that day, sitting in my kitchen with its blue irises on the table, I nodded. I said yes, not for me, but for others, for all these women whose names had been removed from the registers, so that it not be forgotten, so that what had happened to us not be erased from history as if we had never existed.

The interview took place two weeks later. Thomas came with a camera, a tripod, a microphone. He installed all his equipment in my living room facing the window where the afternoon light entered slowly. He made me sit in my favorite chair, the one where I read in the evening. He asked me if I was ready.

I looked at the camera, this little red light that was flashing, and I thought of all these years of silence, all these moments when I wanted to speak but where no one listened. All these nights where I woke up sweating, alone with my memories, I breathed deeply and I started.

For the first time in sixty years, I told everything from start to finish, without hiding anything, without softening anything. I told about the truck, the 45 women piled up in the dark, the smell of fear and urine, the camp surrounded by barbed wire, the barracks where we slept directly on the ground. I recounted the calls.

These lists of names were shouted out every morning. The terror of not knowing if it would be our turn. I told about the stone building, the dark corridors, the closed doors and these rooms. These little rooms with an iron bed, a chair, a table. I told about the men, the officers who used us as objects, their hands, their voices, their indifference.

I told of this sentence which came back again and again: “It will be fast.” As if speed made the thing bearable, as if time was the problem. I told the pain, not just physical, but this deeper pain, that of losing one’s humanity, of becoming a thing, a number, a body without a soul.

Thomas didn’t interrupt me. He remained motionless behind his camera, his eyes flushed. Sometimes he wiped away a tear discreetly, but he said nothing. He let me talk and I talked. The words flowed like a river, long held back by a dam. It was painful. Every sentence was like tearing off a piece of myself.

Every memory that came back burned my throat. But it was also liberating because all these years, I carried this alone. And there finally, someone listened, someone believed, someone was recording so that it wouldn’t disappear.

I told of Marie, this young girl with blond hair who was only 19 years old. How she was called again and again, how she became empty, how she no longer spoke, no longer smiled, no longer cried. I told of Simone, the teacher who had lost her mind and recited nursery rhymes all night. I told of Hélène who had hanged herself rather than continue, and I told of all the others.

All these women whose names I didn’t even know but whose faces I remembered. Blank stares, broken bodies. The interview lasted 4 hours. When I finished, I was exhausted, empty, too strangely light, as if a weight that I had carried for 63 years had been shared.

Thomas turned off the camera. He approached me and hugged my arm. He was crying. He told me that he was sorry, that it was unfair, that we should have been recognized, honored, helped, but instead silence had been imposed on us. We were made to feel shameful. We were told to forget as if what had happened to us didn’t matter, as if our bodies had no value, as if our lives could just resume as if nothing had happened.

I nodded because it was true, but I also understood something that day: that the silence had not protected the guilty. It had just imprisoned me a second time. And that in speaking, even 63 years later, I finally broke this prison. The recording became a documentary.

Thomas spent months editing the images, adding historical archives, photographs of the camp, official documents. He found other survivors—not a lot. Three other women, all in their 80s, who agreed to testify. Together we told what no one wanted to hear. The documentary was broadcast on French television in March 2008 on a public channel late at night.

I watched it alone in my living room, sitting in my chair. It was strange to see myself on screen. This old woman with white hair, her face marked by years, who told terrible things in a calm voice. I didn’t recognize her. But at the same time, it was really me, this young girl of 24 who had been torn from her house, this woman who had survived hell, this grandmother…