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I was twenty years old when I first pressed my face against the wall . It was winter, three in the morning. The cement was so icy cold that it burned the skin like hot iron. I could feel the warm breath of the German soldier on the back of my neck. He didn’t need to touch me. Proximity was already the threat.
My hands were clasped behind my back, my fingers beginning to lose all feeling. I didn’t know if I would return to the barracks alive. Nobody knew. That was their method, to keep us between terror and uncertainty until our souls began to crack like thin ice beneath our feet. My name is Aé Delcour.
I was born in the Loire, in a village so small that it didn’t even appear on military maps. My father was a baker. My mother died of tuberculosis when I was 12 years old. I learned to knead bread before I learned to read properly. I grew up breathing in flour and yeast, listening to the oven crackling at dawn.
I thought my life would be simple. Get married, have children, continue the bakery. But in 1943, simplicity became a luxury and kindness a crime. It all started with two neighbors, Madeleine and her daughter, Rachel, who was Jewish. They lived three houses below ours. Rachel was seven years old and liked to draw loaves of bread on the floor with crepe.
Madeleine was silent, but her eyes said everything. When the Germans started knocking on doors, I knew what was going to happen. I am not a heroine, I never have been. But that evening, when Madeleine knocked on our door trembling, holding Rachel by the hand, I simply opened the cellar trapdoor. My father pretended not to see anything.
He knew that losing me would be worse than losing the bakery. I hid them for eleven days. I brought old bread, water, and blankets. Rachel was drawing on the cellar walls with charcoal. Madeleine prayed softly in Hebrew. I was planning to take them to a farm in the countryside where a cousin of mine raised sheep. But someone spoke.
There’s always someone talking. On the 12th day, the soldiers entered screaming. They overturned the shelves, broke the oven door, found Madeleine and Rachel, huddled together in a corner of the shaking cellar. They took them both. I never saw them again. And they took me too. I was deported three days later.
There was no trial, just a train, cattle cars without women crammed into a space meant for wine. The smell of urine, sweat, and fear formed a dense cloud that clung to the throat. Some were crying, others were praying. I remained silent, standing, holding an old woman who had fainted in my arms. The journey lasted two days.
When the doors opened, the sunlight blinded me. But it wasn’t freedom, it was just the beginning of a nightmare. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. Guards with German shepherds patrolled the perimeter. The ground was frozen mud. Rotten wooden shacks stretched out in an endless row.