The Torture With No Paper Trail: How “Suspension” Was Used to Break Women—and Why History Pretended It Never Existed

At twenty-two, I learned that a person can be dismantled without being killed. It does not happen through a single act of violence or an event that can be photographed. It happens quietly, methodically, in repetitions so carefully designed that nothing visible remains afterward. When people ask why survivors waited decades to speak, they misunderstand the nature of what was done. Some crimes were engineered not only to destroy the body, but to erase themselves from history.

My name is Thérèse Boulanger. I was born in Lyon in 1921. I am speaking now because silence has proven more dangerous than memory.

For most of my life, I carried this history alone. I did not tell my husband. I did not tell my daughter. I did not tell the doctors who wondered why I could not lie flat or why certain parts of my body reacted with panic at the lightest touch. I remained quiet because what happened to us existed almost entirely outside the official record. No photographs. No signed orders. No clear terminology in military archives. Only bodies that remembered long after language failed.

I am speaking because my granddaughter, Mathilde, told me something I could no longer deny: when survivors die without testimony, denial becomes easier. And denial, dressed as skepticism, finishes the work that violence began.

Before Arrest, There Was Ordinary Life

I grew up above my parents’ bakery. My father believed dignity was as essential as food. When France fell in 1940, that belief was tested daily. Occupation did not announce itself loudly at first. It settled into the streets through silence, lowered eyes, and conversations that stopped mid-sentence when boots passed nearby.

I did not join the resistance out of bravery. I joined because immobility became unbearable. In 1942, my role was small—messages passed discreetly, papers concealed, doors opened briefly for people who needed to disappear. I believed then that humanity could be defended through careful, limited acts.

I was wrong about how much the system noticed.

In November, before dawn, soldiers arrived at our door. There was no explanation. No warrant. No time to dress. I was taken outside barefoot, wearing only what I had slept in. My mother’s voice followed me down the stairs, breaking as the door closed. My father tried to step forward and was forced back inside. That door closing remains one of the loudest sounds of my life. I never saw him again.

Detention Without a Name

I was transported with six other women in a sealed vehicle that smelled of metal and fear. We did not know where we were going. When we arrived, it was already night again.

The building was not a camp listed on any map. It was an old factory requisitioned for temporary use. Places like this existed precisely because they were meant to disappear. What occurred inside them was not intended for documentation.

An officer addressed us in careful French. He spoke of cooperation, of consequences, of order. Then we were separated and locked into cells with bare floors, damp walls, and a single bucket in the corner. Despite everything, we still believed in procedure. We believed in interrogation, in charges, in some recognizable logic of war.

That belief lasted three days.

The Method With No Official Name

On the third night, at exactly midnight, keys sounded in the corridor. That detail matters. Precision was part of the system.

We were taken to a large empty room where chains hung from ceiling beams. No explanations were offered. No questions were asked. This was not an interrogation. It was instruction.

What followed was not recorded as punishment. It was described, when it appeared at all, as “disciplinary holding.” Survivors would later call it something else entirely.

The intent was not to extract information. It was to establish helplessness through repetition.

Time lost structure. Night blurred into night. The same sequence returned again and again, not with rage or shouting, but with professional calm. The absence of visible wounds was not accidental. It ensured plausible denial later.

The most corrosive realization came slowly: for those administering it, this was routine. Not cruelty in the heat of the moment, but labor performed efficiently and without emotion.

What Repetition Does to the Mind

Within days, something shifted inside us. Speech thinned. Reactions slowed. One young woman stopped resisting entirely, not out of acceptance, but exhaustion of the self. Another tried to disappear in a different way. We stopped her, unsure whether we were saving her or ourselves.

Physical symptoms accumulated quietly. Swelling. Numbness. Persistent pain that no longer flared, but settled permanently. Hunger worsened it. So did cold. None of this produced the kind of injury that could later be photographed and catalogued.

That was the point.

Every morning we woke alive, which felt less like survival and more like continuation of a process designed to outlast our sense of time.

When It Stopped Without Explanation

On December 15, 1943, it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Orders changed. The front moved. The factory lost its usefulness. The men left without ceremony.

Out of the group originally detained, only a few of us remained. Others died quietly—from illness, internal injury, or despair that no longer needed encouragement.

Resistance members discovered the building by chance. They entered expecting weapons or documents. What they found instead were people who could not explain what had happened to them using available language.

When one of them asked me directly, I said only one sentence: they suspended us every night.

He did not understand until I showed him my ankles. His reaction was not disbelief. It was something closer to fear—because what he was seeing did not fit into the categories he had prepared himself for.

After Rescue, Silence Continues

We were taken to a convent. The sisters did not ask questions. They cleaned wounds and applied bandages gently, as if afraid of causing further harm. One woman died days later from complications no one knew how to treat. Another was institutionalized and never recovered her voice.

I returned to Lyon months later. My mother recognized me immediately. My father did not. He had declined after my arrest and died shortly afterward. I never told him why I had disappeared. Some truths are impossible to offer without cruelty.

After the war, I tried to speak. I wrote letters. I met officials. I approached journalists. The response was always the same, carefully polite: without documentation, without corroboration, without physical evidence, history could not accommodate my account.

I learned then that absence of proof is often treated as proof of absence.

So I stopped talking.

The Body Remembers What Archives Erase

I married. I had a child. I lived a respectable, quiet life. But my body carried its own record. Certain positions caused panic. Certain sights—hooks, chains, overhead beams—produced nausea without conscious thought.

Trauma does not require memory to persist. It only requires repetition.

For decades, historians focused on what could be counted: camps, numbers, dates. What could not be catalogued remained unexamined. Methods that left few marks were treated as anomalies or dismissed as exaggeration.

That silence was not accidental. It was the final layer of the system.

Why Testimony Came So Late

When my testimony was finally recorded, something unexpected happened. Researchers began looking again—not for dramatic evidence, but for inconsistencies. Vague references. Temporary facilities mentioned without detail. Medical reports that avoided explanation.

A former nurse, speaking carefully, confirmed that such methods were known but unofficial. Unwritten. Designed to disappear along with the people who endured them.

In 2010, a plaque was placed on the site of the factory. It did not describe the method. It did not need to. It acknowledged that women had been detained and subjected to torture there.

That acknowledgment mattered more than detail.

What Silence Was Designed to Do

The method used against us was not an exception. It was a solution to a problem faced by any system that understands scrutiny: how to punish without leaving evidence, how to break without documentation, how to ensure future denial.

Silence was not a byproduct. It was the goal.

I am not telling this story for sympathy or recognition. I am telling it because the most effective weapon used against victims was never physical force alone. It was the expectation that, without proof, we would eventually doubt ourselves.

If you hesitate to believe this, I understand. Doubt feels safer than acceptance. But ask yourself why someone would reopen such a memory at the end of a life, when there is nothing left to gain.

The answer is simple.

Because it happened.
Because it was real.
And because remembering is the only way it does not happen again quietly.