Josette Molan, who died aged 100 in France on February 17, was a young member of the French Resistance during World War II when she was captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Nazi women’s forced labor camps. He survived, after seeing and enduring repeated episodes of brutality. Later, after returning to France, she spoke to students about her experiences over the years.
In the 1980s, however, worried that her story was not reaching them, she concluded that it was not enough to tell young people about her life in the camp. He would have to show them. So she began to paint, from painful memory, scenes of the cruel confinement she and many other inmates had suffered. He created a total of 15 paintings, in the style of folk art. Here are five of them, with the text he wrote to accompany them.
‘The toilet’
“A place where one washed. No soap, toothbrush or towel. Cold water flows in a narrow, uncomfortable trough.’
“50 hits of ‘Gummi'”
“Almost always fatal if the woman was thin. Here the blows are administered by our captain, a German prisoner of common law (Green Triangle).”
‘At the dentist’
“Nude, so nothing could be hidden in the clothes. He is looking for gold (which was used at the time). He takes out the crowns, with the tooth. Here the bucket is full of gold.”
“He had just cut down a tree”
“He collapsed from exhaustion. The ‘auseherin’ (guard) finished her off with a bullet to the back of the head.’
“Liberation of the Camp by Polish Partisans on horseback”
“They had taken the SS by surprise, ready to flee and having mined the camp.”
