Woman spy's lost story of how she watched people shot at her feet in Nazi camp
Odette Sansom's story reads like the film script it later became as she witnessed horrific torture, death, a dramatic escape and romance.
Held by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France, for two years she refused to betray her country under terrible torture.
She was branded on the back with a red-hot poker and had every toenail torn out.
She gives a harrowing account of her time in captivity, including the sickening revelation that she witnessed cannibalism in the Nazi Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for women.
“I saw dreadful things,” she says, her normally firm voice wavering. “The most dreadful things that human beings can do to other human beings.”
She tells how, in a rare moment outside her solitary cell, she spoke to a young girl who was suddenly shot dead in front of her.
The body was at once seized upon by starving, demented inmates.
“I saw a girl of about 18 who certainly had not been there long because she was still fresh... the next minute she was dead at my feet.
"They shot her down and the women around her attacked her like dogs, still warm – they were starving, they were demented, they were crazy.”
Her voice wavers again when she considers why the girl may have been shot. “Perhaps because she was talking to me,” she admits. “I will never know.”
Odette Sansom's story reads like the film script it later became as she witnessed horrific torture, death, a dramatic escape and romance.
Held by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France, for two years she refused to betray her country under terrible torture.
She was branded on the back with a red-hot poker and had every toenail torn out.
She gives a harrowing account of her time in captivity, including the sickening revelation that she witnessed cannibalism in the Nazi Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for women.
“I saw dreadful things,” she says, her normally firm voice wavering. “The most dreadful things that human beings can do to other human beings.”
She tells how, in a rare moment outside her solitary cell, she spoke to a young girl who was suddenly shot dead in front of her.
The body was at once seized upon by starving, demented inmates.
“I saw a girl of about 18 who certainly had not been there long because she was still fresh... the next minute she was dead at my feet.
"They shot her down and the women around her attacked her like dogs, still warm – they were starving, they were demented, they were crazy.”
Her voice wavers again when she considers why the girl may have been shot. “Perhaps because she was talking to me,” she admits. “I will never know.”
Don't get me wrong I believe the story, but it's still amazing the depths to which humans can sink and these were women too. Survival is survival, I don't judge them at all, but it's startling to read.
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