MME. VAILLANT-COUTURIER: I was arrested on 9 February 1942 by Petain’s French police, who handed me over to the German authorities after 6 weeks. I arrived on 20 March at Santé prison in the German quarter. I was questioned on 9 June 1942. At the end of my interrogation they wanted me to sign a statement which was not consistent with what I had said. I refused to sign it. The officer who had questioned me threatened me; and when I told him that I was not afraid of death nor of being shot, he said, “But we have at our disposal means for killing that are far worse than merely shooting.” And the interpreter said to me, “You do not know what you have just done. You are going to leave for a concentration camp in Germany. One never comes back from there.”
M. DUBOST: You were then taken to prison?
MME. VAILLANT-COUTURIER: I was taken back to the Santé prison where I was placed in solitary confinement. However, I was able to communicate with my neighbors through the piping and the windows. I was in a cell next to that of Georges Politzer, the philosopher, and Jacques Solomon, physicist. Mr. Solomon is the son-in-law of Professor Langevin, a pupil of Curie, one of the first to study atomic disintegration.
Georges Politzer told me through the piping that during his interrogation, after having been tortured, he was asked whether he would write theoretical pamphlets for National Socialism. When he refused, he was told that he would be in the first train of hostages to be shot.
As for Jacques Solomon, he also was horribly tortured and then thrown into a dark cell and came out only on the day of his execution to say goodbye to his wife, who also was under arrest at the Santé. Hélène Solomon-Langevin told me in Romainville, where I found her when I left the Santé, that when she went to her husband he moaned and said, “I cannot take you in my arms, because I can no longer move them.”
Every time that the internees came back from their questioning one could hear moaning through the windows, and they all said that they could not make any movements.
Several times during the 5 months I spent at the Santé hostages were taken to be shot. When I left the Santé on 20 August 1942, I was taken to the Fortress of Romainville, which was a camp for hostages. There I was present on two occasions when they took hostages, on 21 August and 22 September. Among the hostages who were taken away were the husbands of the women who were with me and who left for Auschwitz. Most of them died there. These women, for the most part, had been arrested only because of the activity of their husbands. They themselves had done nothing.
M. DUBOST: When did you leave for Auschwitz?
MME. VAILLANT-COUTURIER: I left for Auschwitz on 23 January 1943, and arrived there on the 27th.
M. DUBOST: Were you with a convoy?