From Bruises on Wooden Chairs to Blushing Over First Kisses: How German and Japanese Women Prisoners of War Endured Painful “Treatment,” Awkward Questions, and Unexpected Respect When Their Captors Asked About the Most Personal Memories They Had Left

The first time Lotte Bauer saw the chair, she thought it looked like something from a dentist’s nightmare.

It sat in the corner of the American field hospital ward, facing a window that showed only gray winter sky and the bare branches of a tree. The chair had a high back, wide armrests, metal footplates, and—most disturbing of all—an array of canvas straps neatly rolled along its sides.

The other German women in the ward called it “der Stuhl,” the chair, as if saying anything more was tempting fate.

Lotte eyed it from her bed, fingers gripping the thin blanket.

“I told you,” muttered Gerda on the cot beside her. “They strap you in and pull until you scream. Look at Hilde’s shoulders.”

Hilde, two beds down, sat hunched over, rubbing the tops of her arms. Faint red marks—stripes, really—wrapped just below her sleeves, as if someone had pressed ropes there and held them tight.

“They say it helps,” Hilde murmured when she caught Lotte looking. “Pulls things back where they should be. That’s what the doctor says.”

“And what do you say?” Lotte asked.

Hilde gave a half shrug, then winced.

“I say it hurts like sin,” she said. “But I can stand straighter now. A little.”

Lotte lay back and stared at the canvas ceiling.

Captured outside Aachen in the autumn of 1944, she had expected cold, hunger, maybe even rough treatment from the enemy. She had not expected this—clean sheets, regular meals, and an American doctor fussing over the way her spine had twisted when a wall collapsed on her during an air raid.

“You’re lucky,” he’d said in slow, careful German, pointing at the hazy shadow of her bones on an X-ray. “Two vertebrae cracked, but not shattered. If we can straighten you now, you may walk like a normal person in a few years.”

“What happens if you don’t?” she’d asked.

“Then you will live bent,” he’d replied. “In pain. Maybe with worse to come.”

Now, as a nurse approached her bed with a clipboard and a too-cheerful smile, Lotte felt her stomach tighten.

“Fräulein Bauer,” the nurse said in English, then repeated clumsily in German. “Today is your turn for the…ah…” She searched for the word. “Chair exercise.”

Gerda squeezed Lotte’s hand.

“Be brave,” she whispered. “Scream loud. At least then they know you’re not made of wood.”

Lotte swallowed.

“I won’t scream,” she said, though she wasn’t sure she believed herself.

On the other side of the world, on a damp stretch of earth ringed with barbed wire and watchtowers, another woman stared at another chair with a similar mix of dread and baffled suspicion.

Only this one wasn’t meant to pull bones back into place.

It was just a plain wooden chair in a drafty hut on the edge of a Japanese women’s prisoner-of-war camp, positioned between a rickety table and a small charcoal stove. But the way the American officer gestured toward it made Hana Ishikawa’s skin prickle.

“Please,” he said in English, then repeated through the interpreter. “Sit. We will talk.”

Hana hesitated.

She had been captured months earlier on a small island garrison after Japan’s formal surrender, part of a group of women who had been working as clerks, nurses, and communications aides. The war was officially over, but its echoes still hummed in the air—empty food stores, damaged buildings, letters that never arrived.

Now they were POWs of a different sort, housed in a camp that smelled of damp straw and boiled rice, watched over by guards who were as uneasy with their roles as the women were with theirs.

Medical examinations, she had expected. Questions about unit names and radio codes, she had expected.

She had not expected this: a sign tacked to the hut’s exterior in awkward Japanese characters that read, “EMOTIONAL INTERVIEW – WOMEN ONLY.”

Emotional interview, she thought sourly. As if feelings were something you could weigh on a scale.

“Please,” the interpreter repeated, his voice gentle. “You will be asked some questions. About before the war. About now. It is…for research. And to help you.”

Hana glanced sideways at the other women waiting in the line against the wall.

Emiko, who had once worked at a telephone exchange in Yokohama and now carried herself like a person who expected to be blamed for everything. Yuki, who had lost two brothers at sea and rarely spoke above a whisper. A few others, all clutching their thin coats tight as if they were armor.

They looked back at her, eyes full of the same question:

What new indignity is this?

Hana exhaled.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go first.”

She stepped to the chair and sat, back straight, hands folded in her lap like a student in a long-ago classroom.

The American officer—tall, with sandy hair and a face that might have been handsome if it weren’t so obviously tired—offered a small, strained smile.

“I am Lieutenant James Carter,” he said in English, then nodded as the interpreter echoed the words in Japanese. “I am not here to interrogate you. I am here to understand how the war has affected you…inside.”

Inside, Hana thought. If you knew what it had done there, you’d run.

“All right,” she said aloud. “Ask.”

Carter shuffled papers on the table, then cleared his throat.

“The questions may seem…strange,” he said. “Just answer as you can.”

He glanced down at the top sheet, frowned, then looked back up.

“First one,” he said. “Describe, in as much detail as you remember, your first kiss.”

For a moment, Hana thought she’d misheard.

She stared at him.

“My…what?” she said in Japanese, voice flat.

The interpreter’s ears turned red.

“Your first…kiss,” he repeated, clearly wishing he were somewhere else. “They want you to talk about it.”

Hana’s cheeks flamed.

Behind her, one of the waiting women choked on a laugh. Another made a strangled sound somewhere between outrage and horror.

“What kind of question is that?” Emiko demanded. “Is this a joke?”

Carter held up both hands, palms out, scrambling to regain control of a situation that had clearly felt very different on the forms back in his tent.

“It is not a joke,” he said quickly. “It is a question the doctors designed. They say that trauma, fear, long periods of danger—these can change how a person remembers…personal things. If you cannot remember, or if you feel nothing, that tells them something. If you remember and feel…everything, that also tells them something.”

He hesitated, then added, “They ask our own men similar questions. About their first time driving a car. Their first date. The last time they watched a sunrise in peace.”

He looked from one woman to the next, clearly aware of how ridiculous he sounded.

“It is not meant to embarrass you,” he said. “But I see that it does. I am…sorry.”

Hana crossed her arms over her chest.

She could have answered any number of questions with grim composure. She had prepared herself to talk about bombings, about hunger, about the day she’d watched the rising sun flag come down from the radio station’s mast.

But this?

“Tell them,” she said through clenched teeth, “that their question is badly chosen.”

In the American field hospital in Belgium, Lotte learned that there were many kinds of pain.

The pain of a bomb’s blast, sudden and bright.

The pain of hunger, slow and dull.

And the pain of being strapped into a chair while someone you barely knew pulled on your body until it felt as if your bones were being stretched like taffy.

“Ready?” the doctor asked, tightening the last strap over her thighs.

“Do I have a choice?” Lotte muttered.

He smiled thinly.

“Not unless you want to keep walking like a question mark,” he said. “We’ll go slow.”

The “chair exercise” turned out to be a kind of traction therapy. Lotte sat, arms secured to the armrests, chest held against the back by a wide canvas band. Another strap wrapped her waist. Yet another crossed over her hips.

At her feet, a contraption of pulleys and weights tugged gently but firmly at her boots, pulling her spine into a straighter line.

When the orderlies cranked the tension up, the muscles along her back screamed.

She bit the inside of her cheek.

“Breathe,” the doctor said in German. “In. Out. It will ease after a few minutes.”

He was partly right.

The initial shock faded to a deep, throbbing ache.

By the end of the first session, sweat plastered Lotte’s hair to her forehead, and her fingers tingled. When they released the straps, the red marks left behind were stark, like lash lines on pale skin.

“You are striped now,” Gerda said later, pressing fingers lightly to the raised bands on Lotte’s shoulders. “Like a zebra.”

“It felt like being stretched on a rack,” Lotte replied. “If this is their idea of kindness, I’d hate to see their cruelty.”

Gerda snorted.

“Kindness hurts sometimes,” she said. “So does being alive.”

The sessions continued twice a week.

Each time, Lotte dreaded the moment the straps tightened. Each time, she walked a little steadier afterward.

One evening, after a particularly intense therapy session that left her muscles quivering, she watched an American medic help an injured German woman take her first steps down the ward.

The woman, a former driver whose legs had been crushed when a truck overturned, clung to the crutches as if they were the only solid things in the world. The medic walked beside her, one hand hovering near her elbow, not quite touching.

“You’re doing great,” he said in English, then repeated in hesitant German. “Sehr gut. Just a few more steps.”

The woman gritted her teeth and moved.

Later, when she was back in bed, she caught Lotte’s eye.

“Did they put you in the chair today?” she asked.

“Yes,” Lotte said. “It felt like they were trying to pull me in half.”

The woman looked thoughtful.

“When the building collapsed and my legs twisted under the beams,” she said slowly, “it felt like that too. Only then, no one was trying to help.”

She shrugged.

“Our own doctors would have left me in a corner and said, ‘Be grateful you’re not dead,’ ” she added. “These fools strap me down and make me hurt on purpose. And somehow I think…maybe they’re onto something.”

She tugged at the hem of her hospital gown, revealing faint red bands around her calves.

“They stripe us like beasts,” she said, half joking, half bitter. “But they also let us hope we might walk again.”

Lotte lay awake long after the ward lights dimmed, staring at the ceiling.

She had grown up in a world where uniforms and flags had been presented as simple things—this side good, that side bad. Pain inflicted by the enemy was evil; pain inflicted by her own side was sacrifice.

Now, strapped into a foreign chair by foreign hands, she was no longer sure where the lines fell.

All she knew was that the stripes on her skin were slowly, stubbornly, pulling her upright.

In the emotional-interview hut, Hana felt a different kind of pulling.

It was as if the question Carter had asked—Describe your first kiss—had hooked onto something inside her and tugged.

She didn’t like it.

She folded her arms more tightly.

“I don’t see how this…memory…is any of your business,” she said. “You want to know about the war? Ask about air raids. About watching buildings burn. About writing letters that never reached their destinations.”

Carter listened, his expression earnest.

“We will ask those things too,” he said through the interpreter. “This question is about who you were before all that. About whether that person is still…reachable.”

The interpreter’s choice of words made Hana frown.

Reachable.

She thought of the girl she had been ten years earlier—a clerk at a small newspaper office in Yokohama, with ink on her fingers and two favorite kimonos she rotated between workdays. She had loved running her hands over newsprint, feeling the raised edges of letters.

She had also, she admitted grudgingly to herself, loved the way Kenta had smiled when he saw her.

Kenta, with his too-long hair and notebooks full of poems he never showed anyone. The amateur photographer who had taken her picture once in front of the harbor and then blushed so hard he almost dropped the camera.

Her first kiss had not been in some dark, forbidden corner.

It had been on a quiet side street after a festival, under paper lanterns swinging in a soft summer breeze.

He had stood too close. She had not moved away. Their hands had brushed. He had leaned down, hesitant, and their lips had touched.

It had been short. Clumsy. Sweet.

She had thought about it for weeks afterward, replaying the exact angle of his head, the faint taste of roasted corn from the food stall they’d visited earlier.

A year later, he had enlisted.

Three years after that, she had received a short letter from his mother, apologizing for the inadequacy of the news:

He will not be coming home.

Now, sitting in a drafty hut in a camp on foreign soil, that memory felt like something from another person’s life.

“Can’t remember?” Carter asked gently when the silence stretched.

Hana bristled.

“I remember,” she snapped. “Too well.”

“Then?” he prompted, spreading his hands. “Tell us.”

She glared.

“You ask a woman who has stood in the rubble of her city to talk about a kiss,” she said. “Do you not see how foolish that sounds?”

Carter’s mouth twitched.

“Honestly?” he said. “A little. But I also know that the men who wrote these questions are trying to figure out if all of this”—he waved a hand vaguely, encompassing the war, the camp, the scars—“has burned away everything you used to be. Sometimes, when our own soldiers can’t remember anything gentle, it means something broke inside.”

He leaned forward slightly.

“If you can remember,” he said, “and feel something besides numbness or rage, that tells them something too. It means there’s still a bridge back to who you were. Even if it hurts.”

Hana looked down at her hands.

When had anyone last asked her about something that was hers? Not her unit. Not her duty. Not her losses.

Her.

The memory rose again, unbidden—the lanterns, the warm night, Kenta’s nervous laugh, the way her heart had slammed against her ribs so hard she thought he must surely hear it.

She shifted on the chair.

“Fine,” she said tightly. “But only because if I don’t answer, the others will never stop asking me later.”

Carter smiled faintly.

“Fair enough,” he said.

She spoke carefully, the interpreter trailing behind her words like a shadow.

“I was twenty,” she began. “There was a summer festival in the city. I had finished work late, but my friend dragged me there anyway. We ate too much. We laughed at children trying to catch goldfish. He walked me home.”

She described the narrow street behind her parents’ house, the paper lanterns still glowing, the distant sound of a shamisen from somewhere.

“I thought he would just say good night and go,” she said. “He was that kind of boy. Always polite. Always…careful.”

A ghost of a smile passed over her face, surprising her.

“But he didn’t,” she said. “He stood there, saying nothing, until I realized he was even more afraid than I was. So I did something brave.”

She looked up at Carter.

“I did not run away,” she said simply.

The other women behind her shifted, some suppressing smiles, some looking away, embarrassed.

“And then?” the interpreter prompted.

“He kissed me,” Hana said. “He leaned down. He missed my lips the first time and bumped my nose. We both laughed. Then he tried again. It was over before I could decide whether I liked it.”

A soft snort came from Emiko.

“Of course you liked it,” she muttered under her breath.

“Maybe,” Hana said. “Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now. He is gone. The festival street is gone. That girl is…somewhere I can’t quite reach.”

She looked back at Carter.

“Does that answer your question?” she asked. “Have I proven to your doctors that I am still ‘reachable’?”

Carter’s expression had shifted as she spoke.

He looked less like a man ticking boxes on a form and more like someone hearing a story he hadn’t expected.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “And it tells me something else.”

“What?” Hana asked.

“That you haven’t let the worst thing that happened erase the best thing that happened,” he said. “Not completely.”

She scoffed.

“It feels more like the worst thing has wrapped itself around the best and squeezed,” she said. “Like your…striping chair squeezes those women’s bones in Europe.”

She had overheard the guards talking once about a German POW hospital where they strapped women into chairs to straighten their backs. It had sounded barbaric then. Now, she wondered.

“Sometimes you have to use pain to straighten what’s bent,” Carter said, perhaps thinking of the same reports. “But the pain has to have a purpose. That’s the difference between torture and treatment.”

He glanced at his paperwork, then back at her.

“Thank you,” he said. “You didn’t have to tell us that. We’ll try to make the rest of the questions less…cringe-worthy.”

The interpreter struggled with the last phrase, eventually settling on a Japanese expression that meant “enough to make you want to sink into the floor.”

The other women laughed despite themselves.

Hana felt heat in her cheeks that wasn’t entirely from shame.

She had exposed something tender. It hurt.

But in a strange way, it also reminded her that the tender thing still existed.

Months passed.

In Belgium, snow melted from the trees outside the hospital, and the wards emptied as prisoners were transferred to more permanent camps or repatriated.

Lotte had long since lost count of how many times she’d been strapped into the chair.

The first time, the stripes from the straps had stood out in angry red bands.

Now the marks faded more quickly, the skin used to the pressure.

Her spine, according to the doctor, had gained several degrees of straightness. She could stand for longer without her lungs protesting. She could walk the length of the ward and back without feeling like her back was on fire.

“Close your eyes,” the doctor said one day. “Tell me how you feel.”

She obeyed.

“I feel…taller,” she said slowly. “And as if someone has taken a fist out of my chest.”

He chuckled softly.

“I will add that to the medical chart,” he said. “Diagnosis: one less fist.”

She opened her eyes.

“Why do you do this?” she asked impulsively. “For us.”

“For you?” he echoed.

“For prisoners,” she clarified. “For women from a country that sent bombs to yours.”

He leaned against the windowsill, looking out at the weak sunlight.

“I grew up near the border,” he said. “My mother was from Alsace. Half her brothers spoke French, half spoke German. She used to say, ‘The war will come and go, but your bones will still ache if you don’t take care of them.’”

He shrugged.

“You were under a building when it fell,” he said. “That is physics. Not politics. I can help with physics. So I do.”

She studied his profile.

“You hurt us to help us,” she said. “The straps. The pulling.”

“Does it feel like punishment?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But it also feels like…possibility.”

“Then it’s working,” he said simply.

In the Japanese camp, the emotional interviews continued.

Word spread quickly about Lieutenant Carter’s “kiss question.” Some women refused to participate at first, muttering that the Americans were prying into places they had no right to go. Others, curious or simply bored, volunteered.

Emiko emerged from her interview one afternoon with her cheeks pink and her eyes shining in a way Hana hadn’t seen in a long time.

“What did they ask you?” Hana demanded.

“The same nonsense about first kisses,” Emiko said. “I told them about the boy from the rice shop who tried to kiss me behind a crate and sneezed instead. I thought I would die of embarrassment. Then I started laughing. So did the interpreter. Even the American mess of a lieutenant smiled.”

She shook her head.

“I had forgotten that story,” she said. “Buried it. Like everything else from before the sirens.”

Hana thought about her own interview, about the way her chest had hurt telling the story of Kenta under that peeling roof.

Had it helped?

She wasn’t sure.

What she did know was that, in the evenings now, the women sometimes shared bits of their “before” lives around the small charcoal stove—favorite songs, silly childhood pranks, the first time they rode a bicycle.

Once, tentatively, Yuki brought up her own first kiss, and they all groaned and laughed and threw wadded bits of paper at her when she got too sentimental.

It was ridiculous.

It was healing.

Carter, for his part, sent his reports back to the medical team with notes in the margins that went beyond the standard categories.

“Subject reports vivid memory of first romantic experience,” he wrote on Hana’s form, then added in smaller handwriting:

“And responds with sarcasm and anger, not flat affect. Appears annoyed at being asked to feel, which suggests she still can. Recommend group discussions that allow women to share prewar memories on their own terms.”

His superiors, reading the reports in an office far from the camp, circled the phrase “on their own terms” and made a note to ask exactly what he meant at the next briefing.

War had taught them to think in terms of strategy, resources, intelligence.

It took time to realize that part of rebuilding meant convincing people their private stories still mattered.

The years rolled on.

The war ended. Camps closed. Men and women went home—to Berlin, to Yokohama, to small villages and big cities that had been altered in their absence.

Lotte returned to a Germany that barely resembled the country she’d left.

Her family home in Cologne was gone, replaced by a pile of rubble and a small sign with a street name screwed into a crooked post.

Her father had died during an air raid. Her younger brother was missing somewhere on the Eastern Front. Her mother, miraculously, had survived and now lived in a crowded flat with an aunt and two cousins, clinging to the idea of “family” with the fierce stubbornness of someone who had lost too much.

When Lotte walked in—taller, straighter, with faint white lines on her shoulders where the straps had once bitten—the first thing her mother did was reach for her face and say, “You’re alive.”

The second thing she did was step back, gasp, and say, “Look at you. They straightened you.”

Lotte laughed, tears springing to her eyes.

“Not fully,” she said. “But enough.”

Slowly, over the next decades, she built a life.

She became a seamstress, then a tailor, then opened a small alterations shop where brides and grooms brought their clothes for adjustment. She married a man who had spent three years in a Soviet camp and who, like her, carried the war in his bones. They did not have children; their bodies, patched together by wartime medicine and circumstance, had other ideas.

She never forgot the chair.

Whenever her back twinged a certain way, she would remember the feel of canvas straps and the deep ache as her spine stretched stubbornly toward the position it should have been in all along.

In Japan, Hana returned to a Yokohama rebuilt in steel and concrete instead of wood and paper.

The street where she had shared that awkward first kiss no longer existed. A department store stood where her parents’ house had been. The harbor, once full of fishing boats and the occasional foreign steamer, now hosted cargo ships and cranes.

She found work as a clerk again, this time in an office that processed housing permits. Later, she became a counselor of sorts—unofficial at first, then in a more formal capacity as the city grappled with waves of people carrying invisible scars.

The American question about her first kiss lingered in her mind.

At first, she resented it, as she had in the hut—resented the way it had forced her to expose something that felt too tender for examination.

But over time, she came to see that the question itself was less important than what it had uncovered.

There was a bridge, however narrow, between the girl under the lanterns and the woman behind the desk.

Crossing it still hurt.

But it was there.

In 1965, a small conference on “Women and War” was held in Geneva.

The organizers—a mix of European and Japanese academics, charity workers, and a few stubborn ex-military officers who hadn’t forgotten the faces of the women they’d treated or interrogated—invited several former female prisoners of war to speak.

Most declined.

A few, to everyone’s surprise, said yes.

Lotte, now in her early forties, took a train across half of Europe with a suitcase full of sensible clothes and a photograph of her mother tucked into her wallet. She still walked with a slight stiffness, but compared to the bent figure she would have been without the chair, she considered herself fortunate.

Hana, in her late thirties, flew for the first time in her life, gripping the armrests during takeoff and landing and marveling at the way clouds looked from above. In her handbag, she carried a small notebook where she had written down, in careful script, the points she might speak about if her courage didn’t fail.

They met in a hotel lobby that smelled of tobacco smoke and furniture polish.

Lotte was studying a schedule printed in French, trying to remember more vocabulary than “bonjour,” when she heard someone beside her mutter in Japanese, “Do they think we can read this?”

She turned to see a woman with dark hair streaked with gray, wearing a simple navy suit and a pin shaped like a plum blossom.

“You speak Japanese?” the woman asked in halting German when she saw Lotte’s armband marking her as a panel participant.

“Only a few words,” Lotte admitted. “But I understood that you understood nothing on that paper.”

The woman laughed, the sound bubbling up unexpectedly.

“I am used to not understanding the official version of things,” she said. “My name is Hana Ishikawa.”

“Lotte Bauer,” Lotte replied.

They shook hands.

Later, during a break between sessions, they sat together on a bench outside the conference hall, watching people rush by with folders and cups of coffee.

“What did they do to you?” Hana asked quietly, after a long comfortable silence.

Lotte considered how to answer.

“They tied me to a chair,” she said. “And pulled until my spine screamed.”

Hana’s eyes widened.

“The enemy?” she asked.

“The Americans,” Lotte said. “Doctors. They called it therapy. It hurt. It helped.”

She described the chair, the straps, the red stripes on her shoulders, the way she had cursed her captors in three languages under her breath while also secretly clinging to the possibility that they might actually be pulling her toward something better than the twisted future she’d imagined.

Hana listened, head tilted.

“You?” Lotte asked in return.

Hana’s mouth twisted wryly.

“They sat me in a chair too,” she said. “And asked about the most ridiculous thing they could think of.”

“What?” Lotte asked.

“My first kiss,” Hana said.

Lotte blinked.

“Your…what?” she repeated, half laughing, half appalled.

“It was part of a questionnaire,” Hana said. “Some American doctor wanted to see whether the war had erased our ability to remember anything tender. They never expected resisted women’s POWs to throw the form back in their faces quite so hard.”

She told Lotte about Carter, about the interpreter’s embarrassment, about the way the other women had looked at her when the question was translated.

She told her about Kenta, and the lanterns, and the awkward bump of noses.

“You told them?” Lotte asked, eyes wide.

“I did,” Hana said. “Once. Then never again. But in telling it, I realized the story was still there. The war hadn’t burned it completely.”

She sighed.

“It made me…cringe,” she admitted. “To talk about something so gentle in a place built on the memory of explosions. But it also reminded me that I was not only a clerk, or a prisoner, or a survivor. I was also a girl who once thought about a silly boy for weeks because of a single clumsy kiss.”

Lotte sat back.

“For you, the chair pulled at your heart,” she said slowly. “For me, it pulled at my bones.”

“It hurt either way,” Hana said.

They sat in silence awhile longer.

“You know,” Lotte said eventually, “sometimes I still feel those straps when it rains. My back aches in those same lines. I curse the Americans all over again, and then I remember that without them, I might be bent double.”

“Sometimes,” Hana replied, “when I smell roasted corn at a festival, I think of that question and want to hide. Then I remember that without it, I might have convinced myself I was never that girl at all.”

They looked at each other.

“So,” Hana said, “they tied us to chairs and prodded at what hurt most.”

“And somehow,” Lotte finished, “we stood up afterward anyway. A little straighter.”

They both laughed, the sound carrying briefly over the hum of conference chatter.

Inside the hall, speakers droned on about policy and precedent.

Out on the bench, two women who had been on opposite sides of a world war compared notes on chairs, stripes, kisses, and the odd, unpredictable ways their captors had both hurt and helped them.

Years later, when asked by younger people what it had been like to be a prisoner of war, neither Lotte nor Hana started with battles or politics.

Lotte talked first about the chair.

Hana, if she trusted the listener, sometimes talked about the question.

“Were they cruel?” one earnest student asked Hana once, expecting tales of beatings and starvation.

“Sometimes clumsy,” she replied. “Sometimes too sure they knew what was best. But one of the strangest things they did was ask me about the softest thing in my life. That question made me want to crawl under the floorboards.”

“And yet?” the student pressed.

“And yet, I am glad they asked,” Hana said. “Because it forced me to admit that the girl who had that first kiss was still living somewhere inside the woman who walked out of that camp. Even if they made me cringe to get to her.”

Another time, a neighbor asked Lotte if she ever forgave the Americans for “torturing” her in their medical chair.

She smiled faintly.

“Forgive them?” she said. “I curse them whenever my back aches. Then I thank them when I see myself stand in a shop window and realize I’m not bent like a hook.”

She traced the faint white lines on her shoulders where the straps had once pressed.

“They striped me while I was tied to that chair,” she said. “But they didn’t do it to break me. They did it so I wouldn’t break myself with every step for the rest of my life.”

In the end, both women carried their experiences not as simple tales of cruelty or kindness, but as complicated knots of pain, indignity, unexpected respect, and stubborn survival.

They had been pulled.

They had been prodded.

They had been asked questions and given treatments that made them cringe and curse.

But from those chairs—one in a Belgian hospital, one in a damp hut in the Pacific—they had walked away with something the war had tried hard to take:

A body that could still straighten.

A memory that could still blush.

And the knowledge that even in the hands of strangers wearing the wrong uniform, there were moments when hurt carried within it the seeds of healing.

THE END