PARIS, Sept 16 (AFP) - "I am afraid," one prisoner awaiting interrogation and almost certain death at the hands of the Gestapo scrawled on the walls of his Paris prison cell.

"Never confess," reads another defiant message etched into the plaster nearby.

Heart-rending words transformed by history into epitaphs, these and other messages on long-forgotten walls in the Gestapo's World War II Paris headquarters will go on exhibit for the first time ever this weekend, part of France's annual heritage day.

More than 15,000 sites normally closed to the public, ranging from the national archives to the finance ministry, will open their doors to some 10 million visitors on Saturday and Sunday.

Most of the rooms at 11, rue de Saussaies in the 8ème arrondissement were renovated after the French interior ministry took possession of this notorious address where hundreds, if not thousands, of resistance fighters and other hapless victims of the Nazi occupation were tortured and condemned to die.

It was as if France's post-war leaders were eager to turn a page.

But a few prison cells were left untouched, and the plaintiff expressions of fear and foreboding, patriotism and pride, preserved on their walls stand today as a moving testament of Gestapo cruelty and human defiance.

"Frankreich uber alles" -- 'France above all' -- reads on inscription with biting irony, a play on words transforming the title of the German national anthem.

"Believing in yourself gives one the power to resist despite the bathtub and all the rest," reads another, a dark allusion to a preferred technique of torture practised by the Gestapo.

"Don't talk," commands another, as if to give courage.

Most of the unfortunates interrogated and tortured here were later executed or deported to camps, historians say.

The few rooms that remain from that era have been left intact: the ceiling lamp that still casts a wan, sinister light over over the room; the thick metal ring attached to the wall, to which prisoners were chained; the barred window with a view of the interrogation chambers on the other side of the courtyard.

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