Her eyes shone with a terrifying intensity. She looked at the other women in the shack. Simone, Hélène, Marguerite, Clothilde, me. She simply said: “We have this minute, maybe less. You come or you stay. But if you come, you obey. No questions, no panic, you do exactly what I say. No one answered, but they all stood up.
We went out into the night. The darkness was total. Only a few flashlights pierced the darkness in the distance. On the side of the administrative buildings where the soldiers were bustling about , we walked along the wall of the curved, silent barracks. Isoria advanced in the lead, guided by a perfect memory of the place.
She knew every master in that camp, every obstacle, every blind spot. We reach the neighboring shack. Isoria inserted a key into the lock. Turned, the door opened. Inside, eight women stared at us with huge, incredulous eyes. Isoria murmured: “Now go outside, absolute silence.” They went out.
We did the same with the next shack, and then the next one. Each time, Iszoria opened the door, murmured the order, and the women came out. Some hesitated, some were afraid, but most instantly understood that she would never have another chance. In less than five minutes, we had freed 35 women. 35 ghostly silhouettes lined up in the dark, trembling, waiting for the order to run.
Isoria looked at them all. She said: “The fence is 100 meters to the north. There’s a spot where the wires are less taut. You go there, you run towards the forest. You don’t stop, you don’t look back . You disappear !” She stretched her arm towards the darkness. Leave now. They left like a silent wave.
They disappeared into the night. Some were running, others were walking fast, others were crawling. But they all went in the same direction, towards freedom, towards uncertainty, towards everything except this hell. Isoria watched them leave without moving. I stayed by her side. I asked her why she wasn’t running too.
She looked at me and simply said, “Because someone has to close the doors, to make it seem like they ‘re still there, to buy time.” She pushed me towards the others. “You, you’re leaving.” I refused. She insisted. “I refused again.” Then she slapped me hard and said, “I’m not asking you, Maéice. I’m ordering you. Go.” But I don’t.
The spotlights came back on 4 minutes later. The white light exploded in our eyes. The sirens wailed. The soldiers understood immediately. They rushed towards the barracks, found the doors open, the beds empty. 35 missing. The camp exploded into total chaos. Orders could be shouted, dogs barking, truck engines starting up.
Isoria and I ran towards the fence, but we were too slow, too late. Three soldiers caught up with us before we reached the barbed wire. They threw us to the ground, beat us, dragged us to the center of the camp where the commanding officer, the opteller, was waiting for us with a face white with rage. He didn’t ask any questions; he already knew.
Kurt and they were dragged in front of him, handcuffed. Kurt was still looking for his keys. His face was ravaged, gray, terrified. He finally understood what had happened. that for weeks we had manipulated him, that every smile was a lie, that his kindness had only been an exploited weakness.
What time did he look at with icy contempt? He said something in German. Kurt lowered his head. Elias, for his part, stared at me. Her eyes were filled with such pure hatred that it chilled me to the bone. He spat on the ground. Then they were taken away. I never saw them again, but I later learned that they had been executed the following morning, shot for gross negligence causing the loss of a prisoner, lives exchanged for 35.
This had been Hissoria’s calculation from the beginning. We were not executed. We were locked in a punishment cell measuring 2 meters by 2 meters, with no window, no light, no water. We were left there for 8 days. H days in absolute darkness, fed once a day. with a ladle of cold soup and a piece of moldy bread.
Isoria hardly spoke during those eight days. She remained seated against the wall, her eyes open in the darkness, breathing slowly. I lost all track of time. I no longer knew if it was day or night, if hours or minutes were passing. I drifted between sleep and wakefulness, between consciousness and hallucination.
But Isoria remained anchored, lucid, indestructible. During the day, we were taken outside. The camp had changed. No more spotlights at night, no more negligent guards, no more freedom of movement. The remaining women were constantly watched , tied up at night, and counted three times a day.
And the two of us, Iszoria and I, were literally branded. A medical officer tattooed a number on our left forearm. Not like in the concentration camps we would later discover, just a crude black ink number made by hand with a needle and pen ink to remind us that we were no longer people, that we were units, inventory objects.
My number was 47, Isoria’s was 46. I still have it. Even today, fifteen years later, I can still see the distorted numbers on my wrinkled skin. Three weeks after the escape, news arrived. 22 of the 35 had been found. Some died of exposure in the forest, others were captured by patrols, brought back to the camp, and publicly executed in front of the other prisoners.
We were forced to watch. This was our punishment, the price of our revolt. My three wives had disappeared, truly disappeared. No trace, no capture. She had vanished into thin air during the night and never returned. 13 lives saved. For Iszoria, it was a victory. For me, it was an accounting nightmare. 22 dead versus 13 saved.
What was the outcome? Did we do the right thing? I still don’t know . We remained in this camp until January 1944. 3 months of empty, automatic, mechanical survival . We were no longer truly alive, just bodies that functioned, that ate when they were given food, that slept when allowed, that obeyed to avoid beatings.
Isoria fell silent. She was hardly speaking anymore . even to me. His eyes had lost the burning intensity they once possessed . She stared into space for hours, sitting on her bed with her hands resting flat on her knees. Sometimes I would ask her if she had any regrets. She never answered. I think she didn’t know herself.
In January, the Soviet offensive in the East forced the German army to reorganize its resources. The camp was dismantled. The remaining women were dispersed, some sent to arms factories, others to larger camps. Isoria and I were transferred to Ravensbruck, the women’s concentration camp north of Berlin.
There, we were no longer political prisoners or civilian hostages. We were just numbers in an industrial death machine. We work 12 hours a day in a textile factory sewing uniforms for Vermarthe. We slept on planks stacked three high, packed together like cattle. We ate a clear soup and a piece of bread. We were dying slowly, but we weren’t dying fast enough.
Isoria dyes well until April. Then she developed a lung infection. She was coughing up blood, she was burning with fever. I begged her to go to the infirmary. She refused. She knew what was happening to the sick man at Ravensbrück. He never got over it . So she lay on her board, trembling and suffocating, while I stole bits of bread for her, gave her my soup, and covered her with my own blanket.
She survived, but something inside her died during those weeks. Something I could never give back to him. The camp was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945. Soviet soldiers entered and found living skeletons. We weighed less than 40 kilos. We could no longer walk alone. We stopped talking . Isoria and I were transported to a field hospital in Berlin.
We were given bread, soup, and medicine. They washed us, they dressed us. They tried to make us human again. But it was too late. We were already dead inside . We returned to France. In July 1945, our mother had died during the winter of 1944. The house had been looted, the village was empty. Nobody recognized us.
Nobody asked us where we were. Nobody wanted to know. The war was over. People wanted to forget, rebuild, turn the page. We had no place in this new world. We were the ghosts of a time that people wanted to erase. Isoria lived for another 18 years. She got married, had two children, and worked as a seamstress in a small town near Lyon.
She never spoke of the war, never of the camp, never of what we had done. She smiled when she needed to. She was raising her children. She prepared the meals. She was alive, but she wasn’t there, not really. She had stayed in that dark shack in October 1943, holding a stolen set of keys and watching 35 disappear into the night.
She died in 1963 of lung cancer. She was 41 years old. At his funeral, his children wept. Her husband wept. I stood standing before her dry, empty grave, wondering if she had finally found peace. I lived longer. I never got married. I had no children. I worked as a librarian in a town that nobody knows, brown rock on the island, a quiet place where people left me alone.
