I read, I classified books, I answered questions politely, and every night I had the same dream again. I am in the dark, I can hear the sirens. I run towards the fence and I never manage to reach it. For 62 years, I remained silent. Then in 2005, a historian knocked on my door. He was conducting research on Vermart’s annex camps in the occupied zone.
He had found my name in recently opened German archives . He wanted to know if I would agree to testify. I refused at first. Then I think about it. I was thinking about Isoria, about what she had sacrificed, about her 13 women who had survived thanks to her, about Kurt and Elias who had died because we had manipulated them, about all those intertwined lives, broken, saved, lost.
And I understood that silence was another form of death. So, I accepted. The interview lasted three days. I recounted everything, the details, the names, the dates, the faces, the weight of the keys, the smell of schnapps, the sound of the sirens, the texture of the night. The historian recorded everything. He thanked me.
He said that my testimony was important, that it would be archived, that it would serve history. I nodded, but I knew that history had no use for us, that we were just footnotes in a much larger narrative, that no one would really remember Isoria and Maéie Sarvancour, two ordinary sisters who had done something extraordinary in an extraordinarily cruel world.
I died in 2012. I was years old. My heart stopped while I slept in my little brown rock house on smooth ground one November morning. The next day I was found lying peacefully in my bed, with my hands crossed on my chest. The neighbors said it was a beautiful death. Gentle, without suffering. He didn’t know that I had spent four years suffering, that every day was a battle against memories, that every night was a return to that camp, that I had never really left that dark shack where Isoria had slapped me and ordered me to leave. But
before I died, I did something . I wrote a letter, a long letter addressed to no one in particular. I left it on my nightstand in a sealed envelope with clear instructions to publish it after my death. In this letter, I recounted what we had done. Not for historians, not for archives, but for women, for all those who will one day find themselves in an impossible situation where they will have to choose between dignity and survival, between morality and life, between what they believe to be right and what they must do to continue to
exist. I wrote that Isoria was right, that survival has no morals, that when everything is taken away from you, your body becomes the only weapon you have left. That using it is not shameful, that it is a strategy, a resistance, a form of warfare waged with the means of despair. I wrote that we had seduced these men, that we had lied to them, that we had manipulated them until they lowered their guard, and that we never, ever regretted it.
Because thanks to this, women survived, 13 lives snatched from hell, 13 victories against the Nazi death machine. But I also wrote the truth that no one wants to hear, that these victories cost 22 lives, that Kurt and Elias, despite everything, were men, not monsters, just men caught in a monstrous system, that they turned out to be families, children, dreams, and that we used them and then threw them away without hesitation, that their death was part of the price, and that I still don’t know 80 years later if that price was just, I
only know that it was paid entirely by them, by us, by all those women who died in the forest, by Isoria who faded away slowly for 18 years, by me who lived 67 years too long. The letter was published in 2013. It caused a scandal. Some called me a collaborator, others a liar, and still others a heroine.
But most of them said nothing because they didn’t know what to say. Because the story I was telling didn’t fit into any category. She was neither beautiful nor edifying. She was just being genuine. And sometimes the truth is intolerable. Today, in 2025, a few traces of us remain. A commemorative plaque in Belle-val des Cendres mentions the women deported in September.
A German archive document listing the prisoners of Nebenlager Host 7. A recorded testimony preserved in the collections of the Shoah Memorial in Paris. And this letter, republished in several languages, read by thousands of people who will never truly know what we went through, but who may perhaps understand a little better what it means to survive.
I miss Isoria even now, even though she’s been dead for 12 years, even though she’s a ghost among ghosts, I miss her. I would like to tell her that I understand, that I have finally accepted what she knew from the beginning, that in some situations there are no good choices, only possible choices.
And that what she did , even if it cost us our humanity, saved lives. 13 lives, maybe more. If these three women had children, grandchildren, perhaps somewhere today there are people who exist only because one night in October 1943, a 21-year-old woman had the courage to steal keys from a German soldier she had seduced.
That’s all that’s left of us. A story, a testimony, a letter, and this question left unanswered. How far are you willing to go to survive? What are you willing to sacrifice? Your dignity, your morals, your humanity? And if you had to choose between saving lives and remaining pure, what would you choose? Isoria chose to save lives. She paid the price.
