I still hear it, even now, years old, sitting in this silent living room where the afternoon light enters gently through the curtains, I still hear the sound of this door hell closing behind me this night of April 1944. It’s not a memory, it’s a presence. The cold of the metal against my bare back, the smell of musty and sweat masculine impregnated in the walls, the heavy breathing of someone who didn’t see my face as human.
I have spent years trying to erase this. But some memories don’t die. They just wait, lurking in darkness until you are alone enough to face them. My name is Isol de Marivot and what I will tell now does not appear in history books. It’s not in official reports on the Nazi occupation in France because what they did to us at 45 snatches of their house in one was deliberately erased, buried, reduced to silence for decades.
But I have survived and as long as my voice works still, the truth will not die with me. I was born in 1920 in a small village north of Lyon, surrounded by vineyards that my grandfather cultivated since he was a child. Life there was simple, predictable, punctuated by the seasons and by the church bell which rang three times a day.
My father was a blacksmith. My mother sewed dresses for local women. I was the oldest of three sisters. I have learned early to take care of the house, preparing bread, washing clothes in the icy river during the winter. We didn’t have much but we had dignity. We had a name, we had a face. I was isolated, not a number, not an object.
I was a person. When the war started in 1939, I had anxiety German seemed distant. Some something that was happening in Paris, in the big cities. But war has a way of spreading. Like a stain of oil on clear water, it contaminates everything. In 1943, soldiers Germans arrived in our region. They installed a post command in an abandoned mansion in three kilometers from the village.
Suddenly he there were gray uniforms in the streets, harsh voices in German reasoning in the squares, orders shouted to people who didn’t understand not and there were looks, looks that roamed our bodies as if they were evaluating cattle. I still remember the day when everything changed. It was April. One Tuesday, the sky was low, heavy with gray clouds that seemed to portend something terrible.
I was helping my mother hanging laundry in the yard when I heard the sound of a truck approach. These were not the trucks of transportation of foodstuffs that we knew already. They were bigger, more heavy and they moved slowly like if they were looking for something. My mother stopped what she was doing and looked at with this type of fear that only a woman who has experienced war can recognize. She didn’t say anything.
She has just grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the inside of the house. But it was already too late. The trucks are are stopped in front of our door. I can still hear the sound of boots descend, hitting the paved ground, approaching. The door was broken down with a single kick. Three soldiers entered.
One of them wore a list. My name appeared there: Iole de Marivau. 24 years old, single, in good health, fit. They didn’t explain anything. They just pointed at me and said something in German that I didn’t understand. My mother started screaming, grabbed my arm, begged in French that he lets stay. One of the soldiers pushed him with such force that she fell to the ground.
My little sister Margaot started cry. My father was not there house. He had gone to the market in the neighboring town. I never saw him again. I was dragged outside the house. I didn’t have the time to take anything, nor a coat, nor a photograph, nor a last embrace. I was thrown to the back of a truck covered in dark tarpaulin where other women were already piled up.
Some were crying, others were silent, their eyes glassy, as if they had already understood that crying wouldn’t change anything. I recognized some of them. Mary, the baker’s daughter, Simone who worked at school. Helene who came to get married 3 months ago. At total, we were 45. The youngest was 17, the oldest 42. Age didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter that we let’s be mothers, wives, daughters, little matter if we had dreams, projects, families who were waiting. There, in this dark truck that smelled of fear and urine, we stopped being people. We became one cargo. The journey lasted hours, I don’t know not how much. I lost the notion of time.
The truck was swaying violently broken roads. Some women have vomited, others fainted. I am remained motionless, leaning against the wall rough wood, feeling the cold entering through the holes in the tarpaulin. I tried to memorize the path by sounds. The sound of gravel, the sound of a river, the distant whistle of a train, anything that could help me come back one day.
But the truth is that I already knew. I already knew that I will not come back the same person. When the truck finally stopped, the tarpaulin was torn off suddenly. The late afternoon light blinded me for a few seconds. When my eyes adjusted, I saw where we were. A camp surrounded by barbelets, lined up wooden barracks, watchtowers, armed soldiers at each corner and at the bottom a more construction large gray stone with windows narrow and iron bars.
This was not a labor camp, it was no ordinary prison, it was something else. Something that official records have never admitted to exist. We were forced to go down one by one on the wire, without speak, without looking to the sides. A German officer, tall, in uniform impeccable, walked slowly in front of the file.
They watched us as we inspects merchandise. They stopped in front of some, lifted their chin with the tip of a leather glove, turned their faces on one side then the other. When he arrived in front of me, he arrested. I smelled tobacco and expensive cologne. He said something in German to a another soldier who noted something on a paperweight.
Then he continued. I didn’t yet know what it meant, but I would soon find out. We we were taken inside a landing. The ground was dirt beaten. There were berths in coarse wood, fine coverings and torn, a single jump in the corner which served as a trine. The roof had holes. We could see the sky. This first night, no one slept.
We we stayed awake, huddled together against others, trying to understand what was happening. Some prayed, others trembled simply. I stood looking at the ceiling, the stars that appeared in the holes and I thought of my mother. I I wondered how she was doing at this that moment, if she was still crying, if my father had returned, if Margaot had fear.
And then I heard a cry coming from the stone building, a sharp, desperate cry that was stifled suddenly as if someone had covered the mouth of the woman by force. Then silence. If you listen to this story now, wherever you are in the world world, know that what I’m going to tell then was not recorded in no court.
It is not in any museum. There is no plate commemorative. But it happened. And if there is anything i learned twenty years of life is only silence protect the guilty. The truth must be said, even if it hurts, even if no one wants to hear it. The Next morning it started. At 6 o’clock in the morning, the door of the barracks was opened violently.
A soldier has shouted names in German, reading a list. Five women were called. Among them Marie, the daughter of baker. She was only 19 years old. Blonde hair, light eyes, face delicate. She looked at me before she went out with this kind of look that asks for help without words. But I couldn’t do anything do. Nobody could.
They have were taken to the stone building. They came back three hours later late. They didn’t speak. They are simply lying on the bunks, turned towards the wall, trembling. Mary cried softly, face buried in the dirty pillow. I approached her, I put down my hand on his shoulder. She got curled up as if my touch was burning. Got it.
At that time, I understood everything and I felt a different fear. Not the fear of dying, but the fear of losing something that could never be recovered. My name was called three days later late. I still remember the sound of this German voice, dry and precise, distorting the syllables of my first name. Marivau isolate. I felt my legs weaken.
Around me, the other women lowered their eyes. Nobody said anything. But I saw in their eyes what they thought. It was my turn. I got up slowly. I walked towards the door of the barracks. as if I was moving towards a precipice. The soldier who waited for me was young, maybe years old, hard face, eyes empty. He motioned for me to follow him.
We crossed the Mirador courtyard. The ground was muddy from the rain of the night. My feet were sinking into the cold earth. I still wore the same dress as the day he had me taken from my house. She was dirty, torn at the hem. I felt the icy wind pass by through the thin fabric, but the cold physical was nothing compared to what was waiting for me.
The stone building was different from the inside. There was a long dark corridor lit by yellow bulbs hanging from the ceiling, massive wooden doors each side all closed. I heard muffled noises behind some, moans, cries, voices masculine. The soldier pushed me towards a door at the end of the hallway. He has hit two shots.
A voice responded in German. The door opened. To inside there was a small room, an iron bed, a chair, a table with a bottle of schnapps and of glass and a man, an officer not young. Quarantine. Gray hair cut short, uniform, impeccable. He looked me up and down down slowly, as one evaluates a animal. Then he said something German to the soldier who came out and closed the door behind him.
I have heard the lock slide. And there, in this overwhelming silence, I understood that no one would come, that no one would hear me, only what was going to happen in this room would remain within these four walls. The officer approached me. He smelled of alcohol and tobacco. He held out hand and touched my hair.
I have instinctively backed away. He smiled. Not a smile of pleasure, a smile of power. He said something in French with a heavy accent. Don’t have afraid, it’s going to be quick. These words, these four words, I heard them dozens of times later. Every time I was called, each time one of we were taken to this building, that will be quick.
As if the speed made it bearable, as if time was the problem. But this was not a question of time, it was about destruction. of reduction, of transforming a being human as an object, in silence, in nothing. He ordered me to undress. I hesitated. He repeated the order over strong this time. I started to remove my dress.
My hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t undo the buttons. He got impatient. He has grabbed the collar of my dress and tore it with a sharp blow. The buttons flew out the ground. I was naked, exposed, vulnerable. I covered myself with my arms. He has laughed, a short, contemptuous laugh. Then he told me pushed onto the bed.
I remember the cold metal against my skin, the smell of stale sweat on the sheets, weight of his body, pain and above all, I remember the silence. This silence in which I locked myself to survive. I wasn’t screaming, I wasn’t I didn’t cry, I didn’t say anything. I I stared at a point on the ceiling, a crack in the cast and I was trying to convince that it wasn’t me, that it was someone other than my mind was elsewhere, far away, in the my grandfather’s vineyards, in the my mother’s kitchen, in any place that was not this room.
When it was over, he recovered calmly. He poured schnapps into a glass and drank it in one gulp. Then he opened the door and called the soldier. I stayed lying on the bed, unable to move. The soldier is came in, threw my torn clothes at me in my face and ordered me to get dressed. I stood up, my legs were trembling.
I put my dress back on like I could, holding the pieces of fabric together with my hands. The soldier told me taken back to the barracks. The other women looked at me as I entered. She knew, she knew exactly what happened because it had happened to them too or because it was going to happen to them. I I’m lying on my bed, I closed eyes and for the first time since days I cried.
No sobbing, just silent tears that were running down my cheeks because I just understood something terrible. It wasn’t over, it was just the beginning. The following days, the routine was installed. Every morning, names were called. Sometimes two women, sometimes five, sometimes 10. We don’t never knew who would be next.
This uncertainty was torture self. Some women prayed not to not be called. Others seemed to have resigned oneself. Mary, the young girl with blond hair, was called seven times in two weeks. On each return, she was a little more absent, a little emptier. One evening she sat next to me. She looked at me with eyes that no longer cried.
She told me said, in a blank voice that she had stopped counting, that counting made things worse, than the only way to to survive was to no longer think, to no longer no longer feel, become a shell empty. I wanted to tell him something comforting, but I had nothing to say because she was right. There had unwritten rules in the camp.
Never look at officers in eyes, never resist, never cry in front of them. The one who resisted was punished. Hélène, the young bride, tried to refuse one evening. She begged, screamed, tried to escape. They dragged him from strength in the building. She came back the next day with purple marks on the neck, split lips, one eye closed by swelling.
She didn’t speak more. She was staring into space. Two weeks later she hanged herself with a rope made of pieces of fabric. We found his body early morning hanging from a beam barracks. The soldiers removed the body without ceremony. They burned the rope and that same evening, his name was replaced by another on the list like if it had never existed.
But this which still haunts me today, it are not the rapes themselves, it is the organization, the coldness, the systematization. These were not impulsive acts of drunken soldiers. It was planned, controlled. There were schedules, lists, rotations. The officers superiors had priority. Some had their favorite. They asked the same women again and again again.
Others still wanted news. There was even a doctor soldier who examined us once per month, not to treat us, to check that we were in good condition. If a woman became pregnant, she disappeared. We never knew where. Some said they were sent to hospitals. Others thought they were killed. I don’t still don’t know. What I know is that three women disappeared like this during the months I was there and that none ever returned.
One evening, a drunk officer said something to me that I will never forget. He was lying on the bed after finishing. He smoked a cigarette looking at the ceiling and he said almost for himself in broken French, you you are not women, you are tools. And when a tool is broken, we throws it away. There was no anger or cruelty in his voice, just a observation as if he were stating a done.
And that is perhaps the most terrifying. It wasn’t hatred, it was indifference. We were not not enemies to destroy, we were things to use. And when we don’t served no more, we ceased to exist. The weeks turned into me. I lost track of time. The days were all the same. Wake up at dawn, calling of names, waiting, fear, then return to the barracks.
The body broken, mind elsewhere. Some women were going crazy. Simone, the teacher started talking all alone. She recited poems to loud voice, contines for children, prayers in random order. She was no longer sleeping. She walked in circles in the barrack all night until the soldiers come to beat her for let her be silent.
One morning, she didn’t responded to the call of his name. She was curled up in a corner, eyes wide open but empty. She was still breathing, but she was no longer there. They took him away. I never have it reviewed. I survived by myself splitting. I can’t explain otherwise. When I was in this room, on this bed, under these men, I I was no longer Isolde.
Isold was elsewhere. She was in the vineyards of his grandfather, his hands stained with juice grapes. She was in the kitchen his mother, kneading the bread dough. She was sitting by the river, feet in the cold water, looking at the dragonflies. The girl on the bed, the one who was suffering, it wasn’t me. It was a body, an empty envelope.
And when I came back to the barracks, I put the pieces together. I reconstituted just enough to last until the next day. This is how I survived, by dividing myself, by becoming many. isolates her from before, isolates it during and isolates it after, which tried to make the connection between two.
There were times when I thought I wouldn’t last, moments when the temptation to do as Hélène was almost irresistible. But something inside me refused. a stubborn little voice that said: “No again, not today. I don’t know where did this voice come from? Maybe from my mother, perhaps of my grandmother who had survived the first war, perhaps of all the women before me who had endured the unimaginable and who had continued.
I told myself that if I died here, they would have won. They would have completely erased me and I I refused to give them that. So, I held on. Day after day, rape, I held on. And then in August 1944, some thing has changed. The soldiers were nervous. There was more coming and going than usual, trucks which left loaded with boxes, officers shouting orders contradictory.
We didn’t understand what was happening was happening, but we felt that something thing was different. One morning, the Allies bombed a German position a few kilometers away of the camp. We heard the explosions, felt the ground shake. Seen the black smoke rise into the sky, some women cried with joy. Others were afraid that the camp would be bombed too.
I have nothing felt. I was too tired to hope. A few days later, at middle of the night, the soldiers are came to wake us up. They opened the doors of the barracks and shouted that we had to leave immediately. We were pushed out into the cold of the night. There was no more list, more order. It was chaos. Some women tried to escape into the darkness.
I heard gunshots, screams. I don’t know how many were killed that night. We were forced to walk miles and miles in the night without knowing where we let’s go. Many women fell exhausted, hungry, sick. Those who could no longer walk were left on the side of the road. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe Did they freeze to death? Maybe were they completed.
I didn’t not returned. I couldn’t. I had to keep walking. To the little morning we reached a station. The soldiers crowded us into cattle cars. No seat, no window, just a dark space and stifling. The train ran for hours. We didn’t know where he was took. Some thought that we were going to be executed. Others hoped that we would be released. I didn’t think anymore.
I am sitting in a corner of the wagon, knees to chest and I closed the eyes. When the train finally stopped, the doors opened abruptly. The light of day has blinded. I heard voices, but not in German, in French. Soldiers French, resistance fighters. We were free. The Germans had fled. They abandoned us there, in this train, in the middle of nowhere.
Some women laughed, others cried. I stayed seated. I didn’t know what to feel because even if my body was free, whatever something inside me was still a prisoner. The return to normal life was impossible because there was no longer normal life. Lyon had been released but the city bore the scars of war.
Destroyed buildings, families broken and everywhere silence. A thick silence, full of secrets that no one wanted to hear. When I returned to my village, my mother hugged me and cried for hours. She tells me squeezed so tightly that I had difficulty breathe, but I let her because I knew she was crying no only my return, but also the daughter she had lost.
My father does not didn’t look me in the eye for the first weeks. He remained in his blacksmith workshop from morning to evening, hammering the iron with violence which did not exist before. One evening, I went to see him. He was alone. The face reddened by the heat of the fire. When he saw me, he put down his hammer. Then he opened his arms and for first time since my return, I cried in my father’s arms.
Margaot, my little sister, asked me questions questions I couldn’t answer. Where were you? What do they have for you? done? I didn’t say anything because to say would have been to live again and to live again would have been die a second time. The first weeks, I tried to resume my life before.
I helped my mother house. I kneaded the bread dough as I had done hundreds of times. I was going to the market, but everything was different. My hands were moving mechanically as if they belonged to someone else. Sometimes, in the middle of a task, I fig. My mother found me like this, blank look and she gently placed her hand on my shoulder. Isold, come back.
And I blinked. I was coming back, but every return was more difficult than the previous one. People looked at me strangely, some with pity, others with malicious curiosity and a few with contempt. Because in the spirit of some, women who had been in these camps were no longer completely respectable fact, as if what had happened to us was our fault, as if we had chosen.
One day at the market, a woman I knew since childhood told me : “It’s a shame what happened to you, but at least you’re alive. Others had it worse. I smiled politely and I left. But these words remained in me like poison. At least you are alive as if surviving was sufficient. As if being in life erased everything else. The nightmares started a few weeks after my return.
Every night, I woke up in a sweat, my heart beating, feeling suffocated. I I saw this room again, this bed, these men. I heard their voices, I felt their hands. Even when awake, memories haunted me. A sound of slamming door, a smell of tobacco, a man in uniform on the street. No matter what could bring me back there.
And when It was happening, I froze. My body is wrote. My breathing accelerated, I couldn’t move anymore. Sometimes that lasted a few seconds, sometimes several minutes. My mother didn’t understand not. She thought I was sick. She wanted me to see a doctor. But how do you explain to a doctor that the body remembers even when the mind trying to forget? I tried to speak once to a childhood friend, Jeanne, who was also returned from the war.
She had been a nurse in a hospital campaign. She had seen horrors. I I told myself she would understand. We We were sitting in a cafe gray November afternoon. I started to tell him not everything, just fragments, the camp, the calls, parts. She listened to me silence and when I finished, she posed his hand on mine and said to me slowly Isold, you must forget.
You need to turn the page. Otherwise, you will never be able to move forward. She thought she was doing well, but her words broke me because she didn’t understand not that I couldn’t forget, that it was impossible, that his memories were aggravated in my flesh, in my waters, in my soul. So I stopped to speak.
I decided that if no one didn’t want to hear, I will keep everything in me. The years have passed. I learned to live with silence. I got married in 195 to a good man, a carpenter who didn’t ask questions. Henry was patient, gentle, he did not rush. I never told him about the camp. He knew that I had been a prisoner during the war, but not the details, not what really happened.
We we had two children, a girl then a boy. I raised them as best I could I could. I gave them my time, my be careful, my love. But there was always a distance as if a part of me was inaccessible. My children felt it, I think. My daughter sometimes asked me “Mom, why are you sad?” And I replied: “I’m not sad, my darling, just tired.
” But she knew, children always know. My husband felt it too. Sometimes he looked with a sadness that I could not console because I couldn’t give him what I didn’t have more. The woman who married her was only half. The other half had remained in this camp, on this bed, in this room. The decades have past, my children have grown up, have you their own family.
I became grandmother and slowly, very slowly, I built a life. not the life that I should have had, not the one I would have had if the war had not existed, but a life nonetheless with moments joy, laughter, little joys and always in the background the weight of passed like a shadow that never left me never.
My husband died in 1998, sudden heart attack without warning. To his funeral, I cried. But not only for him. I cried for everything I never told him, for all the secrets I had kept, for the woman I could have been if we hadn’t stolen it from me. And I understood, standing in front of his grave, only the silence hadn’t protected anyone.
He had me just imprisoned a second time. In 2007,3 years after my release, a historian came to see me. His name was Thomas Attic. He was young, in his thirties maybe, with round glasses and a notebook always in hand. He was doing research on the camps detention in France during occupation. He had found my name in German military archives which had been declassified a few years ago.
Lists, registers, documents that no one didn’t want to watch for decades. My name appeared there Isold Marivau, 24 years old, arrested on April 12, 1944, detained until August 23, 1944. He wanted to interview me, he wanted I tell. I refused at first. I had 87 years old. I was tired. My bones hurt. My hands were shaking.
I lived alone in a small house outskirts of Lyon, surrounded by photographs of my children and grandchildren. I just wanted to finish my days in peace. I didn’t want reopen these wounds. I didn’t want plunge back into this darkness that I had spent my whole life trying to forget. But Thomas came back week later, then two weeks after, then a month.
Every time he knocked on my door with the same gentleness, the same respect. He never forced it. He was just posing a question. Mrs Marivo, would you agree to talk to me? Just a few minutes. And every time, I refused. But he came back anyway. One day he brought me flowers, blue irises, my favorite. How did he know? I don’t know.
Maybe he had spoken to my neighbors. Maybe he had simply guessed. He put them on my kitchen table and told me with a sincerity that touched: “Madame Marivau, I am not there to make you suffer. I know that what you experienced is beyond words. But there are dozens of women like you who suffered the same thing and no one talks about it.
This part of history has been erased, forgotten, denied. History books mention the concentration camps, deportations, executions, but they never mention what is you arrived. And if you don’t testify now, if the last survivors don’t speak, the truth will die with it you and those who did this to you will have won a second time.
These words made me touched because he was right. I was one of the last. Mary was dead for a long time. Simone too. Helene hanged herself in 1944. So many others had she left without never told. What if I die without speaking, who would remember? Who would know? So that day, sitting in my kitchen with its blue irises on the table, I nodded.
I said yes, not for me, but for others, for all these women whose names had been removed from the registers, so that it not be forgotten, so that what had happened to us not be erased from history as if we never had existed. The interview took place two weeks later late. Thomas came with a camera, a tripod, a microphone.
He installed everything his equipment in my living room facing the window where the afternoon light entered slowly. He made me sit in my chair favorite, the one where I read in the evening. He asked me if I was ready. I have looked at the camera, this little light red that was flashing, and I thought of all these years of silence, all these moments when I wanted to speak but where no one listened.
All these nights where I woke up sweating, alone with my memories, I breathed deeply and I started. For the first time in sixty years, I told everything from start to finish, without hiding anything, without softening anything. I told about the truck, the 45 piled up in the dark, the smell of fear and urine, the camp surrounded by barbelets, the barracks where we slept directly the ground. I recounted the calls.
These Lists of names were shouted out every morning. The terror of not knowing if it would be our turn. I told about the building of stone, dark corridors, doors closed and these rooms. These little rooms with an iron bed, a chair, a table. I told about the men, the officers who used us as objects, their hands, their voice, their indifference.
I told this sentence which came back again and again. It will be fast. As if speed made bearable thing, as if time was the problem. I told the pain, not just physical, but this deeper pain, that of to lose one’s humanity, to become a thing, a number, a body without a soul. Thomas didn’t interrupt me. There remained motionless behind his camera, his eyes blush.
Sometimes he wiped away a tear discreetly, but he said nothing. He let me talk and I talked. The words flowed like a river, long held back by a dam. It was painful. Every sentence was like tearing off a piece of myself. Every memory that came back burned me the throat. But it was also liberating because all these years, I wore this alone.
And there finally, someone listened, someone believed, someone was recording so it wouldn’t does not disappear. I told Marie, this young girl with blond hair who was only 19 years old. How she was called again and again, how she has become empty, how does it spoke no more, no longer smiled, no longer cried more.
I told Simone, the teacher who had lost her mind and who recited contines all the time night. I told Hélène who had hanged herself rather than continue and I told all the others. All these women whose names I didn’t even know but whose faces I remembered. Blank stares, broken bodies. The interview lasted 4 hours. When I finished, I was exhausted, empty too strangely light, as if a weight that I had carried for 63 years had been shared.
Thomas turned off the camera. He got approached me and he hugged me arm. He was crying. He told me that he was sorry, that it was unfair, that we should have been recognized, honored, helped, but instead we were had imposed silence. We had shameful. We were told to forget as if what had happened to us didn’t matter, as if our bodies had no value.
As if our lives could just resume as if nothing had happened. I nodded because it was true, but I also understood something thing that day, that the silence had not protected the guilty. He had us just imprisoned a second time. And that in speaking, even 63 years later, I finally break this prison. The recording became a documentary.
Thomas spent months edit the images, add historical archives, photographs of the camp, official documents. He has found other survivors, not a lot. Three other women, all their 80 years, who agreed to testify. Together we told what no one wanted to hear. The documentary was broadcast on French television in March 2008 on a public channel late at night.
I watched it alone in my living room, sitting in my chair. It was strange to me see on screen. This old woman with white hair, face marked by years, who told things terrible in a calm voice. I don’t I didn’t recognize it. But at the same time, it was really me, this young girl 24 years old who had been torn from her house.
this woman who had survived hell, this grandmother who refused to let the truth die. The the day after the broadcast, I received dozens of letters. Some came young historians who thanked me for my testimony, other women old people who had experienced things similar and who had never dared talk about it. She wrote to me that she felt less alone, that they had cried when she saw me, that she understood.
But there were other letters too, hateful letters, people who accused me of lying, who said that I invented these stories to attract the attention, which said that I was dirty the memory of the war, which was necessary respect the dead and not stir up the past. A man wrote to me: “You should be ashamed.
You are a old embittered woman trying to find herself to point out. This kind of thing is not never happened. You dishonor our soldiers.” I read this letter. I reread it and I cried sadness but anger. How could we deny? How could we look at my face, listen to my voice and think I was lying? But I have understood. Some people don’t want know because it would force them to recognize and acknowledge the would force action.
And they don’t want act. They just want to keep live in their comfort, in their ignorance. But for each letter hateful, there were 10x others full of compassion. Schools have invited to come and testify before adolescent classes. Universities wanted me to participate in conferences. Journalists asked for interviews. I accepted some invitations, not all.
I was old, tired, but I did what I could. I went in three schools. I spoke to young people aged 16 to 17. They listened to me with eyes wide open. Some were crying. Others posed questions. How did you survive? Have you forgiven? Is this that you still have nightmares? I answered honestly. I told them that I had survived because I refused to give them my death, that I hadn’t forgiven because forgive requires an apology and that no one never apologized.
That yes, I still had nightmares, even at 88 years, even after all these years. A day, after a conference in a high school from Lyon, a young girl approached of me. She must have been 16 years old. She was trembling. She looked at me with tears in my eyes and told me barely audible voice: “Madam, I thank you because me too something happened to me, not war, but something and I don’t have never dared to talk about it.
Everyone said to forget, not to do of history. But you spoke after 63 years and that gives me courage. I took her in my arms. this little girl I didn’t know. And I told him, “You’re not alone. You don’t have to be ashamed. What is you happened is not your fault and you have the right to speak.
You have the right to be heard.” She cried against my shoulder and I also cried because that I understood that my testimony was not just for the women of the past, it was also for women today, for all those who carry too heavy secrets. I died 3 years later. in January at the age of years. Officially of natural causes, my heart just stopped in my sleep, but the truth is that I was exhausted.
Exhausted from carrying this weight my whole life. Exhausted from fighting so that people listen. exhausted to see some people deny what I had experienced, exhausted from being a survivor. But before I died, I made a last thing. A few months before my died, I had written a letter, a long letter addressed to all women who had suffered what I had suffered, to all those who wear secrets too heavy, to all those who think they are alone.
I had it entrusted to Thomas, asking him for read at my funeral. In this letter, I wrote: “You are not guilty. You don’t have to be ashamed. What happened to you doesn’t define who you are. You are more than your trauma. You are survivors and your life, even broken, even difficult, has a value. Don’t let anyone say the opposite.
Speak, even if your voice trembles, even if no one wants listen. Speak because silence kill. It kills the soul, it kills the truth. Speak for you, speak for those who can no longer speak, speak so that it never happens again. Today my story is in the archives. It is taught in some French schools. She does part of university programs on the history of the Second War worldwide.
Not the big story, the one battles and generals, but the other story, that of women, that of broken bodies, that of imposed silences, that of truths buried. Thomas’ documentary is available online. Thousands of people saw it, researchers use it in their work. Of feminist associations show this when of conferences.
And every year on the 12th April, the day of my arrest, a ceremony takes place in front of a plaque memorial which was installed in my village. It bears the names of the 45 taken that day. 45 names engraved in the stone so that no one forgets. And as long as there is someone tell, as long as there is someone to listen, I will not be completely dead.
because my voice is still there in this recording, in these words, in the heart of this young girl who told me that I had given him courage, in the tears of these students who listened to my testimony, in memory collective of a country which has put too much long to recognize this truth. My voice said, it happened, it was real.
We were human and we deserve to be heard. So today, where whatever you are, I ask you this question: what is worth being forgotten and what is worth being recalled? Because the story is not only what is written in the books by the winners, it is also what is whispered in the shadows by the survivors, which is carried in silence by those who had no choice, this which is passed down from one generation to the other so that the mistakes of the past do not are not repeated.
And if we choose to forget, if we choose to look away, if we choose to tell the victims of this land, then we choose to repeat. We let’s become accomplices. But if we we choose to remember, if we let’s choose to listen even when it’s uncomfortable, if we choose to believe the victims, even when their truth bothers us, so we let us choose to resist.
We we choose humanity, we choose justice. My name is Iol de Marivau. I was 24 when the war decided who I will never be again, but I have survived. I built a life despite everything. I liked it. I had children, little children. I laughed, I cried, I lived and at the end of my life, I spoke. Not to hate, not to take revenge, but so that the truth survive, so that these 45 are not not forgotten, so that Marie, Simone, Hélène and all the others be recognized as what they were.
of human beings who deserved respect, dignity and justice. And my voice, it does not will not die. As long as there is someone to listen to it, as long as there is someone to transmit, as long as there is will have someone to refuse the silence, my voice will continue. She will say “We were there, we suffered and our history deserves to be told.
” The isolated voice of Marivot fell silent in January 2010, but these words remain alive. They reason in each person who dares to listen, in every heart who refuses to forget. What she experienced was not a story among million. It was a truth among millions of silence. A truth that official records attempted to erase, that society tried to bury, that time has almost succeeded in destroying.
But Isold spoke and as she spoke she made humanity not only herself, but to all those women whose the names were never written, including the voices were never heard, whose bodies were used and thrown away as if they had no importance. Today, its history exists because that she had the courage to break decades of silence.
And now, it’s up to us to decide what we will make of this truth. If this documentary touched you, if the Isold’s words made you feel something deep, if you believe that stories like this cannot be forgotten, so don’t let this voice die here. Leave a comment below. Tell us where you’re looking from. Share how you felt.
Tell us if Isold’s story has awakened a memory, a reflection, a question that you carry within you. Because that every comment, every word written is a way of saying “I heard, I believe, I care.” And that too simple as it may seem, is a act of resistance against forgetting. It is a way of honoring not only Isold, but all the women who don’t have never been able to tell their stories.
Subscribe to this channel, not by obligation, but out of conscience. Because that here, we are not telling stories to entertain. We tell to remember, to disturb, to make you think, to ensure that truths like these are not never buried again. Each subscription is a vote for memory. Every like is a way of saying that his lives have counted, that his pains were not vain, that history does not belong only to the winner, but also to those who survived in the shadows, bearing invisible scars which no monument has ever honored.
Activate the notification bell because soon we will bring other stories, other voices that were silenced, others testimonies that the world has tried to forget. And when these stories will reach you, we want that you are there. We want you listen. We want you think because the story does not repeat not by chance.
She repeats herself when we stop paying attention, when we choose the comfort of ignorance rather than discomfort of truth, when we tell victims that it’s time to move on, to forget, to move forward without ever give space to be heard. Share this video with someone who needs to hear. Maybe it’s a friend who wears her own silence? Maybe it’s a family member who has never including the weight of some trauma? Maybe it’s someone who needs to understand that history is made of people real, real pain, body real people who felt the cold, the
fear, humiliation and abandonment. Isole de Marivu was not a number. She was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and she deserved to be heard just like the 45 women taken from their homes this morning of April 1944, just like the thousands of others whose the names will never be known. So today we ask you this question: Will you listen? Will you remember? Are you going carry this truth with you? Because that this is how we honor the survivors.
This is how we let’s prevent history from repeating itself. This is how we say to everyone women who carry too heavy secrets : “You are not alone. Your voice account. Your story deserves to be told. Leave your comment, subscribe, share and above all never forget because as long as we we remember, Iole de Marivot continues to speak and his voice refuses to die.
