When you are tied to two trees in the middle of the night, 2 months pregnant, with the Alsatian cold cutting your skin like glass, and a German soldier appears in front of you holding a knife, you don’t think about salvation. You think the time has come. You close your eyes and wait for the end.
But what happened that night in January 1944 was not the end. This was something that war should never have allowed. Something that still haunts me today, sixty years later, not as a nightmare, but as the only light that came through hell. And if I die tomorrow without telling this truth, it will die with me and the name of Matis Keller will disappear as if he had never existed.
My name is Éliane Vaerkc. I am one year old. I was born in Lille in northern France in a stone house where my mother planted lavender and my father repaired clocks. I grew up believing that the world had an order, that people respected boundaries, that cruelty needed a reason. The war destroyed every one of his illusions.
In November, at 20 years old, pregnant and without Marie, I was dragged from my home by German soldiers who did not look me in the eyes once. They said that women like me were dishonoring the country. They said I would be an example. They wouldn’t let me kiss my mother. They wouldn’t let me take anything.
They simply pushed me into a freight truck with ten other women, most of them older, some still teenagers, all with the same terror on their faces. The smell inside that truck was one of sweat, urine, and despair. No one was crying loudly. Fear had taught us to be silent. They took us to a temporary detention camp near Strasbourg, a hastily assembled structure that was not listed in the official records of Vermarthe, a place where the rules of the Geneva Convention did not apply because officially this camp did not exist.
I discovered this years later when I tried to find documents. There was nothing, only whispered testimonies from survivors who had preferred to forget. I spent 3 months there. Three months that should have killed me. The cold was the first torture, a damp cold that penetrated the waters and never left.
We slept in shacks made of rotten wood, without heating, piled on top of each other like firewood. My belly was growing, my body was wasting away. We ate a clear soup of potatoes and turnips once a day, sometimes twice if there were leftovers. The guards treated us like animals at a circus. He didn’t beat us frequently, but he systematically humiliated us, forcing us to stand for hours in the freezing courtyard.
He made us sing German anthems that we didn’t know, and laughed when we stumbled. One of the guards, a blonde woman with light eyes named Hild, seemed to take particular pleasure in pointing at my stomach and asking aloud where the father was. I never replied. Silence was the only dignity I had left. At first, I prayed.
I prayed that my child would be born alive, that I would survive long enough to see him breathe, that something or someone would come and get us out of there. But the weeks passed and God seemed too busy with bigger wars. One night in January, I was lying on the floor of the barracks, feeling my child move inside me when I heard heavy footsteps of boots outside.
