I was tied to the ice, slowly dying, while German soldiers watched from a distance as if I were part of an experiment they had seen dozens of times before

I was tied to the ice, slowly dying, while German soldiers watched from a distance as if I were part of an experiment they had seen dozens of times before.  The cold no longer hurt.   That was the  scariest thing.  When the body stops suffering, it has already given up on you.  My lips were violet, my skin bluish, my fingers as stiff as stone.

I knew it would be my last day.  And then, in the middle of this silent, white hell, a man approached.  He shouldn't have done that. No soldier should have done what he did , but he did it.  And that is why today, at 86 years old, I am still alive to tell this story. My name is Isoria de la Cour.  I am years old .

  I live in a small house in northern France, in the same region where I was born, where I grew up and from which I was taken away in the middle of winter 1943. I have spent 64 years trying to forget what happened in that camp.  I tried to live as if it had never happened.  I got married, I had children, I grew old in silence.  But the truth is, you never forget the day you were chosen to die.

We carry that day within us like a scar that no one sees but that never stops burning. Today, after so much time, I have agreed to tell what I have experienced. Not out of heroism, not for forgiveness, but because some stories must survive, even if they hurt.  I was 22 years old when they took me away. It was January 1943.

 And the winter that year was one of the cruellest that northern France had ever experienced. The snow covered everything, the roads were blocked, and the cold cut flesh like a sharp blade. I lived with my mother and younger sister Céline in a small stone house on the outskirts of Montre-Val sur Liss, a rural village near the Belgian border.

  The war had already swallowed everything around us.  Our men had been taken to labor camps or killed at the front.  Our food was rationed to the point of near starvation.  Our freedom had disappeared the day the Germans occupied the region in May; all that remained was fear, a constant, silent fear, which lived in us like a sleeping beast waiting for the moment to awaken.

  They knocked on the door before dawn.  three soldiers of the Vermarth, impeccable uniforms, polished boots, indifferent faces, as if they were performing some bureaucratic task.  My mother tried to protect me with her own body, but she was pushed against the wall with a mechanical brutality, without anger, without pleasure, just cold efficiency.

My sister Céline was in a corner, her eyes wide, trembling, her hands pressed against her chest, as if she wanted to prevent her heart from exploding with terror.  There was no accusation, no judgment, no explanation, just a sharp wave of the hand and a short, harsh order that still echoes in my head decades later.

  I was simply chosen as if my name was on a random list that someone had written without giving it a second thought. I was dragged out of the house while my mother screamed and Céline cried in despair. I didn't have time to say goodbye to them .  I didn't have time to kiss them.  I only saw their blurry silhouettes in the snow as the military truck started up and took me away from everything I knew.

If you are listening to this story now from anywhere in the world, know that what I am about to tell you is not easy to hear, but it is real.  Every word I say here has happened.  And if this touches you in any way, leave a comment.  to show that this memory still matters, that it lives on as long as someone listens to it because the truth needs witnesses.

She's always needed it.  I was taken away with seven other women from the area, all young, between 18 and 25 years old, all terrified. Nobody knew where we were going, but we all knew we wouldn't be coming back . We travelled for two whole days in a military truck covered with a thick tarpaulin that blocked all light.

  It was so cold that my fingers turned purple and swollen. My body was trembling uncontrollably, but trying to warm myself up was useless.  There was no blanket, no food, no water, only the sound of the engine, the violent jolts of the potholed road and sometimes a stifled sob from one of the other women who tried to hold back her tears so as not to attract the attention of the guards.  No one was speaking.

  The silence was heavy, suffocating, as if we all knew that words no longer had much value.  When we finally arrived, I saw the tall, black, silent iron grills . The camp had no name, at least not a name that was given to us.  There were rotten wooden barracks, barbed wire fences stretching as far as the eye could see, and watchtowers with searchlights that swept across the snowy ground like mechanical eyes that never slept.

  There was also a fine smoke rising from distant chimneys, a strange smell in the air that I couldn't identify but that made my stomach turn.  Later, I discovered that this smell was that of burnt flesh mixed with chemicals. Later, I understood that many of those who entered here never left .  We were greeted by a hard-faced German woman, dressed in a grey uniform and black boots, who pounded the concrete floor with terrifying military precision.

She looked at us with absolute contempt as if we were insects and led us to a freezing shack where other women were already crammed together, sitting on the dirty floor, their eyes empty and their faces marked by hunger and fatigue.  For the first few days, I tried to understand what was happening.  I tried to find a logic, a reason, an explanation.  But there weren't any.

Some of us were put to work in factories inside the camp itself, sewing uniforms or assembling metal parts whose purpose we never knew .  Others were sent to separate, isolated barracks and never returned.  I quickly realized that there was a cruel division between us.  Some women were kept working until they were exhausted.

Others were kept to serve as examples, warnings, silent spectacles.  We were stripped of our dignity even before we were stripped of our clothes.  Our hair was cut short, our names replaced by numbers, and our humanity erased with terrifying efficiency. I became number 1228. This number was tattooed on my left arm with a thick needle and black ink that burned like fire.

  I watched that issue and I felt that Isoria of the court had died there. Winter inside the camp was even more brutal than outside. We had no proper clothes, only thin rags that barely covered the body.  We had no heating, only the heat we managed to generate by  huddled together during the night, trying to survive until morning.

  The food was a clear soup of rotten potatoes served once a day, sometimes with pieces of paint that had to be soaked in dirty water in order to be swallowed.  Many women died from cold, hunger, and diseases that spread through the barracks like invisible plagues.  I saw women die beside me during the night, their eyes open, frozen, without anyone noticing until the following morning when the guards came to collect the bodies like garbage.

  But the worst thing was n't the cold, it wasn't the hunger.  It was the fear of what he was doing to some of us.  There were whispered rumors among the prisoners about medical experiments being conducted in hidden barracks deep inside the camp.  Rumors about torture disguised as science. Rumors about women being exposed to extreme cold to test how long the human body could withstand before entering total collapse.

I thought these were just stories invented out of despair until the day I was chosen. It was a morning in February.  The sky was grey, the snow was falling slowly and the cold was so intense that it hurt to breathe.  I was in the central courtyard of the camp with other prisoners when a guard came towards me, pointed at me and said only two words.