What is your name ? Corn! He nodded slowly as if he were recording every syllable. I’m Mathias. And for the first time, in 29 years, I heard my son’s name. Mathias and I never became close ones. Not really. How could we have? I was a stranger who wore his face. He was a man built on a lie that I had just destroyed.
We saw each other sometimes after this first meeting. Polite coffees, careful conversations. He asked me questions about Aurore and Séverine, on the camp, on Von Steiner. I answered honestly, even when hurt. One day he asked me “Did you love me?” Even a little? I looked at this 30 year old man, this stranger who was my son, and I tells the truth.
I loved you from the first second I felt you move inside me and when they tore you from my arms, part of me is dead. I spent my life try to find you. So yes, Mathias, I loved you. I still love you. He cried. Me too. But love does not is not always enough to cure what has been broken. Mathias had his own family, a wife, two children, a life built far from me.
I don’t couldn’t demand a place in this life. I didn’t want to. I just wanted let him know. We wrote to each other for a few years, then letters are spaced out, then they are stopped. In 2005, I learned through one says that he died of a cancer. He was sixty years old. I don’t have not invited to the funeral.
Still, I stood at the back of the church, discreet, invisible. I looked at his children crying, his wife collapsed and I realized something. My son had a life, a real life despite everything. Despite Funsteiner, despite the camp. In spite of myself and maybe it was sufficient. In 2010, when I gave this interview for the dissertation project history, I was years old.
My body was worn out, my voice fragile, but my mind remained clear. I was asked if I regretted something. I replied no. Not for looking for Mathias, not to have knocked on his door, not to have tells the truth, because silence also kills and because some stories can’t die buried. Von Steiner was never judged.
The children born in this camp have no never been officially recorded. The women like me have never received recognition, apology, repair. We were simply erased. But as long as there’s someone left to tell the story, we still exist. I died 5 years after this interview, in 2015. I was 91 years old. I was alone as I had experienced most of my life. But my words remained.
And today, decades later, thousands of people hear my history. Perhaps among them there are to a woman who recognizes something, a familiar pain, a silence that she wears. If so, I want let her know this. Your story account. Your pain is real and you you are not alone. The world tried to fade away, but we are still there in every testimony, in every memory preserved, in each person who refuses to forget.
It was my history, the story of Maée du rock, the story of three sisters who survived the unthinkable. And now, it’s yours too. Because you you will remember, we will still live.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
