John Wayne’s racist joke that drove Dean Martin to break it forever.
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. Come with me.
My heart stopped. I looked around, searching for help, but all the other women looked away. She knew, she knew that when someone was chosen like that, they rarely came back. I was taken to an isolated barracks on the edge of the camp, far from everything. Inside, there was a metal table, rusty medical instruments, and three men dressed in blood-stained white coats.
They looked at me . as if I were an object, something soulless, voiceless, without the right to exist. They took off my clothes, tied me up, and took me outside into the snow. I was tied to the ice with thick, rough ropes that cut into my skin. My clothes had been torn off, leaving my body exposed to the biting February cold.
I didn’t understand what he was doing. I didn’t understand why, but I knew I was going to die. The cold didn’t hurt at first. It was almost strange, an intense burning sensation, then a gradual numbness that moved up my legs, arms, and torso. My breathing was becoming increasingly difficult, as if my lungs were filling with ice from the inside.
I couldn’t move my fingers anymore, I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. My body trembled violently by reflex, desperately trying to generate heat. But it was no use. The cold was setting in, and they were watching. There were four men around me. Three of them were wearing white coats and taking notes in notebooks. The fourth was a German soldier, a simple guard who stood at a distance, hands in his pockets, his face impassive.
He spoke to them in German, exchanged technical remarks, checked a watch from time to time as if he were timing something, as if I were an experiment, a test, a human guinea pig whose suffering had scientific value. I tried to speak, to beg, but my mouth no longer responded. My lips were frozen, purple, and stiff.
My tongue felt as heavy as lead. All I could do was watch them with my eyes slowly closing, praying that it would end quickly. And then something changed. One of the men in white coats said something I didn’t understand and then they all left . All except one. The soldier, the one who had stayed back. He remained there, motionless, staring at me .
For a moment, I thought he was going to finish me off, that he was going to shoot me in the head to end my suffering. But he did nothing. He simply stood there in the snow with an expression I couldn’t decipher. Then he looked around once, twice, as if checking that no one could see him. And then he approached. His name was Matis Brandner.
I only learned about it later. At that moment, he was just a German uniform, an enemy, someone who should have let me die. But he didn’t do it. He knelt beside me, took a knife from his belt and cut the ropes that were holding me. My arms fell heavily onto the snow. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even thank him. He took off his thick, heavy military coat and placed it on me with a gentleness I hadn’t felt for months. Then he lifted me up.
I was light as a feather, devoid of all substance. He carried me to a small abandoned structure at the back of the camp, a ruined old warehouse that was being used as a dump. He placed me on a pile of old canvas bags, covered me with his coat and a torn tarpaulin, and looked me straight in the eyes.
I don’t know what he saw in my eyes. Perhaps fear, perhaps gratitude, perhaps just the reflection of a humanity he had forgotten. He said nothing, not a word. He simply left, leaving his coat with me. That coat saved my life that night. I stayed hidden in that warehouse for hours, huddled under the tarpaulin, still trembling, but alive.
My body was slowly beginning to warm up. My fingers were gradually regaining their mobility. My breathing became regular again. I had survived. Against all odds, I had survived. But I didn’t understand why. Why had this man saved me? What had driven him to risk his own life for a French prisoner he didn’t even know ? These questions swirled in my head like an obsession.
The next morning, I returned to the main barracks, trying to blend in with the other prisoners. No one asked any questions. Nobody wanted to know. In a camp like that , asking questions meant attracting attention, and attracting attention meant dying. But I was different now. Something inside me had changed.
I had seen death up close . I felt his icy breath on my skin. And I had been torn away from her by a man who should never have done what he did. I didn’t know yet that this was only the beginning, that Mathis Brandner would continue to protect me silently, day after day, week after week, at the risk of losing everything. The following days were strange.
Matis never spoke to me directly. He never looked me in the face in front of others. But I could feel his presence. I felt like he was watching me. not in a threatening way but in a protective way. When the guards shouted at me, they would intervene discreetly, divert their attention, invent an excuse to move me away.
When we were given the meager ration of food, I sometimes received an extra piece of bread surreptitiously slipped into my bowl. When other women were taken to the medical barracks, they always found a pretext to assign me somewhere else. He owed me nothing. He had no reason to do that, but he did it anyway.
One evening, while I was working in one of the camp’s sewing workshops, he came in under the pretext of inspecting the premises. The other guards weren’t suspicious, but I knew. He walked slowly past each worker, checking the work with meticulous precision . When he reached me, he bent down slightly as if to examine my stitching and murmured something in French.
His voice was low, almost inaudible. Trust no one, talk to no one, remain invisible. These words were engraved in my mind like a sacred commandment. I understood that he was giving me the keys to my survival. to remain invisible, to not exist, to disappear into the grey mass of prisoners until this infernal war ends. But why was he doing that? This question haunts me.
One evening, as I lay on the rotten wooden plank that served as my bed, an old French woman named Marguerite, who was sleeping next to me, whispered something to me . She had noticed, she had seen the small gestures, the discreet protections, the inexplicable interventions. She told me that Matis Brandner was not like the other soldiers, that he had a sister in Germany who had died in childbirth a few years earlier, that he always carried a photo of her in the inside pocket of his uniform, that he had been sent to the front and
had seen indescribable horrors and had come back changed. Marguerite thought that by saving me, he was trying to save something within himself, something he had lost in that war. I don’t know if it was true, I’ll never know. But it helped me understand that even in hell, there sometimes remains a spark of humanity, a fragile glimmer, almost invisible but real.
The weeks have transformed into me. Winter has given way to a cold and wet spring. The camp was still just as brutal, just as deadly, but I was still alive and it was thanks to him. Matis continued to protect me without ever asking for anything in return, without ever getting too close, without ever crossing an invisible line that could have condemned us both.
There was a silent understanding between us , a mute alliance woven by necessity and fear. We were not friends, we were not lovers. We were two human beings trapped in a death machine that crushed everything in its path, and we had decided, each in our own way, to resist. One day in April 1943, rumors began to circulate. The allies were advancing.
The Soviets were pushing back the Germans on the eastern front. The war was beginning to turn. The camp guards were becoming nervous, more violent, more unpredictable. They knew their time was running out. And when men know they are going to lose, they become dangerous. Executions have increased.
Collective punishments have become a daily occurrence. The camp became a death trap where every day could be the last. It was at that moment that Matis took the biggest risk of his life. One evening, while we were gathered in the central Pasio for roll call, an SS officer began to select prisoners at random for a new series of medical experiments.
I was among her. My number was called. My heart stopped. I moved forward slowly, my legs trembling, knowing that this time there would be no turning back. But as I approached the line of condemned men, Matis intervened. He spoke quickly to the officer, showing documents, pointing to another prisoner, inventing some bureaucratic excuse.
The officer hesitated, grumbled, then agreed. Another woman was chosen in my place. I saw him leave. I saw him disappear into the medical barracks. I never saw him again. That night, I couldn’t sleep. Guilt was eating me up inside . A woman had died in my place, a woman whose name I didn’t even know. And I was alive thanks to a German soldier who betrayed his own side to save me.
For what ? Why me ? These questions tormented me. A few days later, I ran into Mathis near the barbed wire. He was alone, smoking a cigarette, his gaze lost in the void. I mustered my courage and approached. It was the first time I had spoken to him directly. Why are you doing this? Why are you saving me? He looked at me for a long time with tired eyes, aged by the war.
Then he replied in French with a heavy but understandable accent. Because if I don’t save at least one person, then I’m no longer human. Those words broke me. I understood that Matis was not saving me out of love, nor out of pity, nor even out of kindness. He was saving me so that he wouldn’t lose his soul, so that he wouldn’t become a monster like those around him.
And in this raw and painful truth, I found something profoundly human. But our time was running out. In June 1943, Matis was reassigned. The orders came from Berlin. He was due to leave for the eastern front where the fighting was becoming increasingly bloody. He didn’t say goodbye to me. He said nothing.
One morning, he was simply no longer there . I felt an immense emptiness engulf me . Without him, I knew my survival was uncertain once again. I had become invisible again, but this time without a guardian. The following months were the hardest. Without Matis’s discreet protection, I had to rely solely on myself. I learned to steal food.
I learned to avoid eye contact. I learned how to disappear. Many women around me have died. Some from cold, others from illness. Still others were executed for ridiculous offenses. But I held on because something inside me refused to give up. Perhaps the lesson that Matis had unknowingly taught me. To survive was to resist.
In August 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy. The news circulated secretly within the camp. Hope was reborn. But with hope came terror. The Nazis knew they were going to lose and they didn’t want to leave any witnesses. The deportations to the east have begun. Thousands of prisoners were sent to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.
I thought my turn had come, but once again , fate decided otherwise. In January 1945, as winter bit fiercely once again, Soviet soldiers began to approach. We could hear the cannons in the distance. The ground was shaking. The German guards were panicking. Some fled, others began burning documents and destroying evidence.
The camp was in complete chaos. And then one morning, the doors opened, not through liberation, but through abandonment. The Germans had left during the night. We were alone. Hundreds of skeletal, starving, half-dead women stood in the snow, not knowing what to do. Some ran, others remained too weak to move. I walked.
I walked for days without knowing where I was going, feeding myself on snow and roots, sleeping in abandoned barns. I walked until I was picked up by American soldiers who were advancing towards Germany. They gave me food, they took care of me, they asked me my name. Isoria of the court. They told me I was free, but I didn’t feel free.
I was empty, hollow, as if a part of me had remained in that camp, frozen forever on that ice where I should have died. I returned to France in March 1945. My mother had died. My sister Céline had survived, but she didn’t recognize me. I had become a stranger, a shadow. I married a few years later to a good man who never asked me any questions about what had happened. I had two children.
I lived a normal life, but every night I dreamed of the cold. Every night, I could still feel the ropes on my wrists. I never saw Matis Brandner again. I searched once after the war. I consulted registers and archives. Nothing. Perhaps he died on the Eastern Front? Perhaps he was captured by the Soviets? Perhaps he survived and chose to forget? I’ll never know.
And in a way, it’s better this way. Because our story wasn’t a love story, it was a story of survival. And survival doesn’t need a happy ending, it just needs to exist. In 2007, I agreed to testify for a memorial project on concentration camps. It was the first time I had told this story out loud. It was painful, liberating, necessary.
Four years later, in 2011, I left . But before leaving, I left this story so that no one would forget. so that no one thinks that war is clean, heroic, or just. So that everyone knows that in hell, there are sometimes men who choose to remain human, even when it costs them everything. Today, my voice is recorded, my face is filmed, my words are preserved in archives that future generations can consult.
But what I want to leave behind is not just a historical testimony, it’s a question. A question that has haunted me for 64 years and will continue to haunt those who listen to this story. What makes a man choose to save a life when the whole world orders him to destroy it? What makes an enemy soldier become a savior? What remains of humanity when everything else has been torn away? I have no answer.
Nor probably does Matis Brandner. But it is this lack of response that makes this story important because it reminds us that good and evil are not always clearly defined, that the enemy can have a human face, that war transforms everyone but that some choose to resist this transformation, even at the risk of their lives.
I don’t know if Matis was a hero. I don’t know if he deserves to be forgiven for wearing that uniform, but I know he saved me and for that, I will be eternally grateful to him. When I think back to that night on the ice, I often wonder what would have happened if Matis hadn’t intervened. I would be dead, frozen, forgotten, a number among millions.
No one would have mourned my death. No one would have told my story, but he intervened and thanks to him, I am here today, 20 years old, sitting in front of a camera telling my story. My voice trembles, my hands tremble, but I am alive. And as long as I am alive, this story exists. After the war, I tried to live a normal life.
I tried to forget, but you never really forget. The trauma remains buried like a silent bomb that sometimes explodes without warning. A sudden noise, a smell of smoke, the cold of winter. And suddenly, I’m back there again, tied to the ice, watching the soldiers observe me like a laboratory animal. My children know almost nothing about what happened .
I never told them. How do you explain to your own children that you survived hell? How can we tell them that we have been reduced to a number, a thing, an object of experimentation? How can we make them understand that their mother, this gentle woman who prepared meals for them and sang lullabies to them, was tied naked to the ice and left to die slowly? I couldn’t.
So I remained silent for decades. But silence comes at a price; it eats away at you from the inside. He creates ghosts that never leave . So today, I’m speaking. I speak for all those who can no longer speak. I speak for the women who died in that camp whose names were erased, whose bodies were burned, whose stories were never told.
I speak for Marguerite who whispered words of hope to me in the darkness and who died of pneumonia three days before the liberation. I am speaking for this woman whose name I did not know. who was chosen instead of me and who never came back . I speak for all those who were not lucky enough to have a Matis Brandner in their life and I also speak for him, for this man who risked everything he had to save a stranger.
This man whom I have never kissed, with whom I have never exchanged more than a few words, but who offered me the greatest gift that one human being can offer another. The life. I don’t know if he survived the war. I don’t know if he started a family. I don’t know if he lived happily or if he was haunted by his memories as I was by mine .
But I know he deserves to be remembered, not as a German soldier, not as a Nazi, but as a man who chose humanity when the world chose barbarism. A few years ago, a historian contacted me. He was researching concentration camps in occupied France and had come across archives mentioning the camp where I had been held.
He wanted to know if I could confirm certain details. I accepted. We talked for hours. He showed me documents, photos, and testimonies from other survivors. And among these documents was a list of German soldiers assigned to this camp. I went through the list and saw his name, Mathis Brandner. Next to his name was a note: Missing on the Eastern Front, January 1944.
Presumed dead. When I read those words, I cried. For the first time in a decade, I cried. No sadness, no joy, but relief because I finally knew, I knew that he had not fled, that he had not denied what he had done, that he had remained until the end, the man he had chosen to be. And in a way, it calmed me because our story, however brief and fragmented , had meaning.
It had a truth, it had an end. But this ending is not the end of everything because this story continues to live on. She lives in every person he hears. She lives in every heart she touches. She lives in every question she raises. And as long as there is someone to listen to her, she will never die. That is why I agreed to testify, not for myself, but for memory, for history, so that no one forgets what happened in these camps, so that no one thinks that it can no longer happen because it can happen. It still happens. All over
the world, human beings are reduced to numbers, objects, things. All over the world, people are choosing cruelty. But all over the world, there are also Matis Brandners, people who choose humanity, and it is to them that this story is dedicated. So here it is, this is my story, the story of a young French woman who was torn from her life, thrown into a concentration camp, tortured, humiliated.
and left to die on the ice. But who survived? Thanks to a German soldier who should never have done what he did . Thanks to a man who chose to see me as a human being when everyone else only saw a number. This is a serious story. It is painful, it is uncomfortable, but it is real.
And the truth, however harsh it may be, always deserves to be told. I am Isoria of the court. I am 86 years old and I wanted you all to know because as long as someone remembers, we are never truly dead. This story you just heard is not a movie script. This is not a fictional story invented to move you. This is the raw truth of a woman who survived hell, of a soldier who risked his life to preserve a spark of humanity in a world that had become barbaric, and of millions of other souls who never had the chance to tell their story.
Isoria of the court carried this burden for 64 years before agreeing to testify. She did it not for herself, but so that the memory would survive. So that you who are listening to this today may remember that horror is never as far away as we think, but also that humanity can resist even in the darkest places. Take a moment now, close your eyes and think about how you would feel if this were your story, if it were your mother, your sister, your daughter who had been torn from her home and reduced to a number. Let this story
touch you. Let it transform you. If this testimony has moved you, if you think it deserves to be heard by others, then do not hesitate to support this channel by subscribing and activating the notification bell. Every subscription, every share, every comment helps to preserve these living memories and to pass them on to future generations who absolutely must know what happened.
Write in the comments where you are watching this video from, what this story has awakened in you, what reflection it has provoked. Your words matter, your testimony matters, because by sharing your emotions, you too become a guardian of this collective memory. And that’s exactly what the world needs today.
People who refuse to forget, who refuse to remain indifferent, who choose to carry these stories with respect and dignity. Isoria left in 2011, but her story lives on. It lives on in every person who hears it, in every heart it touches, in every silence it creates after the end of this video. So, ask yourself this question today.
What makes a human being choose to save a life when everyone else is ordering them to destroy it? What remains of us when everything has been torn away? The answer is not simple. But perhaps it lies in your ability to remember, to pass on, to refuse to let these lives be forgotten. Like this video if it touched you, share it with those who need to hear it, and above all, never let silence stifle the truth because as long as someone remembers, they are never truly dead.