No puedes quedarte aquí eternamente

Marie-Jeanne Echeverria was a Basque-French woman who, at just twenty years old, joined the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. Arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Marie-Jeanne was recruited into the Resistance by her cousin and godmother, María Josefa Sansberro, known as Maddi, about whom Edurne Portela wrote the novel *Maddi and the Borders*, reconstructing the life of this woman who went from smuggling to saving hundreds of lives on the Basque border between France and Spain. Maddi and Marie-Jeanne shared their struggle in the Resistance and, together, were arrested and deported. The former died in the Nazi camps; the latter survived. Survive? What does it mean to survive after the experience of deportation? Is it possible to rebuild a life afterward? Is it possible to do so with that memory, or is there no survival without forgetting? What memories can be passed on to future generations? In this new book, Edurne Portela investigates the life of Marie-Jeanne, from her resistance to deportation, from the moment of liberation to the life that unfolds afterward. We will meet Angélique Bereau, Marie-Jeanne's granddaughter, who will share her grandmother's memories and her fragmented account. We will travel to Marie-Jeanne's places, those of joy and suffering. We will hear the voices of other survivors who managed to record their experiences through their testimonies. We will consider how one can continue living after a trauma of unbearable proportions and what legacy it leaves for those who come after. In these pages there is no fiction, but there is imagination: the kind that seeks to complete the elusive and fragmented narrative of the past in order to situate us, here and now, ethically and politically.