When her landline rang again, Marie-Hélène Sagasse hesitated to answer. She had grown accustomed to never picking up to avoid all those people trying to sell insurance or vacuum cleaners. But someone had been persistent over the past few days, so she decided she would finally tell them off once and for all. "Hello?" She didn't immediately understand what it was about: A stranger began talking to her about her father, Jean Iribarne, a Resistance fighter, arrested at 32 by the Germans in the spring of 1944 in his native village of Camou-Cihigue, in the Basque mountains. He was deported, never to return.

The 80-year-old woman didn't hang up: "I felt it was serious." The stranger introduced himself as Georges Sougné, a theater translator in Belgium and, in his spare time, a volunteer "detective" for the Arolsen Archives, the international documentation center on Nazi persecutions. On that 2024 spring day, he indeed had important information to share with her.

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