Sepúlveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse, a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad, the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Schäfer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to the colony, where Schäfer and his accomplices dissolved family bonds and enforced obedience through forced labor, surveillance, confessions, and physical and sexual torture. Sepúlveda renders daily life with exacting, excruciating detail. Central to the account is the colony’s medical regime, mostly overseen by Dr. Strätling, a former Nazi doctor with a wooden leg. She drugged women and men, forced gynecological procedures, and carried out sexualized torture under the guise of treatment (“Dr. Strätling applied electricity to a part of my body I didn’t know existed”). Ilse recounts the relentless violations of her body and those of other women in a flat, clinical register that offers no relief. The narrative tracks the colony’s deep complicity with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and its shifting relationship to the outside world, including its role as a weapons manufacturer and a detention and torture site for the regime. The narrative ends with Schäfer’s arrest in 2005, when Ilse was 54. Only in the acknowledgments do readers fully grasp that this harrowing testimony is fictional, framed by the author as a memoir. As an artistic project, the book is devastating in its depiction of suffering, but its power raises ethical questions—the degree to which it draws on specific historical testimonies is unclear from the brief acknowledgments, risking a manipulation of readers’ trust and an appropriation of survivors’ authority. Comparisons with works such as Leila Guerriero’s The Call (2024), a rigorously reported portrait of torture survivor Silvia Labayru under Argentina’s military dictatorship, are unavoidable and unsettling.
