It's a garden. A small garden, very simple, minimalist, elevated a few meters above the street, an ordinary avenue in an ordinary neighborhood of the sad town of Marcinelle, just a stone's throw from Charleroi.. It is next to the train tracks, on a corner between three-story houses, brick and asphalt.. A few green meters of hope, with two or three trees, some flowers and an enormous white wall in which the giant fresco of a baby playing with a kite stands out, hurtfully.. They inaugurated it a few days ago, baptizing it Between heaven and earth, but knowing what it is, what it was, it is difficult not to think of that sanctuary as the passage between heaven and hell.

On June 24, 1995, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, two girls just eight years old, were kidnapped by Marc Dutroux and locked in a cell on one of his properties.. Dutroux, the name that will forever be associated in Belgium with absolute evil, was a known criminal who managed to twist the crooked lines of the Belgian administration to collect a disability pension while stealing cars and selling drugs.. He was sick, depraved, a narcissist, a psychopath, an abuser and manipulator, an unfortunate man who abused and raped girls, who recorded all kinds of pornographic videos and who had no problem, along with his wife, an accomplice, in leaving them. starve rather than confess.

In that house in Marcinelle, Dutroux and another of his cronies had built and used a cellar. Barely two meters long, one meter wide and just over one and a half meters high. Well protected behind a bookcase and a door weighing hundreds of kilos. There he held, tortured and let the two girls die, two of his victims, neither the first nor the last, but the youngest.. Two girls who spoke out asking for help, whom the Police even listened to during a search, without realizing what was happening.

That corner has been cursed ever since, it is where God died and the rage of a nation was born.. The house was demolished, like the others where he committed his crimes and buried the victims, but the families wanted a memory, so that history does not forget their daughters, but also so that the city, the country, does not try to forget its history.. The garden has now been built on the ruins of the cellar, bathed in light against the memory of darkness, but preserving the cave, the typical basement of Belgian homes.. The unthinkable happened there and no destruction can erase it.

The opening ceremony was discreet, extremely sad. Just three dozen people in chairs in front of the garden. Everything in silence and white, as it could not be otherwise. Blanca was the march that in 1996 shook the country like never before. Hundreds of thousands of people marching together, in white, without slogans, without shouts. Only applause, silence, bitterness and a lot of pain. “Talking with the parents we decided that this place should be bathed in light. It had to be white, according to them, it was the color that best represented this tragic event,” explains Georgios Maïllis, the architect in charge of raising hope on the ruins of hell.

“This is being a man: full-on horror / Being – and not being – eternal, fugitives / Angel with great wings of chains!” wrote Blas de Otero. This is pure horror, a girl, alone, playing with a kite. Two girls, totally alone, who just wanted to continue playing.