That night they took everything from me.
That night they took everything from me.
I cannot accept that my daughter is remembered only as the girl with the helmet, with flares in her hands.
That evening Cyane was working. She wasn’t there to have fun or to take part in a party that ended in tragedy. She was a responsible girl, always attentive to others. When the fire broke out, she didn’t think only about saving herself: she tried to help, to guide people outside, to show them a way to escape. That is why she stayed.
In front of a door that never opened.
That door was locked because someone was afraid people would come in without paying. A decision made to protect money, not human lives. It wasn’t fate and it wasn’t destiny: it was a choice, and that choice had irreversible consequences.
Today she is remembered through a single image.
But my daughter was not meant to become a detail in a story. She was a young woman with her whole life ahead, with simple dreams, with the right to go back home after work. She was not meant to die while trying to save others, in front of an escape route that was denied to her.
At first there was only shock.
Then a pain impossible to describe.
Now there is only anger.
Because if that door had been open, perhaps today we wouldn’t be talking about the dead.
And my daughter would not have become an image.
She would simply still be alive.”
— Jerome Panine, father of Cyane.
And when the full truth about that locked door finally comes out, how many more lives will it reveal could have been saved
