Lynne Olson documents how, within the horror of a Nazi concentration camp, the women of the French Resistance continued to resist.

In Paris, the granddaughter of Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt remembers her grandmother entertaining three old friends to afternoon tea. They ‘looked like perfectly ordinary old women’, but they were not ordinary at all. As they talked,

the decades would fall away, and they became young women in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, no longer answering to their given names – Jacqueline, Germaine, Geneviève, Anise – but to aliases like Violaine, Danielle, Kouir….

Back then, one of them was helping to organize Paris’s first resistance network. Another was spying on German military positions. Still another … was sending coded messages to London and bicycling around Paris carrying radio sets and secret reports, all the while dodging the Gestapo. 

Lynne Olson has written before about ‘history-making yet relatively unknown women in the French Resistance’ during World War II. In The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, she focuses on four women who were among the resistantes defying the Nazis. Using a wide range of documents, interviews and other resources, she tells of their early involvement, their arrests, their determination to continue their resistance while imprisoned in Ravensbrück, and their lives after the war as they struggled to overcome the trauma of that experience, to adapt to ordinary everyday life, and to fight for justice, recognition and reparation.

Ravensbrück was the only Nazi concentration camp designed specifically for women. ‘An estimated 130,000 women from Nazi-occupied Europe’ were imprisoned there and of these ‘as many as forty thousand’ died of ‘starvation, disease, torture, shooting, lethal injections, medical experiments, and, beginning in December 1944, in a newly installed gas chamber’.

Inevitably, a large part of this book describes the horrors the four women saw and experienced, and it is grim reading. But the spirit of these women, their determination to resist the Nazis in every way possible, and the network of mutual support their actions fostered among the women prisoners, all make their stories remarkable and inspiring.

Germaine Tillon had just finished writing up her PhD research based on six years living in the remote mountainous territory of Aurès in Algeria.  Living in a cave ‘a fourteen-hour horseback ride’ from ‘the closest town with the rudiments of civilization’, she had been documenting the lives, history and beliefs of the Chaouai Berber tribe. When she returned to Paris in May 1940, she was stunned to learn that the Nazis had invaded France.

A few days after her return, they invaded Paris; and on June 17 she was invited into a house to listen to a broadcast in which the new French president, Marshal Pétain, announced that he had asked Hitler for an armistice.

Germaine was so sickened by it that she ran out to the street and vomited. ‘The shock, the disgust was brutal,’ she later said. ‘To ask for an armistice was to open one’s door to the enemy; to submit to an enemy completely. That was completely unacceptable.’

Enraged, she decided ‘something must be done’. She began ‘challenging the Nazis at a time when virtually no one else in the country was doing so’; and she found allies at the Musée de l’Homme, most of whom were scholars who set out to encourage their countrymen ‘not only to reject collaboration with the enemy but to actively defy them’. Together with other small groups they kick-started the French resistance movement.

Germaine’s anger and her attitude of defiance, together with her training as an anthropologist, led her to form mutual support networks in Ravensbrück; to encourage the women to resist and/or secretly sabotage the work they were forced to do; and (importantly) to collect and record the atrocities they witnessed.

‘My experience in Algeria had already taught me how to live in an environment that was completely foreign to me and figure out how that society was put together,’ she wrote.

In the camp, Germaine made friends with Czech and Polish women who, because they spoke German, had been put to work in the administrative and medical positions. She gathered information from them, wrote lists and notes with a pen and scraps of paper they smuggled to her, and hid these in various places and with other people around the camp.

Each of the other three young women, Anise Girard, Geneviève de Gaulle, and Jacqueline d’Alincourt, was equally determined to resist the Nazis, and each worked in the Resistance.

All four women, along with many others in the Resistance, were betrayed by double agents, some of whom Olsen identifies.

Germaine and Anise met in a Paris prison, then on the transport to Ravensbrück ‘formed an intense bond that would last the rest of their lives’. Anise, who had studied German at the Sorbonne and spoke the language fluently, used this skill for information gathering and networking.

Geneviève de Gaulle was the niece of General Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French Forces against the Nazis and supported the French Resistance from his exile in England. Geneviève, who was passionate and outspoken in support of her uncle, spread copies of his speeches around Paris and helped distribute the Resistance movement’s newspaper, Dèfence de la France. In particular, she fostered networks among the women in the camp to support those who were frail, sick, or had been brutally mistreated. She also formed a very close bond with Jacqueline d’Alincourt, and they helped each other cope with the daily struggle to stay alive.

Jacqueline’s young husband had left to fight the Germans immediately after their hurried marriage. He was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Nuremburg, where he died from meningitis. Jacqueline began to work for the National Council of Resistance, finding lodgings around Paris for agents, resistance workers and others who needed hiding places.

The strength of the bonds, not only between these four women but also between many other determined and defiant women prisoners in Ravensbrück, is an inspiring demonstration of the power of sisterhood, even in the face of the most terrible oppression. Among the women in the prison there grew ‘a commitment to sharing and community’.

One amazing example of this was the formation of a committee of Polish prisoners to look after the needs of a group of young Polish women who had been subjected to medical experiments in which their legs had been sliced, mangled, infected and sometimes amputated in order to test the efficacy of Sulfa drugs. As the war was coming to an end, the Nazis, in an attempt to hide all incriminating evidence, moved these young women to a separate prison block in preparation for killing them. Other women in the camp organised their escape from the block, then found hiding places for them in the then-chaotic and overcrowded camp, and managed to give them the identities of dead inmates so that they would receive food.

For Germaine, Geneviève, Anise and Jacqueline, the trauma and the struggle to adjust to normal life after the war was not easy.

As soon as they returned to France, the women of Ravensbrück realized they couldn’t rely on anything, or anyone else to help them put their lives back together. Once again they had to turn to each other.

In the last part of her book, Olsen describes their difficult postwar experiences but she also shows how, in many different and often difficult ways, each of these women continued to fight for the truth; for trial and justice for their captors; for recognition of their contribution to the Resistance; and for medical care and compensation for all the women who had been imprisoned by the Nazis. The evidence they had collected not only listed SS officers and guards and the perpetrators of atrocities, but also disproved claims that at Ravensbrück no gas chamber had ever existed and no genocide had taken place.

The work of one other French Resistance worker also contributed to the evidence. Violette Lecoq, a resistante who worked as a nurse in the camp, had made primitive sketches, a number of which are reproduced in this book.

Knowing she risked a brutal beating or even death if her drawings were found, Lecoq hid away in her barracks night after night, illustrating the barbarism she’d witnessed with pen and paper stolen from the camp’s offices. Like her compatriots, Lecoq was determined to bring to justice those who’d committed these heinous crimes. In doing so, she and others were honouring the shouted command of a French comrade as she was trucked off to Ravensbrück’s gas chamber: ‘Tell it to the world.’

Olson’s The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück continues this commitment, which has become increasingly important in recent times. As the women acknowledged in interviews with filmmaker Maia Wechsler for her documentary Sisters of the Resistance (2002), they were growing very concerned by ‘the rise of right-wing populism … an unsavoury stew of authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, and intolerance towards groups like refugees and other immigrants’. It ‘reminded them of the Nazis’.

Lynne Olson The Sisterhood of Ravensbrūck Scribe 2025 PB 384pp $36.99  

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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