Tillion, Germaine Marie Rosine

▪ 2009

      French ethnologist and World War II Resistance activist

born May 30, 1907, Allègre, France

died April 19, 2008, Saint-Mandé, France

was one of only about 3,500 survivors liberated in April 1945 from Ravensbrück women's concentration camp near Berlin; it was estimated that at least 50,000 women (including Tillion's mother) and children died at Ravensbrück, in addition to thousands more who were transported from there to other death camps. Arrested in 1942 for her Resistance activities, Tillion was interned (1943–45) in Ravensbrück but managed to hide detailed notebooks of her observations on life in the camp. She later used the surviving notebooks as the basis for a satiric operetta, Le Verfügbar aux Enfers (“The Campworker Goes to Hell”), but she refused to allow it to be performed until 2007, soon after her 100th birthday. After graduating (1932) with a degree in anthropology from the Ethnology Institute, Tillion traveled extensively throughout Algeria (researching the Amizigh [Berber] people and the territory's relationship with France) until 1940, when she returned to Paris and joined a Resistance cell based at the Musée de l'Homme. In the 1950s Tillion, who vocally opposed the use of torture in Algeria, unsuccessfully sought to negotiate better relations between the independence-minded colony and France.

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