Lynn Olson | The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück
Join Michael in his conversation with Lynne Olson about her new book The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp which tells the remarkable story of these women who joined forces to defy their German captures and keep one another alive.
Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of ten books focusing on unsung heroes—people of courage and conscience who helped change their country and the world but who, for various reasons, have slipped through the cracks of history.
She has been a consulting historian for the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück
During World War II, more than 100,000 women from Nazi-occupied Europe, many of them members of their countries’ resistance movements, were sent to Ravensbrück, the only German concentration camp designed specifically for women. Among them was an extraordinary group of French women that included Germaine Tillion, a brilliant anthropologist; Jacqueline d’Alincourt, an elegant young countess; Anise Girard, an exuberant college student, and Genevieve de Gaulle, the quiet, reserved niece of Gen. Charles de Gaulle.
In the midst of the camp’s terror and brutality, these four, along with dozens of their countrywomen, refused to behave like victims. Instead, they formed a sisterhood, joining forces not only to keep each other alive but to continue their battle to resist the Nazis, this time by defying their orders to work in the German war effort. “It was our way of taunting our captors, to prove that we were not defeated,” one of them later said. Knowing full well they risked death if they were discovered, they went even further, creating a satirical musical revue making fun of their SS tormentors.
After the war, when many in France wanted nothing more than to focus on the future and forget about those who’d resisted the enemy, the surviving members of the sisterhood refused to allow their achievements, needs, and sacrifices to be erased. They banded together once more, first to support one another in healing their bodies and minds, and then to continue their crusade for freedom and justice—an effort that would have major repercussions for their country and the world into the twenty-first century.
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