Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz
1920 to 2002
French Resistance member and prisoner; later anti-poverty campaigner.
Born on 25 October 1920 at Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz was a niece of General Charles de Gaulle. She joined the Resistance after the 1940 occupation, working with the network Défense de la France, and was arrested in Paris on 20 July 1943, imprisoned at Fresnes, and deported to Ravensbrück in February 1944. In October 1944 she was placed in isolation in the camp bunker on Heinrich Himmler's order so she could be held as a possible exchange hostage, and she was released in April 1945. After the war she married fellow résistant Bernard Anthonioz and devoted her life to fighting poverty, leading the movement ATD Quart Monde from 1964 to 1998 and helping secure a 1998 French anti-poverty law. She died on 14 February 2002 and in 2015 was honored at the Panthéon, one of only a handful of women so recognized.
Corrie ten Boom
1892 to 1983
Dutch survivor and rescuer of Jews.
Cornelia ten Boom was born on 15 April 1892 in Haarlem and in 1922 became the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands, working in her father's shop. During the occupation the ten Boom family hid Jews and resistance members in their home until a Dutch informant betrayed them in February 1944. Her father Casper died within days of the arrest, and in September 1944 Corrie and her sister Betsie were deported to Ravensbrück, where Betsie died that December. The camp released Corrie at the end of December 1944. She spent the postwar decades speaking publicly about the family's rescue work and her imprisonment, and died in 1983.
Violette Szabo
1921 to 1945
Special Operations Executive agent.
Violette Szabo was born in Paris in 1921 to an English father and a French mother and grew up in London; after her husband, a Free French officer, was killed in North Africa, she volunteered for the British Special Operations Executive. On her second mission, parachuted into the Limoges area shortly after D-Day in June 1944 to coordinate Resistance sabotage against German forces, she was captured at a roadblock within days. She was deported to the main Ravensbrück camp in August 1944, sent for forced labor at the Torgau subcamp, and returned to Ravensbrück in a weakened state. She was executed in the camp around 5 February 1945, at the age of twenty-three, and was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
Milena Jesenská
1896 to 1944
Czech journalist and translator; prisoner who died in the camp.
Milena Jesenská was born on 10 August 1896 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a Charles University professor. A journalist and translator, she was among the first to translate Franz Kafka into Czech and is closely associated with him through their correspondence; she wrote for papers including Národní listy and Lidové noviny. After the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia she joined resistance efforts, sheltering Jews and refugees and helping supply false papers. She was arrested in 1939 and deported to Ravensbrück, where she died on 17 May 1944. Yad Vashem recognizes her among the Righteous Among the Nations.
Denise Bloch
1916 to 1945
Special Operations Executive wireless operator.
Denise Bloch was born in Paris on 21 January 1916 to a French Jewish family and worked with the Resistance before escaping across the Pyrenees in 1942 to reach the Special Operations Executive in London. Trained as a wireless operator, she was sent back into France in 1944 to support sabotage operations and was captured in June when her transmissions were traced. She was deported to the main Ravensbrück camp in late August 1944 and executed there in late January or early February 1945, alongside fellow agents Violette Szabo and Lilian Rolfe. She was posthumously recognized for her service.
Fritz Suhren
1908 to 1950
SS commandant of Ravensbrück.
Fritz Suhren served as commandant of Ravensbrück from 20 August 1942 until the end of April 1945, overseeing the camp through its period of catastrophic overcrowding and its final evacuation. After the war he initially evaded Allied capture but was eventually arrested and, with the camp's director of forced labor Hans Pflaum, tried by a French military court in 1949. The tribunal sentenced him to death, and he was executed in 1950.
Margarete Buber-Neumann
1901 to 1989
Survivor and witness to both the Soviet and Nazi camps.
Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist, was handed by the Soviets to the Gestapo in 1940 after surviving a Soviet Gulag camp, then held as a political prisoner in the main Ravensbrück camp for five years. She is among the rare figures to have testified publicly to enduring both the Soviet and Nazi camp systems. Inside Ravensbrück she became closely associated with fellow prisoner Milena Jesenská. Her postwar testimony helped expose the parallels between the two systems, and she lived until 1989.
Germaine Tillion
1907 to 2008
French ethnographer and resistance member; survivor.
Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist and member of a Musée de l'Homme resistance network who was arrested in 1942 and deported to the main Ravensbrück camp in October 1943. While imprisoned she carried out a clandestine study of the camp's workings from within. Her mother, also held at Ravensbrück, was killed there in early 1945. Tillion was freed in spring 1945 through the Swedish Red Cross rescue, became a prominent postwar intellectual, and lived until 2008; she was later honored at the Panthéon.
Wanda Półtawska
1921 to 2023
Survivor; victim of the medical experiments (one of the 'Rabbits').
Wanda Półtawska, a young Pole arrested in 1941 for aiding the resistance, was imprisoned in the main Ravensbrück camp, where she was among the women subjected to the sulfanilamide and bone experiments and known as the 'Rabbits.' She survived roughly four years and evaded a planned execution near the war's end. She later became a physician and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and a longtime friend of Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. She died in Kraków in 2023, shortly before her 102nd birthday.
Olga Benário Prestes
1908 to 1942
German communist prisoner, murdered.
Olga Benário Prestes was a German-born communist from a Jewish family in Munich who, after political activity that took her to Brazil, was deported back to Nazi Germany and confined as a political prisoner. She was sent on an early transport to the main Ravensbrück camp in 1939. In 1942 she was removed from the camp and killed at the Bernburg facility. In postwar East Germany she was held up as a model of the woman revolutionary.
