rench ethnographer Germaine
Tillion, now aged 96, was in Algiers when the Nazis invaded France in
June 1940. She had just completed five-and- a-half years of intensive research among
Berber seminomads in the Aures moun- tains, at the edge of the Sahara. She had been so busv compiling their complete genealogies that she had lost track of
Europe. There had been no newspapers in the remote mountains and no mail deliverM
She wept with Algerian friends over the
French defeat, and immediatelv returned to
Paris and joined the resistance or rather, created it from scratch with her friends from the Mlu,s?e de /'Hornme, France's anthro- pology, museum. Betraved, arrested, and condemned to death on five separate counts by a German military tribunal, she was deported to Ravensbr?ck, a women's con- centration camp in the chilly swamps of eastern Germany, in October 1943.
Upon her arrival in Ravensbriick, she was stripped of the big blue suitcase con- taining her ethnographic notes and thesis drafts. They would never resurface. But she already had a new subject in mind. In Mlarch
1944, while the SS woman guard of her work detail went off to chat up a bovfriend, leaving some friendly Polish prisoners in charge, Tillion seized the opportunity to lec- ture a group of newly arrived French pris- oners, including her mother, on the opera- tions of the "slow extermination camp."
Ravensbriick, she explained, was a hub from wliich women prisoners were rented out, in groups of 50 or 100, to German factories, at so much per day, minus the miniimal cost to their jailers of food, clothing, and shelter.
As long as the women could work, they were shunted about from one camp to another, depending on where the need for labor arose. Once they had lost the capacity to generate income for the system, thev
became