ObituaryGeneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz
Translating the horror of the concentration camps into concern for the world's poorEven in France, there are those for whom the name de Gaulle means not the general but his niece, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, who has died aged 81. They include those who were with her in Ravensbrück concentration camp, and those who worked with her in the charity Aide Toute Detresse (ADT), dedicated to helping the world's poor and homeless.
Geneviève was the daughter of the general's elder brother Xavier, said to have been the most intelligent of the five de Gaulle children. Born in Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle, in Gard, she had a Catholic convent upbringing, and was just beginning life as a student in Paris when she heard, with indignation, Marshal Pétain's speech of June 17 1940, saying that France must stop its war against Germany.
The next day, travelling to Britanny to join her father and grandmother, she missed her uncle's famous speech of resistance from London - but saw her first German soldiers. When she reached her family, she learned that a priest had told her grandmother who the broadcast was by. "It's my son," the aged Madame de Gaulle had cried. This was a woman who had wept when the French had been defeated by the Prussians at Sedan in 1870.
When Geneviève returned to Paris, her indignation was so great that she pulled down a German flag and threw it into a rubbish bin. Through fellow Catholic students, she joined the Défense de la France, a resistance group made up of young people. Geneviève was 19 and looked much younger, a fact that was to help her in her resistance activities.
The group's main work was providing information about the war and about the Vichy regime. Its members produced leaflets, but their great triumph came on July 14 1941, when they distributed - by hand - some 3,000 copies of the first edition oftheir newspaper, Défense De La France (after the war, it became the thriving newspaper Paris Soir). This distribution was one of Geneviève's tasks and, by the summer of 1943, 30,000 copies were being printed.
On July 20 1943, Geneviève went to a bookshop in the Rue Bonaparte, carrying, as she had often done before, copies of the newspaper, and false identity papers printed in the cellars of the Sorbonne. That day, however, a stranger greeted her and examined her papers - before promptly arresting her.
Geneviève was sent to the prison at Fresnes, then, in February 1944, she was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where the former Olympic village of 1936 had become a horrifying centre for women prisoners. Some 54 years later, she wrote a short, and enormously successful, account of that experience, La Traverse De La Nuit (God Remained Outside).
Her recollections were devoid of rancour against her captors, but they were remarkably vivid. She did not hesitate to tell of the horrors - she once saw a woman guard cutting a prisoner's throat with a spade. She got on well with fellow prisoners, and also with some guards. Once, as a privilege, she was allowed to darn some Germans' socks, and thought gratefully of the con vent sisters who had taught her to sew.
Geneviève never forgot. When she went to the working-class Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Grand in 1958, she saw in the faces of the poor and destitute the same expressions she had seen on her fellow camp deportees. From then on, she devoted her life to helping them. For 30 years, from 1964 to 1994, she was president of ADT.
Geneviève always believed in the essential goodness of humanity. Even the German guards had humane quali ties, she said, although they had been corrupted by evil. It was through mankind that she found God. She remembered seeing a starving prisoner offering food to a fellow prisoner. The German people had been overcome by totalitarianism.
Having been invited to speak to the French national assembly in favour of a law against exclusion, which asserted the human rights of every person, she warned them against another totalitarianism - "the imperial-ism of money". She was applauded by everyone. In 1998, she became the first woman to receive the grand cross of the Legion of Honour. In France today, the value of her work is recognised by all.
Geneviève married Bernard Anthonioz in 1946. She is survived by three sons, a daughter and 10 grandchildren.
· Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, resistance fighter and campaigner, born October 25 1920; died February 14 2002
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