Temoignages.
Holocaust Drawings by a French Nurse
Lecoq, Violette. Temoignages. 36 Dessins à la plume. Préfaces du Professeur Henri Mondor de l’Académie Francaise et du Group Captain Somerhough Président de la Commission des crimes de guerre. Paris: Les deux Sirènes, (1948).
4to.; title page faintly offset; printed in black and red; unbound leaves, laid-in to plain wrappers; cream printed dust-jacket; lightly soiled and edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, limited to 754 copies; this is one of the 700 numbered copies on Lafuma paper (this is #265); the remaining print distribution was 36 copies numbered i –xxxvi, 15 hors commerce marked HC1 to HC15; and three copies were specially printed for the king of Norway, Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. With a Preface in French by Professor Henri Mondor, and one in English by Group Captain A.G. Somerhoug.
Lecoq’s book prints thirty-six drawings of her memories as a French political prisoner at the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women, outside the town of Furstenburg, Germany. Ravensbruck incarcerated women from several nationalities and religions, but Polish women had the largest presence there. All of the drawings are in black and white, save for the final one, titled, “Crématoire,” which depicts a red flame shooting up from a chimney flue. The drawings are arranged to depict a prisoner’s experience at the camp; the first, titled, “Welcome,” features a scene of well-dressed women, decked in coats, hats, and high heels, with suitcases and packages strewn around them on the floor. The next drawing, “Deux heures après” (Two hours later), depicts a row of women prisoners with their heads shaved and dressed in striped work uniforms.
Lecoq’s drawings are valuable, powerful records of the horrors that took place within the camp. She drew them in secret while she was a prisoner there.
The images grow increasingly macabre; “La loi du plus fort” (The law of the jungle) shows a male SS guard beating a woman prisoner, while three other women run away; “Inspection” pictures a group of gaunt, naked prisoners being inspected by a woman guard in a long cape; “Agonie juive,” (Jewish agony) depicts half a dozen dead women lying in wheelbarrows; “Hygiène” (Hygiene) shows a group of women standing under showers; and “Ce furent des enfants, des filles, des femmes” (They were children, girls, women) shows a grim heap of dead bodies piled in an uncovered wooden cart.
Lecoq (1912-2003) became a Red Cross nurse in 1939. She was taken prisoner by the Germans, but was able to flee; she continued to work as a nurse in a hospital at Compiègne, and helped French soldiers escape German persecution. She then went to Paris and worked as a member of the Resistance. She was captured and sent to Ravensbruck in 1943, and became a prisoner-nurse there – thanks to her knowledge of German, she wasn’t executed – and she worked in the Nacht und Nebel brigade with women who had been sentenced to death. She survived her stay in Ravensbruck, and was one of the few French women liberated from there in 1945. Her work during the Resistance and World War II earned her recognition from the Legion d’Honneur, and she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and Medal of the Resistance.
Ravensbruck was the only major women’s concentration camp in operation during WWII: built by male prisoners at the nearby camp at Sachsenhausen in 1938, it opened a year later, initially hosting 860 German women and 7 Austrian women. It is estimated that 132,000 women and children were imprisoned at Ravensbruck during its seven years of operation, 92,000 of whom died there. When the camp was liberated in 1945, only 3,000 prisoners remained. Ravensbruck is infamous for having conducted sadistic medical experiments on women and children, infecting women with bacteria and gangrene, stimulating battlefield wounds, amputating limbs, and performing bone transplant operations, sterilization and abortions.
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