Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe (born 31 May 1923) is a French resistance fighter and sociologist. She was active as a resistance fighter in Brittany, was arrested in 1942, was interned in various prisons until being sent to Ravensbrück in 1942. There, she worked at the

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational technology conglomerate. It is focused on industrial automation, building automation, rail transport and health technology. Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe, and holds the positi ...

plant and in the Kinderzimmer before being evacuated in 1945 by the 'white bus' operation of the

Swedish Red Cross The Swedish Red Cross ( Swedish: ''Svenska Röda Korset'') is a Swedish humanitarian organisation and a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Founded in 1865, its purpose is to prevent and alleviate human suffering wher ...

. After returning from her internment, she became an influential sociologist and was active in militating for the protection of human rights.

Early life

Chombart de Lauwe was born in Paris on 31 May 1923. She is the daughter of Suzanne Wilborts, midwife, and Adrien Wilborts, a pediatrician of Flemish origin. Her father had been injured by gas from the trenches during the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. In her youth, she spent her vacations in

Côtes-d'Armor The Côtes-d'Armor ( , ; ; , ), formerly known as Côtes-du-Nord until 1990 (, ), is a department in the north of Brittany, in northwestern France. In 2019, it had a population of 600,582.island of Bréhat. Aged 12, she continued her studies on the island by correspondence. During the '

phony war The Phoney War (; ; ) was an eight-month period at the outset of World War II during which there were virtually no Allied military land operations on the Western Front from roughly September 1939 to May 1940. World War II began on 3 Septembe ...

', she was a first-year student at

Tréguier Tréguier (; ) is a port town in the French department of Côtes-d'Armor, Brittany, northwestern France. It is the capital town of the province of Trégor. Geography Tréguier is located 36 m. N.W. of Saint-Brieuc by road. The port is situat ...

high school. It is there that she listened to Petain’s capitulation speech on 17 June 1940.

Resistance in Brittany, 1940-1942

Chombart de Lauwe joined the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers at the age of 17. During the summer of 1940, German troops landed in Bréhat and requisitioned the houses. In the Chombart de Lauwe home, the family listened to the voice of London from a radio hidden behind a painting. Along with her mother and father, Chombart de Lauwe joined the Resistance, where she served as a messenger. She was fully aware of the dangers: “Despite my young age, I didn’t do that naively. The executions happened very quickly, the context was heavy, we measured the risks. » In the fall of 1941, she began studying medicine in at the university in

Rennes Rennes (; ; Gallo language, Gallo: ''Resnn''; ) is a city in the east of Brittany in Northwestern France at the confluence of the rivers Ille and Vilaine. Rennes is the prefecture of the Brittany (administrative region), Brittany Regions of F ...

and obtained an Ausweis (pass) which allowed her to travel in a prohibited area towards the coast to see her parents. She slipped crucial information into her anatomy notebooks and was able to deliver it, thanks to her pass. She was part of ‘the Bande à Sidonie’ (a resistance network with units in Tréguier,

Lannion Lannion ( ; ) is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwestern France. It is a subprefecture of Côtes-d'Armor, the capital of Trégor and the center of an urban area of almost 60,000 inhabitants. Climate Lannion h ...

Perros-Guirec Perros-Guirec (; ) is a commune in the department of Côtes-d'Armor in Brittany. It has been a seaside resort since the end of the 19th century. Geography Climate Perros-Guirec has an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification ''Cfb''). T ...

and

Paimpol Paimpol (; ) is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Brittany in northwest France. It is a tourist destination, especially during the summer months when people are attracted by its port and beaches. Geography The town is located in t ...

). The group was led by Jean-Baptiste Legeay, a priest and teacher. The group was created by her mother and then integrated into the ‘Georges France 31’ network linked to the British Intelligence Service. The group provided aid to downed British aviators trying to escape to Great Britain and in the transmission to London of information on Germany's coastal defences. In Rennes, the members of the network met at the Café de l'Europe et de la Paix. In 1941, the resistance fighters on the coast were arrested, while the group in Rennes group was still intact. The unit's new liaison officer was a double agent working for the

Abwehr The (German language, German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', though the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context) ) was the German military intelligence , military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ...

. Chombart de Lauwe was arrested at her residence on 22 May 1942. She just has time to write a note on the kitchen table: “I’ve been arrested. Inform family and friends. » She was imprisoned in Rennes and later in Angers. There, she encountered her parents and 11 other members of her intelligence and escape network, who had also been arrested.

Deportation to Ravensbrück

Chombart de Lauwe was then transferred to

La Santé prison La Santé Prison (named after its location on the Rue de la Santé) ( or ) is a prison operated by the French Prison Service of the Ministry of Justice (France), Ministry of Justice located in the east of the Montparnasse district of the 14th arr ...

in Paris and was interrogated by the

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

. There, she encountered the prominent resistant,

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (; née Vogel; 3 November 1912 – 11 December 1996) was a French Resistance member in World War II as well as a photojournalist, deported to Auschwitz in 1943. She survived the war and became a Communist politici ...

, and managed to communicate through the cement toilets with her neighbor,

France Bloch-Sérazin France Bloch-Sérazin (; (21 February 1913 – 12 February 1943) was a chemist and militant communist who fought in the French resistance against German occupation during World War II. Biography Born in Paris into a Jewish family, she was ...

. Aged 29, Bloch-Sérazin was a resistance fighter, a communist and a Jew who manufactured explosives and who would ultimately be guillotined for her work with the Resistance. Chombart de Lauwe described her experience in this prison and with the prisoners she met there as follows: "''À'' ''la Santé, j'ai connu la grandeur humaine."'' She was later taken to the Fresnes remand center and was sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to 'NN' deportation (

Nacht und Nebel ''Nacht und Nebel'' ( German: ), meaning Night and Fog, also known as the Night and Fog Decree, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Na ...

, or 'night and fog', which meant the person was a political prisoner who was not allowed contact with the outside world and whose burial place should remain secret). She was deported by train from the

Gare de l'Est The Gare de l'Est (; English: "Station of the East" or "East station"), officially Paris Est, is one of the seven large mainline railway station termini in Paris, France. It is located in the 10th arrondissement, not far southeast from the Ga ...

in Paris on 26 July 1943 to the Ravensbrück camp. In the same wagon were her mother and 56 other French women NN. On their arrival, this group of 58 women was placed in block 32 of the NN. Registered as prisoner 21706, Chombart de Lauwe worked in the camp's Siemens factory. She and her fellow inmates clandestinely made small gifts to support her camp comrades. She described the purpose of these seemingly trivial, but extremely dangerous acts as: « We wanted to remain thoughtful and thinking beings by offering something on birthdays, even a poem.” On 24 February 1944, her father died at the

Buchenwald Buchenwald (; 'beech forest') was a German Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (Old Reich) territori ...

concentration camp. She learned of his death after the war when she returned to France.

Kinderzimmer

In the summer of 1944, she was assigned to the Kinderzimmer (children's room), block 11 at Ravensbruck. The Kinderzimmer was created to take care of newborns following the German debacle of 1944. The births of children in the camp had become uncontrollable in 1944 (previously mothers died before giving birth or the babies were killed). It was a room with two bunk beds for up to 40 babies; there was no hygiene, no diapers and no baby bottles. The women of the camp managed to supply a little laundry, small bottles and milk, but this did not prevent the death of almost all the children. Out of 500 births recorded at Ravensbrück, only 31 children survived (most of them survivors were born shortly before the liberation of the camp). It is not known with certainty how many children were born during deportation, but work done by the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation (FMD) identified 23 French children born in Ravensbrück, of whom only three survived: Sylvie Aymler (born in March 1945), Jean-Claude Passerat (November 1944) and Guy Poirot (March 1945). Chombart de Lauw also witnessed the forced sterilization of Gypsy women and the medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on young Polish resistance fighters from Block 32 of the NN. After the war, she testified against Fritz Suhren, commander of the Ravensbrück camp from 1942 to 1945, who was prosecuted by a French military court and executed for crimes against humanity. Chombart de Lauw described her work in the Kinderzimmer as follows:

The two worst things I encountered in Ravensbrück were the ‘rabbits’, that's what we called the unfortunate women who were used in Nazi experiments, and the babies (...) They looked like old men. (...) I encountered the daily death of children and the despair of mothers. But it was my vocation: I had to save a few lives (...) It was a new resistance, but with so few results.

She was transferred with the other Nacht und Nebel''' prisoners on 2 March 2, 1945 to

Mauthausen Mauthausen was a German Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern ...

. They were released on April 21 and evacuated to Switzerland by the

International Red Cross The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a aid agency, humanitarian organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is a three-time Nobel Prize laureate. The organization has played an instrumental role in the development of Law of ...

following a negotiation between

Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was a German Nazism, Nazi politician and military leader who was the 4th of the (Protection Squadron; SS), a leading member of the Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful p ...

and Count Folke Bernadotte on behalf of the

and the ‘white bus’ operation.

After the war

After being freed from Mauthausen, Chombart de Lauwe arrived in Paris on 1 May 1945. She then returned to her home on the island of Bréhat and began the task of rebuilding herself, psychologically and physically. She resumed her medical studies and married

Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe (4 August 1913, Cambrai – 11 January 1998, Antony), was a noted French urban sociologist. He was strongly influenced by the Chicago school and was an early advocate of participatory planning.Newsome, W. Brian (2008 ...

. They had 4 children. She became politically active in the fight against torture during the Algerian War. In 1954, she joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

) and worked with Georges Heuyer, head of the child psychiatry department at the Salpêtrière hospital. A member of the League of Human Rights, she is part of the collegial presidency of the National Federation of Resistant and Patriotic Deportees and Internees (FNDIRP) and, since 1996, has chaired the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation, succeeding

in this role. With her husband Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, Chombart de Lauwe did sociological research in the National Center for Ethnology. Her research focused on women and children.

Distinctions

* Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur in 2021; Grand officier in 2008. * Médaille de la Résistance française. 31 March 1947.

References

* This article is, in part, a translation of the francophone Wikipedia page, :Fr:Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe. {{DEFAULTSORT:Chombart de Lauwe, Marie-Jose 1923 births Living people Female resistance members of World War II French women in World War II Auschwitz concentration camp survivors Ravensbrück concentration camp survivors Witnesses to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg Commanders of the Legion of Honour People from Paris