From Normandy To The Hell Of Ravensbruck Life and Escape from a Concentration Camp

This memoir is based on a true story and accurate historical details. None of the characters are fictional. I was born in 1942 near the infamous beaches of Normandy. At the time, my great aunt on my father's side, Charlotte Aline Virmoux, called Aline, was 47 years old. She and her husband Louis were active members in a French Resistance network. During my younger years I met her on several occasions and heard about her experiences in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, north of Berlin. But it was not until spring 1962, when I was a student in Paris, the Gay-Lussac Institute, that I started to fully appreciate her story, and who she really was. She lived in a small town, Quincy-sous-Senart, south of Paris where I often visited her: she loved talking to me, and she emptied her heart of so many infamous memories. At age 20 I had already heard many war stories from my family, cousins, and friends but the intensity of these stories never reached anywhere close to Aline's memories. I hope I can do justice to deliver this message where horror becomes daily routine for those who became nothing, brought to a status lower than animals, where dignity became an unthinkable luxury. Yet, following her escape from the concentration camp that was under Russian artillery fire, she managed to save the life of a wounded American soldier, showing amazing bravery.