A trace in the night

October 1943, Ravensbrück camp
Resistance fighter Violette Lecoq is arrested and sent, along with thousands of other women, to the Ravensbrück women’s camp. She shares a cell with Ewa and Aneta, two young Polish women who, despite the general deprivation, manage to provide her with drawing materials. Violette then set about drawing the reality of life in the camp, in the hope that her fate and that of all the women prisoners would one day be known. When Aneta fell ill and was sent to Block 10, from which no sick person ever came out alive, Violette, citing her past as a nurse, asked to be transferred there too. In this poorly equipped infirmary, a veritable death camp, Dr. Louise Le Porz organized a drug trafficking ring without the knowledge of their block leader, Blockova Mory.
When the Nazis sensed that victory was slipping away, they decided to systematically eliminate the prisoners, starting with the sick in Block 10. To ensure that her patients did not disappear without a trace, Louise kept a register parallel to that of the camp, in which she noted the name of each of them. In April 1945, 300 French prisoners were handed over to the Swiss Red Cross, including Louise, who was caught by Mory trying to take her register with her. The block leader let her go, but not before burning the register, convinced that no one would believe her testimony. On May 10, 1945, Louise and Violette were reunited in Paris. Violette had also been able to leave the camp on a Red Cross convoy, taking her 36 drawings with her. Thanks to Violette’s hidden drawings and her testimony, along with that of Louise Le Porz, the Ravensbrück camp officials, guards, and kapos were convicted at the Hamburg trial in 1947.
After the verdict, Violette decided to compile her drawings into an album and to go and talk about her experiences in schools throughout France, so that the world would know and never forget.