French Resistance fighter, writer

Germaine Tillion, 100, a celebrated anthropologist and French Resistance fighter during World War II, who wrote about her experiences in a Nazi camp, died April 19 at her home near Paris.

Tillion -- who was sent in 1943 to the Nazi camp for women and children in Ravensbruck, Germany, for her work with France’s underground network -- was the recipient of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, one of France’s highest distinctions.

In a 1988 book on the camp, Tillion wrote that she had managed to survive “thanks to luck, to anger, to the desire to bring these crimes to light, and, finally, to the bonds of friendship.”

After the end of the war, Tillion devoted herself to documenting the history of France’s resistance to German occupation. She was also a prominent voice against the French colonial presence in Algeria and spoke out against torture.

Tillion was born May 30, 1907, in Allegre, France. Her father was a judge and her mother a writer.

She studied anthropology and conducted several years of field work in Algeria during the 1930s. Living in the eastern Aures region, she studied the semi-nomadic Ah-Abderrahmane tribe, according to the Germaine Tillion Assn.

Tillion’s 700-page ethnography on the tribe disappeared during her internment at Ravensbruck, according to her association’s website. Tillion reconstructed the study from memory decades later, and “Il etait une foi l’ethnographie” (Once Upon an Ethnography) was finally published in 2000.

--

-- From Times Staff and Wire Reports