Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz

Geneviève de Gaulle - Anthonioz ( born October 25, 1920 in Saint -Jean -de- Valériscle; † 14 February 2002 in Paris) was a member of the Resistance and President of the Human Rights Movement ATD Fourth World. For their public ministry, she became the first woman to the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.

Biography

Geneviève de Gaulle grew up as the oldest of three children. Her father was an engineer, her mother died when she was four years old. From 1935 she studied at the University of Rennes history. After the defeat and German occupation of France in June 1940, Geneviève de Gaulle resigned in a niece of Charles de Gaulle, the Resistance and helped in the organization of the intelligence service. Arrested by the French auxiliaries of the Gestapo on 20 July 1943, she was deported on 2 February 1944 in the Ravensbruck concentration camp and kept there on the orders of Heinrich Himmler four months in solitary confinement in order to use them for an exchange of prisoners can. It was released in April 1945. About this time she wrote a book, which was published under the title Through the night in 1999 in German. Later President of ADIR, the national organization of the deported and interned members of the Resistance, she was actively involved in the legal prosecution of Nazi war criminals. In 1987, she appeared as a witness in the trial of Klaus Barbie.

In 1946 she married the art publisher Bernard Anthonioz. Like this, she worked at the Ministry André Malraux and engaged in the Rassemblement du peuple français, the political movement founded by her uncle. In 1958, she met Joseph Wresinski know, Father of the homeless settlement Noisy- le- Grand and founder of ATD Fourth World. After a period of volunteering for this organization she took over their presided over by 1964 to 2001.

In 1988 she became a member of the National Economic and Social Council, on which she campaigned for improved legislation that benefits poor. Designed with the help of their law was passed in 1998 by the French Parliament.

In addition to the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor she was awarded the prize for human rights in France and the world (1994 ), the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de Guerre ( 1939). Charles de Gaulle dedicated his book Mémoires de Guerre ( " war memories ").

In February 2014, the French President François Hollande announced that Geneviève de Gaulle - Anthonioz is transferred together with Pierre Brossolette, Germaine Tillion and Jean Zay to the Panthéon in the coming year.