The dawn of hope

the long version

"When the Germans occupied Paris in the summer of 1940, Genevieve de Gaulle, the niece of General Charles de Gaulle, immediately joined the Underground. She was then nineteen. Three years later she was arrested, together with a number of her fellow Resistance members, and incarcerated in Fresnes Prison, one of France's worst. From there she was shipped, in one of the now-legendary cattle cars, to the Nazi death camp Ravensbruck. Miraculously she survived her year-and-a-half-long ordeal, much of it in solitary, and was liberated in 1945."--BOOK JACKET. "For over fifty years she resisted all pleas from family and friends to record her experiences of that nightmare period, then finally yielded and brought forth these brief but searing pages telling what it was like to face death every day as a young woman. It was both a test of endurance and a test of faith."--BOOK JACKET. "Several years after her liberation, visiting a camp of the poor and homeless outside Paris, she recognized in their eyes the same despair she had known in Ravensbruck. From that day on she dedicated her life to improving the lot of the have-nots of this world."--BOOK JACKET.