General's Niece

Based on interviews with family members, former associates, prominent historians, and never-before-seen papers written by Genevieve de Gaulle, The General's Niece is the first English-language biography of Charles de Gaulle's niece and daughter-figure, Genevieve. Journalist Paige Bowers leads readers through the remarkable life of this young woman who risked death to become one of the most devoted foot soldiers of the French Resistance. Beginning with small acts of defiance, she eventually ferried arms and false transit letters to fellow resistants and distributed the nation's largest underground newspaper, until she was finally arrested and sent to the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp. The General's Niece reveals the horrors the young de Gaulle witnessed and endured there that could have broken her spirit, but instead inspired her many remaining years of activism on behalf of former prisoners. Bowers details de Gaulle's later years, during which she continued to stand up for what was humane and just, participating in campaigns to help France's neediest citizens and to force the Germans to pay restitution to a group of Polish women on whom the Nazis had performed crippling experiments at Ravensbruck.