French Resistance fighter Germaine Tillion dies at 100

PARIS (AP) - Germaine Tillion, a French World War II Resistance fighter and celebrated anthropologist, died Saturday, her association said. She was 100.
Tillion, who wrote about her experiences in a Nazi camp, died at her home in Saint-Mande, located in the Paris region, said the head of the Germaine Tillion Association, Tzvetan Todorov.

Tillion—who was sent in 1943 to the Nazi camp for women and children in Ravensbruck, Germany, for her work with France's underground Resistance network—was the recipient of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, one of France's highest distinctions. She was one of only five women to have received such an honor, the government said.

She wrote extensively about her experiences in the camp, revisiting through her work the place where her mother died, according to a biography appearing on her association's Web site.

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."

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