Josette Molland was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She was captured by German forces and imprisoned in Romainville, Ravensbrück and Holleischen.

The New York Times explains:

She survived, after witnessing and enduring repeated episodes of brutality. Later, after her return to France, she spoke to students about her experiences for years.

In the 1980s, however, worrying that her story wasn’t getting through to them, she concluded that telling the young of her camp life was not enough. She would have to show them. So she set about painting, from painful memory, scenes of the harsh incarceration that she and many other female inmates had suffered. She produced 15 paintings in all, in folk-art style. Here are five of them, with the text she wrote to accompany them.


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