In the Chombart de Lauwe home, the family listened to the voice of London from a radio hidden behind a painting.

»[2] In the fall of 1941, she began studying medicine in at the university in Rennes and obtained an Ausweis (pass) which allowed her to travel in a prohibited area towards the coast to see her parents.

[2] She was part of ‘the Bande à Sidonie’[3] (a resistance network with units in Tréguier, Lannion, Perros-Guirec and Paimpol).

[4] The group was created by her mother and then integrated into the ‘Georges France 31’ network linked to the British Intelligence Service.

[5] The group provided aid to downed British aviators trying to escape to Great Britain and in the transmission to London of information on Germany's coastal defences.

There, she encountered the prominent resistant, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, and managed to communicate through the cement toilets with her neighbor, France Bloch-Sérazin.

The sentence was later commuted to 'NN' deportation (Nacht und Nebel, or 'night and fog', which meant the person was a political prisoner who was not allowed contact with the outside world and whose burial place should remain secret[1]).

[1] She described the purpose of these seemingly trivial, but extremely dangerous acts as: « We wanted to remain thoughtful and thinking beings by offering something on birthdays, even a poem.”[6] On 24 February 1944, her father died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Chombart de Lauw also witnessed the forced sterilization of Gypsy women and the medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on young Polish resistance fighters from Block 32 of the NN.

After the war, she testified against Fritz Suhren, commander of the Ravensbrück camp from 1942 to 1945, who was prosecuted by a French military court and executed for crimes against humanity.

Chombart de Lauw described her work in the Kinderzimmer as follows:The two worst things I encountered in Ravensbrück were the ‘rabbits’, that's what we called the unfortunate women who were used in Nazi experiments, and the babies (...) They looked like old men.

[7] In 1954, she joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and worked with Georges Heuyer, head of the child psychiatry department at the Salpêtrière hospital.

A member of the League of Human Rights, she is part of the collegial presidency of the National Federation of Resistant and Patriotic Deportees and Internees (FNDIRP) and, since 1996, has chaired the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation, succeeding Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier in this role.