In 1941 a twenty-one year old war widow, Jacqueline Pery d'Alincourt, joined the French Resistance in Paris through the agency of Témoinage Chrétien, the primary movement of the spiritual resistance against Nazism. In the autumn of 1942 she worked with Jean Ayral for the BCRA (the Gaullist Free French Intelligence Bureau in London). She was then appointed to the staff of Jean Moulin by Daniel Cordier, Moulin's closest assistant in France, and worked as a codeuse (decoder) while assuming other dangerous duties. Arrested in September, 1943, Jacqueline was deported to Ravensbrück, the notorious womens' concentration camp where she joined her friend Geneviève de Gaulle, along with Germain Tillon, Anise Postel and Margarete Buber-Neumann. Upon her return to France she married Pierre Pery, a resister whom she had met in underground activities and who had been liberated from Buchenwald.

The first part of the book is devoted to Jacqueline's gathering of Notes from 1943 pertaining to her activities in the Resistance; her Lettres addressed to her family from Fresnes Prison and from the train that transported her to Germany; her Notes written at Ravensbrück describing that hellish place and the savage cruelty that Nazi overseers inflicted upon their victims; her Journal de Voyage back to France through a devastated Europe; and her primary writings of temoignage composed during the next four decades.

The second part of the text presents certain hitherto unpublished documents of truly significant importance: the Journal de Guerre et Prison of Joseph d'Alincourt, her first husband and valiant military officer who died in a POW camp in Germany; the Carnets de guerre of Jean Ayral, young military resister closely associated with Jean Moulin; the Lettres of Louis Daniélou, a naval officer operating clandestine missions for de Gaulle in North Africa; the Témoignages of three concentration camp deportees who were friends and associates of Pierre Pery in the camps: Émile Gente; Jean Boisset, and P.G. Kouyoumdjian; and a moving text by Geneviève de Gaulle about Jacqueline in the Resistance.

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