This drawing appears in the Exhibition "French women in Ravensbrück" presented in Paris from April 18 to 26, 1959, before being installed at the Museum of Ravensbrück, opened in the former prison of the German Nazi concentration camp.
Friends of Ravensbrück
10, rue Leroux – Paris-16th“The call before dawn, with the sick wrapped in blankets,” drawing by Jeanne Letourneau, high school teacher at Lycée Joachim du Bellay in Angers.
This postcard was among the things my grandmother kept that were not personal documents or letters. When I first was going through her papers, I thought that she kept these newspaper items because they reminded her of her own experiences in Vienna or Ravensbrück. However, as I delved deeper, I continue to discover that Helene knew the author (or in this case, the artist). So this is not just an interesting artifact about Ravensbrück, but a drawing by someone she knew personally.
Jeanne Letourneau was imprisoned at Ravensbrück with fellow teachers from Angers, including Lucienne Simier who became a good friend of Helene’s. We saw a letter Helene wrote to Lucienne on January 22 while she was in Istanbul.
You can see other drawings by Jeanne Letourneau which she made in Ravensbrück at the Musée de L’Armée in Paris.
The Museum’s biography states (courtesy of Google Translate): “Jeanne Léonie Antoinette Letourneau was born in Angers on November 13, 1895. She studied drawing in Paris and then became a drawing teacher at the college for young girls Joachim du Bellay in Angers. She was arrested on March 13, 1943 and imprisoned in Angers before being deported "politically" to the Ravensbrück camp where she arrived on April 27, 1943. She remained there until February 1945 then was moved to the Rechlin camp for a few weeks before returning to Ravensbrück between March and April 1945. She was liberated on April 5, 1945 and arrived in Angers on the following April 18. “I weighed 33 kilogr [72 pounds] and was 80 years old,” she wrote, commenting on her physical condition at the time of her release. On her return, she writes an account of these two years spent at Ravensbrück which she calls "Barbarian Clichés" and which accompanies her drawings. Jeanne Letourneau resumed her teaching activity at Angers Lycée until 1955. She was appointed Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor in 1952. The Musée de l'Armée holds in its collections several drawings by Jeanne Letourneau which entered the museum by donation from the artist in 1968. ‘The drawing was for me a happy diversion in the camp although a little dangerous, but I did not think about it.’”
Biographies of Jeanne Letourneau and the other teachers who were deported to Ravensbrück can be found in French at the Lycée Henri Bergson website in Angers.