The Women Who Refused to Look Away

I have a confession to make.

I am a bit obsessed with France.

The food, the art, the architecture, the language, the history, the way the French can make a loaf of bread feel like a matter of national importance. I love all of it.

And increasingly, I find myself fascinated by the French people themselves—particularly their history of resistance.

I am very much a novice when it comes to studying French history. There is so much I don’t know. But perhaps that is part of the pleasure of it. Every time I learn something, another door opens.

That happened recently when I came across the stories of two women whose names I did not know nearly well enough:

Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion.

Their stories stopped me.

Because these were not women who simply believed certain things.

They acted.

And they did so when acting came with consequences most of us can scarcely imagine.

Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz: Resistance at 20

Geneviève de Gaulle was the niece of General Charles de Gaulle, but her remarkable life deserves to be remembered entirely on its own.

She was only 19 when France fell under German occupation. She began resisting almost immediately. One of her earliest acts was startlingly simple: she tore down a Nazi flag from a bridge in Rennes. She later became involved with organized Resistance networks, eventually joining the clandestine Défense de la France movement. 

Think about that for a moment.

She wasn’t looking back decades later and declaring what she would have done.

She was there.

And she did it.

In July 1943, Geneviève was arrested. After imprisonment at Fresnes, she was deported to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück in 1944. 

She survived.

But perhaps equally remarkable is what she did afterward.

Geneviève devoted much of the rest of her life to human dignity. She worked with survivors of the camps and later became deeply involved with ATD Fourth World, fighting extreme poverty. She served as its president for more than two decades and helped advance landmark French legislation against social exclusion. 

Her resistance didn’t end when the war did.

It simply changed form.

Germaine Tillion: Scholar, Resister, Witness

Germaine Tillion was different, yet remarkably similar.

She was an ethnologist and scholar who had spent years studying communities in Algeria. When she returned to France in June 1940 and confronted the German occupation, she concluded that something had to be done.

So she did something.

Tillion became involved in what became known as the Musée de l’Homme Resistance network, helping prisoners of war, gathering intelligence and connecting people working against the occupation. She was arrested in 1942 and eventually deported to Ravensbrück. 

There she met Geneviève.

Imagine the circumstances in which that friendship began.

Two extraordinarily intelligent women imprisoned in one of Nazi Germany’s most brutal concentration camps, surrounded by starvation, disease, forced labor and death.

Yet Tillion continued observing, thinking and documenting.

Remarkably, while imprisoned she even wrote a darkly comic operetta about camp life, Le Verfügbar aux Enfers. Humor became one small means of preserving humanity in a place designed to strip humanity away. 

She survived Ravensbrück and returned to France in 1945. After the war, she documented what had happened in the camps, testified about the experiences of deported women and continued working on questions of justice, torture and human dignity. 

Geneviève and Germaine remained friends for the rest of their lives.

And in 2015, France bestowed upon both women one of its highest honors.

They entered the Panthéon.

The magnificent building in Paris bears the inscription:

Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.

“To great men, the grateful nation.”

For much of its history, that was quite literally true: very few women were honored there. When Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion entered the Panthéon together, France wasn’t merely honoring two women.

It was honoring resistance. 

And I Can’t Help Thinking About America

Historical comparisons require care. America in 2026 is not occupied France, and opposing an elected American administration is not equivalent to participating in the French Resistance against Nazi occupation.

But history does leave us with questions that travel remarkably well across generations.

When you believe something is wrong, what are you willing to do about it?

That question feels very present to me today.

I think about American women who are publicly opposing President Trump and policies of his administration.

Some are famous. Some aren’t.

Jane Fonda, now 88, recently organized a First Amendment event bringing together artists and public figures around free speech and democracy and has continued speaking publicly against actions of the Trump administration. 

Women are also among the attorneys, organizers, journalists, judges, elected officials, nonprofit leaders and ordinary citizens participating in legal challenges, voter-protection efforts and peaceful demonstrations. Ahead of the 2026 midterms, civil-rights organizations and political groups are organizing volunteers, legal strategies and peaceful responses to potential disputes over election administration. 

And just days ago, thousands of Americans gathered at the Kennedy Center in Washington to protest changes being pursued there by Trump and his allies. 

People can—and certainly do—disagree about Donald Trump, MAGA, individual policies and the protests against them.

You know where I stand.

And I want to say something very clearly about the women who have chosen to stand up publicly against things they believe threaten American democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law:

I honor them.

I honor the women carrying signs.

I honor the women filing lawsuits.

I honor the journalists who keep asking uncomfortable questions.

I honor the women showing up at town halls, calling their representatives, writing, organizing and refusing to be intimidated into silence.

And I especially honor the ordinary women whose names will never appear in a history book.

Because that may be one of the most important lessons Geneviève and Germaine leave us.

We know their names today.

But history is largely made by people who don’t know whether anyone will ever remember theirs.

They simply decide:

I cannot look away.

Resistance Doesn’t Always Look Dramatic

There is something else I’ve been thinking about.

You may have noticed that lately I have begun putting three letters after my name:

MBA.

Yes, I earned the degree years ago.

But suddenly I’m using it.

And there is a reason.

For me, putting MBA after my name has become one tiny, admittedly mild, act of resistance.

There’s a story behind that.

And I’ll explain it in another Julie’s Journal.

Consider that a little teaser.

Because resistance doesn’t always involve grand gestures.

Sometimes it is marching.

Sometimes it is testifying.

Sometimes it is writing.

Sometimes it is refusing to remain quiet.

And sometimes it is simply deciding that something you worked very hard to earn is something you’re going to claim publicly.

Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion faced circumstances far beyond anything most of us will ever experience.

I would never diminish their extraordinary courage by pretending otherwise.

Instead, I want to learn from them.

They remind me that courage isn’t something we suddenly acquire when history becomes frightening enough.

We practice it.

In small ways.

Again and again.

Until the moment comes when being silent would require more of us than speaking.

Perhaps that is why these two French women affected me so deeply.

I began reading because I am fascinated by France.

I finished reading thinking about America.

And about women.

And about what it means, in every generation, to refuse to look away.

Thank you, as always, for reading Julie’s Journal. There are an extraordinary number of things competing for your attention every day, and the fact that you choose to spend some of that time here with me means more than you know.

If this essay made you think of someone, please share it with her—or with him. That’s how this little community grows: one reader saying to another, I think you’ll want to read this.

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There is much more to talk about.

Including those three little letters after my name.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

The Mindful Activist