In her memoir God Remained Outside, the French Resistance fighter Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz tells of her imprisonment in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck, where around fifty thousand died.75 She prayed there, throwing herself ‘on the mercy of the Father’. She remembers being ‘answered not even by silence – but by the wretched sound of my own distress’. Certain she is about to be killed, de Gaulle-Anthonioz then asks: ‘My God . . . Why hast Thou forsaken me?’76 – the question Jesus asks in the Bible.
