Violette Lecoq (1912-2003) worked for the Red Cross as a nurse from 1939 on. She was active in the French resistance and helped French soldiers to escape, but she was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo, and then deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943. Because she spoke German, she worked as a nurse at the Tbc-block. In April 1945 she could be evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross. The drawings she had made in Ravensbrück were used as evidence in court after the war, for example in the Ravensbrück Trials in Hamburg in 1946/47 against members of the security staff of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Dunya Breur writes: Frenchwoman Violette Lecoq was not a trained painter, but her drawings leave a lasting impression. She drew the rats, the SS, the selection for the gas chamber and also the flames and smoke above the crematorium. In the first Ravensbrück Trial in Hamburg, her drawings served as illustrations of the crimes committed in the concentration camp that no one wanted to believe at the time. Later Violette Lecoq self-published her drawings and also took care of distribution and sales herself, since she had not been able to find a publisher.