Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding that “life in Ravensbrück was not nearly as terrible as we’ve been told”. De Renty stared at the woman for a moment, before explaining icily that a typical day in the camp began by stepping over the corpses of friends who had died in the night. They would probably have no eyes, she added, since the rats had already eaten them. And with that, the comtesse stood up and swept out.

Ravensbrück always had a credibility issue, explains Lynne Olson in this consistently thoughtful book. The camp, although only 50 miles north of Berlin, had been liberated late, which gave the SS plenty of time to burn incriminating records. There was limited visual evidence, too, since no cameramen accompanied the Soviet army when it knocked down the gates on 30 April 1945. While images from Auschwitz and Dachau of starving prisoners and rotting corpses were flashed before a horrified world, Ravensbrück left little trace in the moral imagination.

The camp – which, unusually, was single sex – is better known now, thanks in part to Sarah Helm’s outstanding 2015 book If This Is a Woman. Helm not only drew on new documentary evidence that became available with the fall of the iron curtain, but also interviewed many of Ravensbrück’s elderly survivors. Olson, by contrast, focuses on just one small subgroup, the handful of French resistance members who arrived from 1942 onwards. She follows them from arrest, deportation and internment right through to the distinctive and coordinated way that they lobbied for recognition and reparations after the war.

Ravensbrück had been built to house 3,000 women, but at its peak held more than 45,000 Jews, Roma, and other groups considered enemies by the Third Reich. There was one latrine per 200 prisoners. Medical intervention was more likely to kill than save and minor ailments quickly escalated into matters of life and death. One woman with a tooth abscess died of septicaemia within a few days. Over a period of six years, around 40,000 women lost their lives through starvation, disease, torture, medical experiments and, from December 1944, a gas chamber that the SS hurriedly installed, having underestimated how long it would take to work everyone to death at the nearby Siemens factory.

Even before they arrived at Ravensbrück, the résistantes had been designated by the Germans as falling under the Nacht und Nebel [night and fog] decree, political prisoners targeted for disappearance. Olson shows how the Frenchwomen turned this vaporous status to their advantage, flitting from block to block under cover of darkness to deliver medicine, tapping out messages along pipes and orchestrating strikes in munitions factories. They specialised, too, in a certain Gallic insouciance, delighting in subverting the heavy-footed Germans without letting on exactly how it had been done.

But they knew too that their indeterminate status would make it doubly difficult to explain to the postwar world what they had been through. To be believed, they needed to find a way of documenting their experience. Step forward Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist who had completed years of PhD study on the Berbers of Algeria before having her notes confiscated when she was arrested at the Gare de Lyon in 1942.

Deported to Ravensbrück, Tillion embarked on an anthropological study of camp life. She noted the names of guards, dates of transports and details of gas chamber “selections”, carefully disguising her data as recipes for dishes she might cook in happier times. Dispersing her notes among trusted friends, Tillion reassembled her material after the war, publishing her seminal work, Ravensbrück, in 1946 and adding to it as she unearthed new sources. The final updated version appeared in 1988.

Tellingly, Tillion could not find a French publisher for her book – it came out under a Swiss imprint – due to that country’s reluctance to confront its own war record and high levels of collaboration. In the face of this wilful amnesia, the women of Ravensbrück founded the National Association of Former Female Deportees and Internees of the Resistance (ADIR) through which they lobbied for housing, healthcare and employment for survivors. It is this phase that gives Olson’s account of the “Ravensbrück Sisterhood” its satisfying final act.

The ADIR’s biggest task was to ensure that the thousands of SS officials, guards and others who had worked at Ravensbrück were brought to justice: of the 38 men and women put on trial, 19 were executed, with the rest given either prison sentences or acquitted. As ever, lack of documentary evidence was the sticking point: oral testimony, though compelling, could easily be dismissed by defence barristers as “hearsay”. Furious at what they considered a gross miscarriage of justice, the résistantes continued to push for prosecutions despite a diminishing appetite in the culture at large.

In 1950, Ravensbrück’s former commandant Fritz Suhren was finally arrested while working as a waiter in a Berlin beer cellar. This time, Tillion’s contemporaneous notes were allowed to be read at trial, and she was able to show that the wretched Suhren, who claimed to have had nothing to do with the gassing of inmates, had indeed signed an order for the execution of 500 women on 6 April 1945. On 12 June 1950 he faced a firing squad.

Lynne Reid Banks, author of ‘The Indian in the Cupboard,’ dies at 94

Apr 05 2024

Lynne Reid Banks, a versatile British author who began her writing career with the best-selling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” but found her biggest success with the popular children’s book “The Indian in the Cupboard,” died on Thursday in Surrey, England. She was 94.

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It is quite rare to find a writer like Lynne Reid Banks, who tries so many different subjects, and so many different ways of writing. The author of The L-Shaped Room and The Indian in the Cupboard, who died on Thursday aged 94, was a writer I admired and liked a lot – and someone who helped me find a pathway for myself.

I have a huge admiration for the breadth of her writing. Her first novel was for adults, The L-Shaped Room. It was a great hit, and was adapted into a film. Where do you go after that? And the answer was, she didn’t follow the commerce, she didn’t go to Hollywood or spend time just writing film scripts. She went on writing what she cared about.

Then – thank goodness – she turned to writing children’s books, and again, rather quickly became immensely successful with The Indian in the Cupboard. Lynne Reid Banks wrote 48 books, but it isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the fact that she wrote books that are going to be read again and again and again. It’s about the fact she had an individual voice and she tried things out, she experimented. And it’s about the fact that she knew that, as writers for children, we have to pass on the things we’re passionate about.

Lynne took on subjects that others didn’t think you ought to include in children’s books – she knew that if you write about these things in the right way with the right voice and you don’t traumatise, then that is what literature should be for young people. My favourite of her books, and the first I read, is The Indian in the Cupboard. The depth and complexity of it is quite extraordinary. It is one of those books that crosses that ridiculous divide made between adults and children. The notion that somehow you stop being one and then become the other is nonsense, and she knew that.

Her writing displayed her extraordinary spirit – a spirit I have tried to imitate in my own work. She wrote about what she wanted to in the way that she wanted to do it, and didn’t follow trends. She was was a wonderful off-piste writer, and a wonderful off-piste person as well. She broke the glass ceiling in all sorts of different ways: before I knew her, she was one of the first female news reporters on British television.

I knew her for about 40 years off and on, and “warm” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of her. She was wholehearted in her appreciation of others, and extremely passionate about children’s art and children’s literature.

We coincided in so many ways. She and I both felt passionately against the way the national curriculum seems to be all about testing and outcomes. If you wish to encourage children to read or paint or do drama, you have to leave room in the day for that, and room in the lives of children to express the creative side of themselves. Lynne knew that instinctively, and I think that may well have been thanks to the time she spent living and teaching on a kibbutz in Israel. She was working out in the open with children, where they were close to nature, growing their sense of the planet around them and their belonging to that planet.

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Her work there was not dissimilar to the work I do with my charity Farms for City Children, through which we give classes of children the chance to spend time on one of our farms, working with them out on the land, digging with them in the vegetable garden and helping them to lamb sheep. Lynne and I had a very close connection about the importance of the land – she felt instinctively that being in nature was something that was very good for children’s welfare and wellbeing. She was talking about that a long time before other people.

Fourteen years my senior, to some extent she was like an auntie to me: very encouraging, never critical. We wouldn’t see each other for five or six years, and then she’d ring up out of the blue, about something I’d said. She gave me good advice, and I always felt that she was encouraging me a little further down some route. If I was being a bit belligerent about the way children are being taught in school, she was encouraging me to do more. I felt like I was a sort of clockwork friend of hers: when we got together, she would wind me up a bit to keep me going.

There won’t be another person who has had the extraordinary life that she had. I shall miss her a lot.

As told to Lucy Knight

Lynne Reid Banks, who has died aged 94, hit a jackpot with her first book, The L-Shaped Room (1960), the story of an unmarried middle-class girl, Jane Graham, who takes a dingy room in London to hide her unwanted pregnancy. The novel was a cracking read that caught the cusp of a momentous change in social attitudes. Its profile rose even higher when it became a film in 1962, with Leslie Caron playing its heroine. It sold in its millions and never went out of print.

This success was both a blessing and curse for Reid Banks. In the decades that followed, she published nine further novels (two of them sequels to The L-Shaped Room), two award-winning volumes of biographical fiction on the lives of the Brontës, two books about Israel and numerous books for younger readers. But nothing she wrote ever matched the acclaim for The L-Shaped Room.

Reid Banks was a dramatic and dynamic woman who lived her life with gusto. If the slights of the literary world sometimes hurt her, they never quenched the energy and passion she brought to her work. Stories flowed effortlessly from her pen, characterised by lively dialogue, well-crafted plots and compulsive readability.

The Indian in the Cupboard (1980), a children’s book she wrote for and dedicated to her youngest son, Omri, came closest to her first success, in sales, translation into 20 languages and transformation into a Hollywood film in 1995. That pleased her. But in the same year, she expressed outrage that her longstanding publishers had turned down her latest adult novel. She nevertheless found another publisher and received considerable praise for Fair Exchange (1998), a book she dedicated to her friend Norma Kitson, whose remarkable struggle against apartheid in South Africa infuses its story.

Lynne was born in Barnes, London, the only child of a Scottish doctor, James Reid Banks, and an Irish actor, Muriel (nee Marsh, who went by the stage name Muriel Alexander), and began her education at a Catholic boarding school. At the start of the second world war, aged 10, she travelled with her mother and a cousin to Canada, which she thoroughly enjoyed. On her return to London, she went to Rada, and thence began acting in provincial rep, like the heroine of The L-Shaped Room.

It was during this period that she met and enraged the young John Osborne, whose first wife, the actor Pamela Lane, was her close friend. Osborne’s letters revealed not only his dislike of her, but the probability that she inspired one of the main characters in his own first success, Look Back in Anger.

A combative streak in Reid Banks got her into spats all her life. But she was no less forthright in her judgments of herself than of others. She did not hesitate to call herself a failed actress, failed playwright (of several plays) and failed television reporter, before her true career took off.

In the doldrums, she began writing freelance journalism, and when she went to interview the head of the embryonic ITN for the Radio Times, she also talked him into employing her. She thereby became one of the first two female reporters on television in 1955. This did not satisfy her for long, however, as (she claimed) they only gave her “the rubbish” to do. When she complained, they put her into a cubbyhole and set her to work writing scripts.

Bored stiff, she began using ITN’s stationery supplies and time to start work on her first novel. She later recalled how the newsreader Reginald Bosanquet would read a page off her typewriter in mocking amusement. But the laugh was on Reggie when the Evening Standard later ran the headline: “ITN girl sells film script for £25,000.” The real sum for The L-Shaped Room was £20,000, but that was still princely in those days.

She was not happy with the film, which changed the book’s story. It was a hit, but it took her 30 years to forgive the director, Bryan Forbes. It also infuriated her that people assumed she had written of single motherhood from personal experience, rather than imagination. Although on the crest of a wave of fame, money and success, Reid Banks left the country and did not return for a decade.

She had met the man whom in 1965 she was to marry, the Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson, while he was visiting Britain. She was not Jewish, but she went out to Israel and loved it, becoming an Israeli citizen. The couple lived on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee, and their three sons were born there.

It surprised but delighted her, soon after her arrival in Israel, to be asked to leave her hot, tiring work in the vineyards to teach English to a class of children. She threw herself into this new occupation with zeal, relishing the chance to use her acting skills, and achieved outstanding results.

But as the years went by, she missed Britain, and in the early 1970s she came back, the family settling uncomfortably at first in the London suburbs, but later living happily in a farmhouse in Beaminster, Dorset, and later still settling in Shepperton in Surrey. Her output of books for children continued (she produced many sequels and series), and she travelled, gardened and wrote for newspapers.

Chaim died in 2016. Reid Banks is survived by her sons, Adiel, Gillon and Omri, and her grandchildren, Daniel, David and Paloma.

The author Lynne Reid Banks has died at the age of 94.

Known for books such as the children’s story The Indian in the Cupboard, she died of cancer “peacefully with her family around her” on Thursday afternoon, her agent, James Wills, said.

Her son Gillon Stephenson said she “leaves a massive legacy of wonderful work”, adding that every day he “receives messages from people saying what a difference she has made”.

The author was born in Barnes, south-west London, in 1929. She was evacuated with her mother and cousin Christopher in 1940 during the second world war to Saskatoon in the Canadian prairies for five years.

After returning to England, Reid Banks attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) before becoming a secretary and a freelance journalist.

In 1955, she became one of the first female news reporters on British TV, appearing on ITN for six years where she interviewed stars including Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Louis Armstrong and Agatha Christie.

During her downtime from journalism she wrote a novel, The L-Shaped Room, which was an unexpected hit and was later turned into a film, landing Leslie Caron an Oscar nomination for best actress, as well as a Bafta and Golden Globe award.

Caron played a young woman who is planning to have an abortion, but later rejects the idea, and rents an odd room in a boarding house where she falls in love with an aspiring actor.

In 1962, Reid Banks emigrated to Israel after meeting the Liverpool-born sculptor Chaim Stephenson, whom she later married. They had three sons.

Returning to England in 1971, Reid Banks said she “stumbled upon the idea of bringing a toy plastic American Indian to life in a magic cupboard” for a children’s book.

The first book from the series was released in 1980. A fantasy story about a boy whose toy magically comes to life, it was turned into a film in 1995 starring Steve Coogan and Richard Jenkins.

She wrote many children’s stories during her career, including The Red Red Dragon, Tiger Tiger, Angela and Diabola and the picture book The Spice Rack.