Olga Wormser-Migot (1912–2002)

Olga Wormser-Migot, née Jungelson, was born to a family of Russian Jewish exiles in Nancy, France. Her parents were Véra Halfin, a left-wing lawyer, and Arcady Jungelson, a revolutionary and agronomist, who had fled separately from Tsarist Russia after the failure of the 1905 revolution and met in Geneva. Her younger sister Hélène Parmelin became a noted writer and journalist. Olga graduated from the Lycée Fénélon and studied history at the Sorbonne. She became a history and geography teacher but was fired from her job under the Vichy regime in World War II. She married Henri Wormser in 1948, and André Migot in 1961, and was close to the French Communist Party. In 1944, Wormser was hired by the Ministry of Prisoners, Deportees, and Refugees to trace French deportees in the newly-liberated concentration camps and European archives. The work took her to Germany and Poland. One of her first publications, a treatise on the deportation of women written with Andrée Jacob, appeared in 1946 in an anthology on the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Wormser-Migot was one of the first in France to study the structure and function of the Nazi concentration camp system, and she played a key role in the development of Alain Resnais' landmark documentary film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). Wormser-Migot also was interested in the history of Europe in the 18th century, writing several biographies relating to this period. Her dissertation for her doctorate from the University of Paris, Le système concentrationnaire nazi: 1933-1945, written over a period of 20 years, was finally published in 1968. Her other major works included Les Femmes dans l'histoire (1953), Quand les Alliés ouvrirent les portes (1965), La Résistance (1971), and Le Retour des déportés (1985). In 1971, she was named head of the Department of Documentary Studies at the Institut pédagogique national (today the Institut français de l'éducation).