was interned until February 15 at the , and on March 20 was secretly moved to La Santé Prison – here she stayed until August when she was transferred to Romainville, an internment camp under German authority. Like her companions, among whom were Danielle Casanova and Heidi Hautval, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the internment camp of Compiègne in the convoy of January 24, 1943, said to be the convoy of "31,000" (see the Memorial of the deportees of France to the title of repression, by the La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation, 2004 and The Convoy of 24 January, by Charlotte Delbo, Midnight Editions, 1965). Others in the convoy included Danielle Casanova and Madeleine Passot. Singular in its composition, this convoy of 230 women, Resistance members, communists, and Gaullist wives of Resistance members, was illustrated in La Marseillaise by crossing the entrance of the camp of Birkenau; only 49 of these 230 women returned from the camps after the war. Vaillant-Couturier was in Auschwitz for 18 months, where she witnessed the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies and took part in the international clandestine resistance committee of the camp. She was then transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in August 1944. Initially assigned to earthworks, she was transferred to the revier (camp infirmary) because of her knowledge of the German language. Ravensbrück was liberated on April 30, 1945 by the Red Army. Vaillant-Couturier returned to France on June 25, 1945. During the interim weeks, she devoted herself to the patients' repatriation. According to a June 16, 1945 article in Le Monde, “Each day, this magnificent Frenchwoman makes the rounds, uplifting courage, giving hope where it is often but illusion. The word "holiness" comes to mind when one sees this grand sister of charity near these men and these women who are dying every day." Social and political engagement In 1945, she successively participated in the Provisional Consultative Assembly and the two Constituent Assemblies and was then elected as a French Communist Party (PCF) deputée, member of parliament for the Seine (1946–1958; 1962–1967), then for Val-de-Marne until 1973. She twice was vice-president of the French National Assembly, from 1956 to 1958 and 1967 to 1968, and later became its honorary vice-president. In 1946, she was elected Secretary-General of the Women's International Democratic Federation and in 1979 was elected vice-president of the Union des femmes française (today