A new book is shining fresh light on the life of an Irish nun who helped save hundreds of people from the Nazis before surviving imprisonment in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
The Nun of Ravensbrück: The Irish Nun Who Defied the Nazis, by historian Cathi Fleming, tells the story of Sr Kate McCarthy, a Franciscan nun from Drimoleague, Co. Cork, who became involved in the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Known in religious life as Soeur Marie Laurence, Sr Kate had first gone to France as a young nun and nurse during the First World War. After returning during the Second World War, she used her work in war hospitals to help Allied soldiers, prisoners of war and others escape Nazi-occupied France.
As part of the Musée de l’Homme resistance network, Sr Kate is believed to have helped some 200 people reach safety before she was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1941. She endured solitary confinement, interrogation and a death sentence before being ‘disappeared’ under Hitler’s ‘Night and Fog’ decree.
She was eventually sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s concentration camp, where she survived forced labour, beatings, typhus and repeated selections for the gas chamber. Liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945, Sr Kate returned to Cork and resumed her vocation caring for elderly men at the Honan Home in Montenotte.
She was decorated by Charles de Gaulle and received a citation from Winston Churchill, though campaigners hope the new book will help win her wider recognition.
