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Elise Rivet born January 19, 1890, in Draria, Algeria - died March 30, 1945, Ravensbrück, Germany, was a Roman Catholic nun and war heroine.
The daughter of a French naval officer, she joined the convent of the medical
sisters, "Notre Dame de Compassion" in Lyon. In 1933 she became "Mère Marie Elisabeth de
l'Eucharistie," the convent's Mother Superior. After the fall of France to Germany in
World War II, she made the decision to fight evil and began to hide
refugees from the Gestapo and eventually used her convent to store weapons and
ammunition for the Mouvements Unis de Résistance (MUR).
On March 24, 1944 she and her assistant were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the prison at Fort Montluc in Lyon. From
there she was taken to Romainville
before being shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin,
Germany. There, stripped of her religious garments, she was forced into hard labor. With the end of the War in sight, the
Germans began a massive amount of killings in the gas chamber including a weakened and starving Mother Elise Rivet, on March 30, 1945 only weeks before the war ended.
In 1961, the government of France honored her with her portrait on a postage stamp and a street bearing her
name in Brignais (Lyon) was inaugurated
on December 2, 1979. In 1997, she was posthumously awarded the Médaille des Justes and
in 1999 the "Salle Elise Rivet" was named for her at the Institut des Sciences de l'Homme in Lyon.
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