Élise Rivet

Who was Élise Rivet?

Élise Rivet was a Roman Catholic nun and World War II heroine.

The daughter of a French naval officer, she joined the convent of the medical sisters of Notre Dame de Compassion in Lyon. In 1933 she became Mère Marie Élisabeth de l'Eucharistie, the convent's Mother Superior. After the fall of the French Third Republic to Nazi Germany in World War II, she began hiding refugees from the Gestapo and eventually used her convent to store weapons and ammunition for the Mouvements Unis de Résistance.

On March 24, 1944, she and her assistant were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Montluc prison 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 round of killings by gas chamber which included Mother Élise on March 30, 1945, only weeks before Germany surrendered unconditionally. She was 55 years old.