Élise Rivet

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Élise Rivet (January 19, 1890, Draria, Algeria – March 30, 1945, Ravensbrück concentration camp, Germany) 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 (MUR). ^{[citation needed]}

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 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.

Legacy

In 1961, the government of France honored her with her portrait on a postage stamp. A street bearing her name was inaugurated in Brignais (Lyon) on December 2, 1979. In 1997, she was posthumously awarded the Médaille des Justes and in 1999 the Salle Élise Rivet was named for her at the Institut des Sciences de l'Homme in Lyon.

External links

Authority control	VIAF: 40187540 GND: 119402343 SUDOC: 103591346

Persondata
Name	Rivet, Elise
Alternative names	Mère Marie Élisabeth de l'Eucharistie
Short description	Roman Catholic nun and Holocaust victim
Date of birth	19 January 1890
Place of birth	Draria, Algeria
Date of death	30 March 1945
Place of death

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