Born: 17 December 1895, Ireland
Died: 19 June 1971
Country most active: France
Also known as: Sister Marie-Laurence
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
McCarthy, Kate (Katherine, Sr Marie-Laurence, Sr Kate) (1895–1971), Franciscan nun and member of the French resistance during the second world war, was born on 17 December 1895 in Driminidy North, Drimoleague, Co. Cork, to Daniel McCarthy, a famer, and his wife Mary (née O’Driscoll). The eldest of nine children (her siblings were Ellen, Cornelius, Mary, Daniel, Denis, Honora, Jane and James), McCarthy was part of a large, close-knit family; her paternal grandmother Katherine McCarthy lived with them, while one maternal uncle, Daniel O’Driscoll, was a doctor in Inchingerig (about 5km from Drimoleague) and another, Denis O’Driscoll, became parish priest of nearby Enniskean. McCarthy first attended Derryclough national school in the parish of Drimoleague and Drinagh, and then went to Drimoleague national school. There is no record of her attending secondary school, and the 1911 census gives her occupation as ‘farmer’s daughter’ rather than ‘scholar’, suggesting she had left education by that date.
In 1913 McCarthy joined the order of the Franciscan Sisters of Calais (now the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady) based in the north of France. Some years before, Cork woman Marie Catherine Crowley had joined the order, taking the religious name Sr Marie de Bethanie. She was a highly influential member of the order, rising to become mother superior of the house in Calais; numerous Irish women followed her example, and it is quite possible that she also inspired McCarthy to choose that particular order. McCarthy began her novitiate in Calais, taking the religious name Sr Marie-Laurence, and when the first world war broke out she was sent to nurse as part of the 4th English Ambulance at St Jean’s Hospital in Béthune, some 70km south-east of Calais. Béthune was an important railway junction and the large hospital there became a major centre for allied and civilian casualties, as well as some German wounded. Until 1917 the town was relatively unscathed, but the numbers in the local cemetery are testimony to the fighting that took place nearby – more than 3,200 war casualties are buried there, of which 2,933 were British, fifty-five Canadian, and the remainder German. Until May 1918 McCarthy and the other nursing sisters lived in rooms beside the hospital, nursing casualties regardless of nationality, but on 21 May a bombardment destroyed large parts of the town. Over 100 civilians were killed and the sisters were evacuated. McCarthy returned to Calais, then moved to Versailles and finally, on 5 December 1918, she took her final vows in Helfaut, a town halfway between Calais and Béthune, where the order had a sanitorium.
On 10 May 1919 McCarthy and five other sisters (four of whom were also Irish) boarded the SS Rochambeau for the five-day sailing from Le Havre to New York. From there the sisters spent another two days and nights travelling by train to Monroe, Louisiana, where Mother Marie de Bethanie had established the order’s first sanitorium in the United States in 1913. McCarthy worked as a nursing sister in Monroe for twenty years, despite the challenging conditions – malaria was rife, temperatures were often unbearable and she suffered ill-health – then returned to France in April 1940, just weeks before the start of the battle of France (10 May–25 June).
McCarthy’s involvement with the French resistance evolved from her nursing activities: she resumed nursing in Béthune, which had been rebuilt in the inter-war years. This brought her into contact with injured British and French prisoners of war who were treated in the hospital after the surrender of France, before being shipped off to prisoner-of-war camps throughout occupied Europe. These soldiers were looking to escape to the unoccupied zone, and McCarthy let them know ‘cryptically and carefully’ that such a thing could be done (Prévost, 12). Following Charles de Gaulle’s famous ‘appeal’ from London on 18 June 1940, widely considered the beginning of French resistance, people around France organised into groups willing to oppose the German occupation. Béthune was no different. McCarthy, along with widowed garage owner Sylvette Leleu, café owner Angèle Tardiveau, first world war veteran Jules Andrieux, Robert Henneton and René Sénéchal, provided the escaping soldiers with clothes, identity cards and money. By November 1940 Béthune’s resistance had grown to about thirty members and had established links with the much larger Musée de l’Homme resistance in Paris, led by Boris Vildé and Paul Rivet. This group aided escaped prisoners, circulated the propaganda newspapers Résistance and Vérité and gathered intelligence to send on to the French government in exile in London. As part of the bigger resistance network, McCarthy smuggled allied prisoners out of Béthune hospital as far as Tardiveau’s café; there they hid until Leleu could smuggle them in her car out of Béthune and on to Marseille, from where they travelled over the mountains and into Spain or Portugal. In all, McCarthy and her group assisted perhaps 200 allied servicemen in evading imprisonment. In addition, she also began gathering intelligence, translating it and sending it on to Paris to be forwarded to London.
In February 1941 the Musée de l’Homme’s activities were abruptly halted when Albert Gaveau, a mechanic and confidant of Vildé, proved to be a double agent. He reported the group’s activities to the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and they were rounded up and interrogated. A courier from Béthune was caught up in the arrests who, under torture, informed on other members of the group. In April Leleu was arrested and, two months later, on 18 June, McCarthy, along with an English nun, Sr Marie-Ursule, civilian nurse André Bart, and the doorkeeper Lantial were escorted from the hospital by members of the Gestapo. For the next thirteen months, McCarthy was kept in solitary confinement, initially in the local jail in Béthune and then in Loos prison. During that time, she endured five ‘difficult’ interrogations with the Gestapo; according to her witness statement, her greatest worry was that she would implicate others (Prévost, 13).
On 8 January 1942 nineteen members of the Musée de l’Homme went on trial before a German court charged with spying for an enemy power. Ten were sentenced to death, seven of whom were shot on 23 February (Boris Vildé, Jules Andrieu, Georges Ithier, Anatole Lewitsky, Léon Nordmann, Pierre Walter and René Sénéchal). McCarthy was one of several tried before a military tribunal in Lille on 11 July. She and Henneton were sentenced to death, the others to several years hard labour each. Henneton’s sentence was carried out on 31 July (he reportedly died singing ‘La Marseillais’ and a modern-day street in Béthune is named in his honour) but McCarthy was left in limbo – the sentence continued to hang over her and she spent each subsequent day ‘waiting and getting ready … to serve the same sentence’ (Prévost, 15). Her sentence was eventually commuted to deportation and, along with 5,000 other French resistance fighters, she became a victim of Hitler’s nacht und nebel (‘night and fog’) decree. This decree, issued on 7 December 1941, allowed German authorities to move individuals alleged to be endangering German security so that they effectively disappeared without a trace.
McCarthy’s journey over the next two years was exhausting; dressed in prison garb, she was put on a railway cattle-truck with other prisoners (she was the only woman) and brought to Brussels, from where they were marched in formation to the prison at Saint-Gilles, some 4km away. Struggling to keep pace during the march, McCarthy was physically assaulted by a German soldier. Ten days later she was sent to the women’s prison in Anrath (now Willich) near Düsseldorf where, to her great joy, she was reunited with Sylvette Leleu. The two women, in their separate cells, communicated via morse code tapped out on pipes and bars. From Anrath, McCarthy and Leleu were moved to Essen, then Bremen, Hamburg and eventually to Lübeck in December 1942, where they were reunited with Tardiveau. By this point McCarthy’s weight had dropped to 42kg and her legs had started to swell. The women were put to work in the various prisons in which they were held, but even in such punishing circumstances were able to commit small acts of defiance – buttons thrown down a toilet instead of sewn onto shirts, belts for paratroopers were poorly made in the hope the parachute would fail to deploy, ‘La Marseillaise’ was sung loudly one night (which earned them two days without rations).
McCarthy, Tardiveau and Leleu were in Lübeck until May 1944 from where they were sent to Cottbus in eastern Prussia. Conditions for the women deteriorated significantly from this point – they were in the care of the Gestapo, rations were increasingly smaller and there were regular beatings. When the three women refused to aid the German war effort by making gas masks in November 1944, they were transported to Fürsternberg and then on to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, 80km north of Berlin. At its height, the camp held about 45,000 women and over its six years of existence around 130,000 women passed through its gates. Estimates of deaths in the camp range between 30,000 and 90,000. McCarthy later described Ravensbrück as an ‘infernal word that left all the women who knew it a horrible memory. The hell of Dante was not worse. Those who went there could say that, after a few hours stay, they had to abandon any hope’ (Prévost, 27). The horrors that McCarthy witnessed and endured in the camp reflect the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of inmates of prison and concentration camps during the war: beatings and torture, inmates forced to stand in silence for hours in rain and snow as fellow prisoners collapsed from hunger and exhaustion, starvation, hard labour and unethical medical experiments. At one point McCarthy became dangerously ill and was brought to the infirmary where the sick were ‘treated’. She found the unit terrifying: ‘[the other patients had] skeleton-like bodies, with swollen bellies, battered and scarred flesh, purulent wounds, infected abscesses, ageless carcasses. With their shaved heads, their toothless mouths, some of those grinning faces frightened me’ (Prévost, 33). By her account, thirty French women died in one night from dysentery. In addition, there was the terror of the ‘huntsman’, a camp guard who examined the women every morning, assessing them for illness or weakness. Selected women were herded into a truck and transported to a crematorium outside the camp. From January 1945 there was also a gas chamber. McCarthy was selected by the ‘huntsman’ on four occasions, but each time she managed to escape – the first time with the help of a Polish woman, the second time by climbing out a window, and final two times by hiding under the beds. She later said she could still hear the sound of the lorry taking away the condemned women, as they were piled up under a wet cover in the early morning hours (Prévost, 35).
Having endured four years of hardship, McCarthy’s final months in Ravensbrück were perhaps the hardest – in the final weeks the camp guards became increasingly brutal. In addition, McCarthy was now alone; when she came out of the infirmary, she discovered that her two friends had been removed to Mauthausen concentration camp. Her suffering came to an end on 25 April 1945 when she boarded a Swedish Red Cross ‘white bus’ which brought her first to Lübeck and then on to Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden. Some days later McCarthy was flown to Scotland and took the train to London where she met her brother Daniel, whom she had not seen since 1936.
In 1946 McCarthy was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance by Charles de Gaulle and the following year she received a commendation from George VI for brave conduct and services during the German occupation of north-west Europe. While in London she also visited Private Albert Poole, one of the British soldiers she had helped to escape (he later described McCarthy as greatly weakened by her ordeal).
For the last two decades of her life, McCarthy lived in her native Cork, following once again in the footsteps of Mother Marie de Bethanie Crowley, who had established a branch of the order in Boreenmanna Road, Cork, in 1928. In 1931 McCarthy moved to the Honan Home in Montenotte at the invitation of the bishop of Cork. The home was run by the order for elderly businessmen who had fallen on hard times. McCarthy took over from de Bethanie as mother superior and remained in charge of Honan Home until her death in 1971. As a result of years of privation and hardship, McCarthy suffered from a weak heart, palpitations and oedema. Her already fragile health continued to decline and on 19 June 1971 she died and was buried in St Finbarr’s cemetery, Cork, beside de Bethanie and Sr Ursula Ryan. While she was alive, McCarthy spoke very little of her experiences during the war, with the exception of the interview she gave to journalist Jean Prévost in 1946. Germaine Tillion, one of France’s leading intellectuals, a member of the Musée de l’Homme resistance network, internee at Ravensbrück and one of only five women to hold the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur, wrote to the French government on two occasions (1947 and again in 1963) asking that McCarthy be awarded the Grand Croix. In recent years there has been a concerted effort to recognise the contribution Irish people made to the resistance during the second world war. On 6 October 2014, McCarthy’s name was included in the fifty Irish people remembered on a special plaque unveiled at the Irish College in Paris, and on 24 May 2024 a plaque was unveiled in her memory in the Franciscan Sisters’ cemetery in Béthune.