A Cork nun’s extraordinary life at war

LAST month, during a walking tour of Béthune in northern France, our guide recalled the work of a Cork woman, Kate McCarthy, who nursed wounded soldiers during both world wars. Her niece, Sr Breda McCarthy of the Loreto Convent in Bray, told me this extraordinary woman’s story.

Kate McCarthy was born near Drimoleague in 1895. Aged 18, she joined the Franciscans in Cork and was transferred to Béthune, a beautiful market town with buildings dating back to the 14th Century. When the Great War broke out, Béthune became a major hospital centre. With so many British casualties, English-speaking nurses were, presumably, much in demand. For four terrible years, Kate nursed Allied, and some German, wounded.

Béthune, and its 15,000 citizens, survived the first three years of the conflict almost unscathed. Then, in spring 1918, the Germans launched the ‘Ludendorff offensive’ and the town was soon on the front line. In three days during May of that year, 70,000 shells rained down, destroying 90% of its buildings. The famous belfry, now UNESCO World Heritage listed, was ‘beheaded’ but most of the ancient structure survived. When Kate McCarthy moved to the United States in 1920, she left behind a landscape of ruin and desolation. Photographs exhibited today in the basement of a furniture shop on the Grand Place give a vivid impression of life at that time.

Then reconstruction began. The beautiful facades were rebuilt rather than restored, with new architectural elements introduced. The Art Deco movement took off in the 1920s so Béthune’s stunning cobbled square is now an elegant mixture of Art Deco and traditional Flemish fronts with the famous belfry, re-crowned, standing dramatically at its centre.

Just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Kate McCarthy returned to her former post at Béthune. This time around, she didn’t just nurse the wounded but became involved with the Résistance, helping Allied airmen escape. Then, in 1941, disaster struck. A courier from Béthune was caught by the Gestapo in Paris and ‘talked’ under torture. McCarthy was arrested and taken to a prison near Lille where she spent 13 months in solitary confinement. She and a male member of the Résistance were sentenced to death. He was shot, she wasn’t. In August 1942, she was taken by cattle truck to Brussels and incarcerated with other women.

After sojourns in jails at Dusseldorf Lubeck and Hamburg, McCarthy was sent to the notorious Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, 90km north of Berlin. It’s estimated 130,000 women and children were imprisoned there between 1939 and 1945. Forced to do physical work with almost no food, prisoners were weighed regularly and weeded out for the gas chamber. McCarthy’s weight fell to 27kg (around four stone). The camp was liberated by Russian soldiers on April 30, 1945. Between 15,000 and 30,000 inmates had survived. Two days after Hitler’s suicide on April 28, the survivors, including McCarthy, were handed over to the Red Cross. Following rehabilitation in Sweden and England, she returned to Cork.

Her exploits had not gone unnoticed. McCarthy was decorated for bravery by De Gaulle and given the honorary rank of lieutenant in the British Army. Dan McCarthy and Catherine Cahalane, writing in the Drimoleague Community Newsletter, state that McCarthy was awarded the ‘Black Cat’ emblem of the Maquis. The origin of this decoration is obscure but the cat seems an appropriate Résistance symbol; felines, unlike dogs, do their own thing and never obey orders. During the Great War, they were deployed to defend food stores from rodents and acted as gas detectors in the trenches. The lethal gases were heavier than air. In an attack, the cat, being close to the ground, would succumb first, warning the soldiers.

Sr McCarthy became mother superior of the Honan Home in Cork. She died suddenly on June 21, 1971 and is buried in St Finbarr’s Cemetery.