Add MS 89444

Title page: ‘God disposes: a memoir by MMD’. Author identified by the donor of the manuscript as her aunt, Joan Evans (later Harris), then a young girl undergoing her novitiate in France.

The account starts in 1940 with the German occupation of Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, where the author is a novice at a religious community of teaching sisters, Les Filles de la Providence. After moving to Rennes to avoid arrest and working as a teacher in the community’s school there, she is deported by train, along with about 300 people, including other British nuns from Saint-Brieuc, to Caserne Vauban internment camp, Besançon (also known as Frontstalag 142). She describes the squalid conditions there, and the nuns’ organisation of infirmary, welfare, and schooling for the camp’s 3000 or so inhabitants. They are moved again in 1941 to an internment complex in the spa town of Vittel, whose inmates include other nuns and novices. American citizens arrive at the camp in 1942, along with refugee Jewish women and children from Poland who hold American passports. The nuns provide education, food, and clothing. A harsher regime starts with a change of camp personnel in spring 1943, with TB, deaths, low morale, mental strain, and immorality. The author takes her vows in the camp along with other novices on 1 June 1943 and later that year ill health confines her to the infirmary for three months. The Polish refugees are told their papers are invalid and are deported (to Auschwitz): that night the author overhears mothers killing their children and taking their own lives to prevent this happening. Eventually in 1944 the author is repatriated to England with other internees in poor health. They have an eventful and broken train journey under allied bombardment to the Spanish border, and thence to Portugal, where they embark for Liverpool, arriving home in August 1944.

Includes

• photograph of the author
• drawing of the church of St Louis, Vittel
• two sketches from the beginning of the author’s internment: The Departure from Notre Dame de Vieux Cours, and The ‘Centre d’Acueuil’ at Rennes (p. 6)
• sketch of room 63, Caserne Vaubon internment camp, Besançon (p. 12)
• photograph of chapel, Hotel Continental, Vittel internment camp (p. 22)
• sketch floor plan of Hotel Continental, Vittel internment camp (p. 25)
• photograph of the nuns’ refectory, Hotel Continental, Vittel internment camp (p. 28)
• photograph of the medical staff, Vittel internment camp (p. 32)