scotianostra:The Scottish nurse Mary Helen Young was born on June 5th 1883 in Aberdeen.A
scotianostra:The Scottish nurse Mary Helen Young was born on June 5th 1883 in Aberdeen.Another very brave lady who is little known in Scotland.Her mother died while she was a baby, after which she moved with her family, her father and two elder siblings, to Edinburgh. After school, she worked as a dressmaker at Jenners department store.She left Edinburgh in 1904 to go to Surrey to train as a nurse, gaining state registration in 1908. In 1909 she travelled to Paris, France, to work as a private nurse.At the outbreak of World War I Young volunteered for service with the British Red Cross, working in the British Army zone in France, nursing wounded troops on the Western Front. Young’s fiancé was killed during the war.After the war, she returned to private nursing in Paris travelling occasionally to Scotland to visit her sister Annie Sutherland in Aberdeen and her aunt in Bllater.When the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940 Young chose to remain in the city and continue her nursing work. In December of that year, she was sent to an internment camp for allied civilians near Besançon and released after about six months as result of poor health, from where she returned to Paris. Despite being under surveillance by the Gestapo she received, into her home at 69 Rue Laugier, people sent from Britain who were assisting with the French Resistance. Her apartment was also used as a base for sending and receiving covert radio transmissions from London. On 11 November 1943 she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo on suspicion of helping British servicemen escape. In February 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, as a political prisoner. News of her death did not reach Scotland until September 1945.After the war, investigations by the British Embassy in Paris and United Nations War Crimes Commission proved that Young had been put to death by the Germans by being “put in a gas chamber or otherwise” sometime between February and March 1945.Her sister and sole next-of-kin, Elizabeth Ann Sutherland, raised a legal action to settle Young’s estate. On 30 January 1948 at the Court of Session, Lord Blade issued a judgement that presumed Young’s death had occurred on 14 March 1945. Evidence given at the trial included letters that spoke to her courage and cheerfulness.The French novelist, Simone Saint-Clair, who was also an inmate at Ravensbrück, said of her, “She always kept her chin up … and all of us liked the little Scotswoman, Mees Young”.Young has been compared to nurse Edith Cavell who was executed by firing squad by the Germans in World War I. After the Second World War the Aberdeen Press and Journal learned that Mary-Helen had ‘died as she lived, a brave Scotswoman’. The newspaper proudly acclaimed her as Scotland’s very own Edith Cavell - ‘Right up to the very end nothing could break her. She would smile, even in this hell that the Germans had made for us, she was a brave woman, the bravest of the brave’. -- source link