A Year of Grace

by Victor Gollancz

I went to the Russian Orthodox Church in Paris to see where Mother Elizabeth had been. She was a refugee from the Russian Revolution who became a nun, and she used to look after Jewish children during the Nazi occupation and she ended up at a concentration camp with crying kids heading towards the gas chamber, and she said: ‘I’ll come with you so it isn’t so bad, and I’ll hold you.’ And she went into the gas chamber with them.