Elise Rivet was the Mother Superior in a convent in France during Nazi occupation. She hid refugees from the Gestapo and stored weapons and ammunition for the resistance. 

On March 24, 1944, she and her assistant were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Montluc prison in Lyon. From there, she was taken to Romainville, before being shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin, Germany. There, stripped of her religious garments, she was forced into hard labor. 

On March 30, 1945, a group of women were selected to be taken to the gas chamber and put to death, Elise voluntarily went in place of a young mother with a baby, only weeks before the Soviet army arrived. She was 55 years old.