Jesuit Chaplain to the Brit Army

This story is taken from an interview with David O’Donnell, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview was by Walter Love, and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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Fr Michael Morrison was a teacher at Belvedere, a Jesuit school in Dublin. He taught Maths and religion. He volunteered as a British Army chaplain, and served in Africa and Europe. He ended up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

He suffered a loss of health when he came back. He still taught at Belvedere, but his health did decline.

He described all the scenes he saw in the camp, and tried to portray how bad things were for the people.

He was an extraordinary man. We have his letters, because Jesuits when they’re abroad have to write back to the Provincial to let them know what’s going on. So his letters describe graphically what happened when the 88th Battalion arrived and him with them. He worked 14 hrs a day anointing the dead. There were heaps of unburied corpses, and they were buried in mass graves.

There’s footage of Michael Morrison himself at the Imperial War Museum, saying prayers over a mass grave. He was working almost flat out, taking short breaks to eat.

[The liberators didn’t know what to expect]

They didn’t know what it was. Auschwitz had been liberated a few months before. Bergen-Belsen was originally a POW camp, but they had no idea of what they were going to find. Because Bergen-Belsen was designed for 10k, but many of the internees of Auschwitz had been marched to Belsen when the Russians were approaching. Including Anne Frank, who died in Belsen before the liberation. So the numbers there were swollen to 60k. And even after the Liberation, they were dying at 500 a day. Typhus had swept the camp, and they were also dying from starvation and disease.

When you read it in a text book you don’t always realise the full suffering of the people.

[Why did these Southerners join the British Forces?]

They were motivated by idealism. People don’t realise that about 40k people from the Republic of Ireland enlisted, even though Ireland was a “neutral” country in the event. These would have been young idealistic people who joined the RAF, who served as chaplains and many of whom served as doctors. For example, Kevin Teehan died in Africa serving as a Doctor with the RAMC.

To illustrate the 2-sidedness of war, one of our pupils died on a bombing mission against Trunken. The plane was hit while over Germany. It almost got back. It was only a few miles from its landing place in England, but it crashed and all 6 crew died, including Bobby McClancy of our school.

But Vin Foil of Belvedere College was living as a citizen in Berlin. He was there when it was bombed, and he went into a burning building, pulled someone out, went in again and was killed when it collapsed. That showed me that war was suffered by both sides. It’s not suffered by one side only. And people from 1 small school in the middle of Dublin were in some ways fighting each other. A tragedy.

One of the saddest things is when you look at these men in their Rugby uniforms.
We entitled our book “The cruel clouds of war” — from a line of Greek poetry that reads “We, encountering the cruel clouds of war, gave away our lovely youth.”

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