Margaret Susan Ryder was born on 3 July 1923. She was a charity activist and friend of Poland. Her active role in providing aid to Polish soldiers and war refugees is remembered today.
“Do not neglect the sick and elderly. Do not turn your backs on the disabled and the dying. Do not push them to the margins of society. When you do, you will not grasp that they represent an important truth. The sick, the elderly, the disabled and the dying teach us that weakness is a creative element of human life and that it is possible to accept suffering without losing dignity,” Sue Ryder said to express the message of work.
The family home of Sue Ryder was located in Scarcroft, Yorkshire, where prosperity reigned, and was located next to a slum district. Sue and her siblings played together with the poor children in the neighbourhood and spent their time in the beautiful garden of Sue’s home, where there were sandwiches and sweets for everyone.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Sue Ryder volunteered to help out at her local hospital and in 1940, after the announcement of the general mobilisation, she volunteered to join FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry).
After attending a three-week course, Sue Ryder reported to SOE (Special Operations Executive) headquarters. She was assigned to the Polish section of SOE, which was mainly responsible for the recruitment and training of the Cichociemni (Silent Unseen), the elite paratroopers of the Home Army.
Among other things, she was in charge of organising the missions of Polish Cichociemni, whom she called ‘Bods’ (colloquially ‘guys’, ‘guests’). ‘She helped them in their daily existence. She was with them in Italy, from where the planes flew out to Poland.
It is important to remember that Sue Ryder was the first foreigner to come to the aid of Warsaw, which was ruined by the Germans after the end of the Uprising.
After the war, Sue Ryder focused on helping the victims of the war, especially young boys who easily fell into criminal activities as they stole from others to survive or took part in revenge actions against their former oppressors, sometimes breaking the law.
In 1953, she set up a foundation named after herself. She decided to buy the house in Cavendish where her mother lived and set up the Foundation’s headquarters and relief home there. The first donors were Sue’s mother and her friends.
The Sue Ryder Foundation in Poland is the only authorised entity to act on behalf of the former English Foundation. The charity’s goals include: helping the suffering or those in need, helping those of poor living conditions, and those who are excluded because of social or poor health conditions, and acting to remove or alleviate their sufferings.
A rosemary sprig and a quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Ophelia says, became the foundation’s motto: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, pray, love, remember”.
She felt closely connected to Poland.
“I feel that I belong to Poland. It is a colourful country, so often misunderstood, relatively unknown and, due to its geographical location, exposed throughout its long history to attacks from more powerful neighbours. It is a country I have been closely associated with for over 40 years. Thanks to its folk tradition and expressed regional culture, as well as its indomitable spirit, Poland, despite frequent invasions and partitions, has never lost its independence and will to survive,” Ryder said.
In the 1970s, she organised holiday trips for former concentration camp prisoners from Poland to holiday in England. During the communist era, this was a very attractive experience for the participants.
“When she was made a life peer of England in 1979, she chose Warsaw as her titular capital in order, as Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, to serve as a reminder of the unprecedented bravery of the Poles and the unpaid debt to them of the free world,” Małgorzata Skórzewska-Amberg, the president of the Sue Ryder foundation in Poland reminds.
Sue Ryder died on 2 November 2000. Almost instantly efforts were made to initiate a process for her and her husband’s beatification.
The person and life of Sue Ryder is commemorated with a Museum located in Warsaw.
Source: Dzieje.pl, ngo.pl
Tomasz Modrzejewski
Photo: IPN
