32nd Sunday November 10th
Augusta Chiwy died in 2016 at her home near Brussels, Belgium. She was 94 years old. Most of us have never heard of Augusta Chiwy (pronounced CHEE-wee). But she was one of the true heroines of World War II. Countless soldiers who were wounded in the Battle of the Bulge owe their lives to her. British military historian Martin King documented her story in his book The Forgotten Nurse and the TV documentary Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne.
Augusta Chiwy was born near the Rwandan border her father was veterinarian from Belgium; her mother was Congolese. The family moved to Bastogne when she was nine. She planned on becoming a teacher, but turned to nursing when the war began. When she was 23, Augusta was working as a nurse in a hospital in the Flemish town of Louvain. In December 1944, she was visiting her family at their home in Bastogne, when an American Army doctor knocked on the door. He was desperate for help. The battle had begun and he was alone in a makeshift medical aid station.
Augusta immediately went to work at the station. At the time, black nurses were not allowed to treat white soldiers – but the doctor got around the regulation by reminding wounded white soldiers that Ms. Chiwy was a volunteer – and added, “You either let her treat you or you die.”
During the siege, the station’s ambulance driver was killed. Augusta and her friend, Renee Lemaire, put on Army uniforms and drove the ambulance to the front and back. Because they were wearing Army uniforms and not nurses’ garb, they could have been shot had the Germans captured them.
The two women combed the battlefield, often coming under enemy fire, to find the wounded in the deep snow. As Ms. Chiwy retrieved soldiers from the front lines, the doctor joked that her five-foot frame enabled her to dodge mortars and heavy machine-gun fire. Augusta demurred. “A black face in all that white snow is a pretty easy target,” she replied. “Those Germans must be terrible marksmen.”
A bomb blast on Christmas Eve near the station killed her friend Renee and 30 wounded soldiers. Augusta herself was blown through a wall, but survived. The siege at Bastogne ended the day after Christmas. Several hundred soldiers owe their lives to the young nurse who worked at the two aid stations for more than a month.
After the war, Augusta married a Belgian soldier. They had two children. Augusta went on to work in a hospital treating patients with spinal injuries. She rarely spoke of her wartime experiences. Sixty-seven years after that horrible winter, Augusta Chiwy was honoured by the Belgian government. She said simply, “What I did was very normal. I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”
The quiet dedication and generous service of Augusta Chiwy and women and men like her mirror the “mightiness” of the widow’s mite that Jesus exalts in today’s Gospel. Taking the Gospel “last place” means welcoming others to take the “first” place; to imitate Jesus’ humility is to recognize the dignity of every individual as a child of God and putting aside our own expectations and wants in order to uphold that honour – especially those whose sense of dignity and self-worth has been diminished and trampled. The kingdom of God is realized only in our embracing Christ’s spirit of servanthood: servanthood that puts the common good before self-interest and profit, servanthood that compels us to place the needs of others less fortunate than ourselves above our own wants and narrow interests, servanthood that finds fulfilment in the love, compassion and kindness we can extend to others. In exalting the gift of the poor widow, Jesus wants us to realize that, in the economy of God, numbers are not the true value of giving. It is what we give from our want, not from our extra, that speaks of what we truly value, what good we want to make happen, what we want our lives and world to be. In the Gospel scheme of things, it is not the measure of the gift but the measure of the love that directs the gift that is great before God.