This week marks the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the young women who worked with Dutch-Paris, we’ll call her Marthe.

Marthe served the line as a postbox in Paris, meaning that she accepted and forwarded messages on behalf of her colleagues. Such messages ranged for the details of an escape being planned for Jewish refugees to microfilms in transit from a courier coming from Spain to a courier heading towards the Netherlands.

Along with most of the rest of the line in Paris, Marthe was arrested at the end of February 1944. Unusually, the Germans don’t seem to have figured out how she was involved in the resistance. She was treated as a hostage rather than a political prisoner. The difference between the two was a matter of degree of horribleness. Hostages were not usually tortured and were allowed to have blankets from home. But hostages also ended up in the concentration camps. Like all women, Marthe was sent to Ravensbrück. She was transferred to the sub-camp at Köningsberg sur Oder, which wasn’t an improvement.

Marthe was in what they called an infirmary in early February 1945 when the SS cleared out the camp. They forced the emaciated inmates to start marching westward through the snow and bitter temperatures or shot them on the spot. They most probably would have shot all the women in the “infirmary” except that one of them had the wit to scare them off with the threat of infection. They were still in the “infirmary” when the Red Army arrived. Soviet soldiers offered them what rudimentary medical care and food that they could.

The prisoners didn’t go anywhere after their liberation. None of them had the strength and where could they have gone in the middle of a battle zone in the depths of harsh winter? But they were free to come and go around the camp. Free not to do back-breaking manual labor. Free to eat. And free to worship. Religious services of any kind were forbidden under the SS regime, which mattered a great deal to those who managed to hold onto their faith despite the conditions.

Marthe, however, was too weak to survive. She died a free woman on February 15, 1945, at the age of 30. Her friends, however, gave her the dignities that would have been denied to her had she died even 11 days earlier. They buried her in a marked grave next to two women whose names they also knew. And they prayed for her out loud.