A heroine of the Holocaust
QUESTION Have you any information about Mary Elmes, who is said to be Ireland’s Holocaust heroine?
MARY Elmes was a woman from Cork city who performed heroic work first during the Spanish Civil War and then during the Second World War in France, when she saved many Jewish and nonJewish refugees.
Yet she never sought recognition for her work, and her life story has remained largely unknown, right up to the present day.
She was born in Cork city in 1908. Her father, Edward, who came from Waterford, ran a pharmacy on Winthrop Street. The business was taken over at the end of the 1930s by her only and younger brother John, on the death of their father.
Mary was exceptionally talented, and after studying at the Rochelle girls’ secondary school at Blackrock in Cork, she went to Trinity College Dublin. She graduated with first-class honours in French and Spanish and won a scholarship from the London School of Economics, which entitled her to a place at an international summer school in Geneva in 1936.
While she was in Geneva, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and rather than pursuing a conventional career, she went to help the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the conflict. Many of these refugees fled from Spain by crossing Pyrenees mountain passes into France.
Mary spent two years helping the vast numbers fleeing from the Spanish Civil War, but returned to her native Cork in 1939.
She didn’t stay long, but returned to the southwest of France. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, the northern part of the country was occupied by the Germans, while the southern part was run by a government in Vichy, central France, which was favourably disposed towards the Nazis.
A disused army camp at Rivesaltes, close to Perpignan in southwest France, was turned into a huge refugee camp, where conditions were so bad they were unsuitable even for horses. Many Jews fled the north of France, but were arrested by the French police in Vichy-controlled territory and sent to Rivesaltes, along with many Spanish refugees. By the end of 1941, the Rivesaltes camp had 4,000 people interned there, of whom a third were children.
Although Mary was a member of the Church of Ireland, she worked closely with the Quaker American Friendly Service Committee, through its office in Perpignan. She worked tirelessly to help people caught on the wrong side of the war in Spain and the Nazi occupation of northern France.
She risked her life on many occasions and saved 200 Jewish children from the Nazis. Many of those were saved by being placed with Catholic orphanages. She also helped thousands of other people not of Jewish descent.
She was very active in this rescue effort throughout 1942, but in February 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and held first at a prison in Toulouse, in the southwest of France, then at the notorious Fresnes prison near Paris. Many representations were made on her behalf, including by the Irish government of the time.
She was released in July 1943. If she had not had Irish nationality, she probably would not have survived the war.
After the war, she stayed in France and married a Frenchman, Roger Danjou; they had two children, Caroline and Patrick. She said little if anything about her experiences during the war and outside Israel, her heroic achievements have been little acknowledged, let alone commemorated.
Decades later, she was nominated as one of the Righteous Among The Nations, and when she was posthumously given this title in 2013, she was the first Irish recipient of this distinction. She was also honoured by a documentary film that was released in 2017 and narrated by Winona Ryder.
Yet during her lifetime, when the French government offered her the Legion d’Honneur, France’s top honour, she declined, such was her modesty.
Mary Elmes lived a long life, dying aged 94 in 2002, a remarkable Irishwoman and a true heroine of the Holocaust. Leanne McGuigan, by email.
QUESTION What invasive plant bothers the Japanese?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, it’s not just plants that bother the Japanese. There are many invasive animal species. The most notorious is the Asian mongoose, brought to Okinawa from India in 1910 to exterminate the deadly habu snake. However, rather than eating the snakes, it went after the rare Amami rabbit and Amami tip-nosed frog, threatening them with extinction. The Amami rabbit is one of the world’s most distinct yet endangered mammals.
In Wakayama and Aomori, Taiwanese macaques have hybridised with native Japanese macaques.
In Tokyo and Chiba, snapping turtles released into the wild by owners who no longer want them as pets attack and eat native freshwater animals.
The caterpillars of the fall webworm moth devastate native trees, while red-necked longhorn beetles threaten Japan’s treasured cherry blossom trees. Cane toads, notorious in Australia, are also found in Okinawa and Ogasawara. Marina Wright, Berkshire.
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