The heroics of the Irish Schindler She ‘spirited away nine children’ destined for Auschwitz
She had a privileged upbringing and elite education, but rather than settle into a life of entitlement, Mary Elmes went to a war zone to help children in the Spanish Civil War – which eventually led to her risking her own life to save hundreds from the ho
IT WAS just two days after her seventh birthday when Mary Elmes got her first glimpse of the grim reality of war. Little did she know that it wouldn’t be her last. At 2.10pm on Friday, May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania — the luxury ocean liner that was the pride of the Cunard fleet — was torpedoed by a German U-boat about 13km off the Co Cork coast. It took just 18 minutes for the 31,000-plus tonne vessel to sink.
Of almost 2,000 people onboard, a total of 1,198 died. The minutes and hours that followed saw the 761 survivors battling to stay afloat until they were rescued by boats that were in the surrounding waters.
Eventually they were brought ashore at Cobh. So, too, were the bodies of many of the casualties.
After hearing the news, thousands of people made their way to Cobh to see if they could be of any assistance. Among them was Mary’s father Edward, a pharmacist based 30km away in Cork city, who travelled to the quayside with his family.
The scenes they witnessed there were, of course, harrowing. One contemporary newspaper report spoke of three open graves in which ‘all the horrors of the calamity [were] mirrored’. It added: ‘One of them contained 65 coffins and and a total of 67 bodies — two babies had been interred with their mothers... it was all too ghastly to comprehend and too sickly to dwell on.’
It is perhaps unsurprising that the experience, according to a new book called A Time To Risk All by journalist and author Clodagh Finn, ‘made a lasting impression’ on Mary.
But in the course of her subsequent extraordinary life, she made a lasting impression of her own.
Rightly, she deserves credit for helping the humanitarian effort during the Spanish Civil War. But the main thing she will be remembered for is saving hundreds of Jewish children from the horrors of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
Such was her contribution that she has been included as one of the Righteous Among The Nations, an honour awarded by Israel to nonJews who risked their own lives during the Holocaust to save Jews. Other recipients include Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie.
The story begins on a rainy spring day in 1908 when Marie Elisabeth Jean Elmes was born on the first floor of the family home in Ballintemple on the east side of Cork city. The Elmeses lived in style; unusually for the time, the house had full plumbing with a bath and indoor toilet.
Meanwhile, the garden features included a pond, rockery, greenhouse and carefully maintained flowerbeds. By the time of the 1991 census, there were two live-in domestic staff, a nurse and a maid, to look after the family of four (a son named John had been born in 1909).
The young Mary was educated at the city’s Rochelle School, which catered mainly for girls from wellheeled Church of Ireland families. She later went to Trinity College Dublin after being accepted on to a degree course in modern French and Spanish literature.
After graduating with first-class honours, Mary was offered a scholarship to study international relations at the prestigious London School of Economics. She was subsequently awarded another scholarship to pursue further studies in Geneva.
By early 1937, however, the Spanish Civil War had been raging for six months and Mary — who had previously spent a year in Madrid — made inquiries about joining the relief effort. On February 11, she travelled to Gibraltar as part of the University Ambulance Unit, which had been set up by a British diplomat in response to the crisis.
Her first posting was to Almeria on the country’s south-east coast, where up to 80,000 people had gathered to take refuge from the fighting. Most of them had made a journey of almost 200km from Malaga and had endured gunfire all along the way. Around 5,000 were killed en route and thousands more simply abandoned the trek.
Mary initially started working in a children’s hospital in Almeria and, even though she had no medical training, impressed her superiors enough to be put in charge of a new, fully-equipped facility in Alicante.
Due to the worsening violence, however, she soon moved the children in her care to the safer environment of a village near Benidorm. According to a friend, she set up base in ‘the summer residence of a rich man who had fled to a more suitable spot for rich men’.
She stayed in Spain until the end of the war in April 1939 and then crossed the border into France. After returning home for a four-week holiday to see her family — her father had died when she was away — Mary travelled to Paris to volunteer for further aid work.
Along with a friend, she was dispatched to set up a cultural programme in the refugee camps in southern France where huge numbers of displaced Spanish nationals were living.
‘I think that the work will be most interesting and I hope that the years that I spent at college in the study of Spanish literature will prove of something more than the purely personal pleasure that they have been so far and be useful now in the choosing of books for the libraries that it is proposed to start for the men,’ she wrote in a letter dated July 1939.
But things were about to get even grimmer than ever. By the end
She’s included as one of the Righteous Among The Nations She set up base in the ‘summer residence of a rich man’
of 1940, Mary and her colleagues had helped several thousand people in the camps that had been established in the PyrénéesOrientales area.
The opening of the Rivesaltes camp, just outside Perpignan, in January 1941 changed the situation. It had been intended as a military base but, according to Finn’s book, ‘it was soon found to be almost uninhabitable’.
The weather was extremely oppressive during the summer, and unbearably cold in the winter. Army chiefs later decided that ‘it wasn’t even fit for horses’.
Nonetheless, the authorities moved many Spanish refugees there. The camp also became home to the increasing number of Jewish people being rounded up under the anti-Semitic regulations of the newly-occupied northern France.
With around 9,000 people being held there by April 1941, malnutrition and disease became major problems. Far worse, the Jewish internees — who made up about 40% of the camp’s population — started being sent to the Drancy camp near Paris and then on to Auschwitz, where many of them died. Against that backdrop, Mary Elmes knew that time was of the essence.
Due to her Irish nationality, she was allowed to continue visiting the camp after her British and American colleagues were forced to leave because of their countries’ involvement in the war.
Under the Vichy puppet state, children were allowed leave the camp for rehousing in so-called ‘colonies’ run by Quakers and other groups. Mary managed to get many children out by persuading their parents it was their best hope; but different tactics were needed as the Nazis moved towards full control in 1942.
Among the first things she did was to move the children who’d already got out to remote locations high in the Pyrenees. But documents show that on August 11, 1942, she ‘spirited away nine children’ destined for the first convoy ultimately headed for Auschwitz. During the days and weeks that followed, she made countless trips to smuggle children out in the boot of her car. It is impossible to say exactly how many lives she saved, but it is known that 2,289 adults and 174 children were herded on to the cattle wagons in the space of a two-month period. Estimates suggest that 427 children were saved from this fate over the course of the same timeframe.
It is thought that Mary was personally involved in helping free at least 200 of these youngsters.
By all accounts, she never explained how she managed to get the children out without anyone noticing. The book suggests ‘the fact that she was a regular visitor to the camp meant that the guards knew her well and probably waved her through the barrier’.
It also raises the possibility that she employed the tactics of fellow aid worker Andrée Salomon, who once succeeded in getting a group of 12 out of the camp.
By early 1943, however, Mary had attracted the attention of the authorities. She was arrested by the Gestapo in February on suspicion of various offences, including hostile acts against Germany. When she was released without charge five months later, she went straight back to work.
Mary Elmes spent the rest of her life in Perpignan, where she married and raised two children. She died in March 2002, less than two months short of her 94th birthday.
Modest to a fault, she seldom spoke about her wartime experiences and, when she was awarded France’s Légion d’honneur, she declined to accept it on the grounds of the unwanted attention it would bring.
Once asked about her experiences of incarceration, which included a stint in the notorious Fresnes Prison on the outskirts of Paris, she simply replied: ‘Well, we all experienced inconveniences in those days, didn’t we?’