Mary Elmes - The Irish Oskar Schindler
The second in Mitchelstown Heritage Society’s series of free online heritage talks will take place on Wednesday, 24th March. These online talks are open to all and are hosted on the Zoom meeting platform.
Next week’s talk is on Mary Elmes, often called The Irish Oskar Schindler. This Cork born academic was educated in Trinity and the London School of Economics, but would become known nationally and internationally for her humanitarian work in a children’s hospital in Spain during its bloody civil war and later in Vichy, France when she was instrumental in the saving of almost 200 Jewish children from deportation to the Nazi death camps.
Mary was nominated for the Legion of Honour in France, which she refused - 11 years after her death she was recognised As Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Centre. Elmes was the only Irish person to receive this tribute.
In 2019, Cork City Council named its newest pedestrian bridge after Mary Elmes.
The talk will be presented by Clodagh Finn, author of ‘Through Her Eyes: a history of Ireland in 21 women’ (2019) and ‘A Time to Risk All’, a biography of Mary Elmes (2017), the so-called Irish Oskar Schindler. She has worked as a columnist, sub-editor and feature writer and as a freelance writer and editor in Paris. Clodagh has a degree in French and Archaeology from UCD and is particu
larly interested in writing about overlooked stories from history.
JOIN ONLINE
For those wishing to join us for this talk - first go to the Zoom website, click on join meeting. You will be asked for a meeting ID and passcode, these are as follows: Meeting ID 874 4352 1667, passcode 333959.
The meeting will open 15 minutes before the talk, scheduled for 7.30pm. Everyone is asked to mute their microphones during the talk to prevent background noise interrupting the speaker. Questions and answers will be dealt with at the end of the talk.
If anyone has any other questions or has issues connecting to this meeting, please e-mail andrewdineen1@gmail.com