Mary Elmes

Dale Andrew describes the life and witness of an Irish heroine

Mary Elmes was a remarkable woman who was responsible, mainly through her work with Quaker bodies, for saving the lives of hundreds of children and protecting them from the evils of Nazism. After the second world war she was awarded the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), the highest civilian award in France at the time, which she refused to accept on the grounds that she felt it was unwanted for what she did. The publication of two recent biographies has drawn attention to this little-known heroine who had such a close association with Quakers.

Mary Elmes was born in Cork, in Ireland, in 1908 and after her studies at Trinity College Dublin, the London School of Economics and then in Geneva, she was recruited in 1937, early in the Spanish civil war, to serve in the London University Ambulance Unit. First helping out at the feeding station in Almeria, she later managed the children’s hospital in Alicante. When Franco defeated the Republicans in early 1939 and half a million Spaniards fled in la Retirada over the Pyrenees into France, Mary followed them.

She organised cultural activities for the idle Spanish refugees stuck in the barbed wire enclosed camp at Argelès-sur-Mer. After Germany invaded France in June 1940, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) put her in charge of the Perpignan office. She made the twenty minute drive nearly every day to the camp of Rivesaltes to succour the Spanish refugees, Jews and other indésirables interned under horrific conditions on the windswept coastal plain.

Saved from deportation

From August through October 1942, nine convoys deported Jews from Rivesaltes to the Nazi conentration camps and Mary Elmes worked tirelessly to evacuate the children from the camps into the colonies in the hills and other hiding places. A colleague estimated that 427 children were saved from deportation that autumn.

Arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943, she was imprisoned for six months. When released, she laconically replied: ‘Oh, we all suffered inconveniences in those days, didn’t we.’ She returned to Perpignan, turning down the offer of a rest in Geneva or Lisbon and refusing her six months accrued salary.

Mary Elmes was like that – quiet and unassuming, preferring to remain in the shadows. It was a serendipitous coincidence that allowed her, much later, to be brought out of the shadows to share the same honour as her colleagues, Helga Holbeck and Alice Resch of the Toulouse délégation, who in 1982 were honoured as ‘righteous among the nations’ by Yad Vashem.

On Christmas Day 2010, Ronald Friend read Bernard Wilson’s blog on the Toulouse Friends Meeting website with a summary about Quaker relief work in southwest France. Ronald Friend wrote to Bernard Wilson explaining that he had learnt that he and his brother had been whisked from the Rivesaltes internment camp in late September 1942, after the convoys had begun transporting Jews to Auschwitz. But he didn’t know who had saved them.

In ploughing through thousands of documents from the AFSC archives, he uncovered a letter from Mary Elmes written to the headquarters in Marseille: she had the release papers from the Friend parents and would be taking the two brothers out of Rivesaltes ‘that evening’ (25 September 1942). Ronald Friend submitted the evidence in an application to Yad Vashem. On 25 January 2013, two years after the AFSC archives had revealed the proof that the Friend brothers’ saviour was Mary Elmes, she joined her colleagues from the Quaker office in Toulouse and became the first Irish national to be honoured as ‘righteous among the nations’. Her name is inscribed in the Yad Vashem garden in Jerusalem and also on the wall of the Shoah Museum in Paris.

‘Irish Oskar Schindler’

It was Paddy Butler, a journalist with the The Irish Times, who first ran the story of Mary Elmes being honoured by Yad Vashem. His ongoing research about her past service with the Quakers, including the rescue of the Friend brothers, led to The Extraordinary Story of Mary Elmes: The Irish Oskar Schindler, released in late September 2017. A week later A Time to Risk All: The incredible untold story of Mary Elmes, the Irish woman who saved children from Nazi concentration camps, written by Clodagh Finn, another Irish journalist, rolled off the presses. The two journalists were researching in parallel the untold story of the ‘Irish Oskar Schindler’.

Mary Elmes never kept a diary during the years of the Spanish civil war, nor later as head of the Perpignan délégation. Neither did she write regular letters back to her mother in Cork. Finn and Butler had to find other means to develop their storyline. They relied on indirect sources, such as the letters of Dorothy Morris, with whom Mary worked in Spain and later in Perpignan; or the journal of Lois Gunden, the Mennonite director of the colonie near Perpignan; and family archives shared by Mary’s two children. But by far the richest source for both authors were the AFSC archives. Hundreds of thousands of pages covering Quaker relief activities in France from 1933 to 1950 had been digitised and were available.

In addition to the archives, Paddy Butler relied to a large extent on secondary accounts of the times. His book presents a distinctly more macro overview, one that privileges the political and military context of the critical decade of Mary Elmes’ activities, 1937-46. Accounts of the Spanish and Italian fascist coalition are excruciatingly vivid as the backdrop for her work in Almeria, Murcia and Alicante: ‘Hospitals were seen as legitimate targets and… rebel bombers chased ambulances as if they were hunting animals; it was one of their favourite sports.’

‘Luminous example of love’

Clodagh Finn, on the other hand, emphasises the personal relationships with her colleagues in the Quaker délégations and other relief offices – and her kindness. Examples include her locating books for the Spanish refugees about which the Catalan poet Augustí Bartra extolled her generosity: ‘Mary Elmes did not send me a dictionary; she did infinitely more, she sent me her own. This dictionary, which has travelled with me during all my exile, is for me a luminous example of love.’ The AFSC’s Marjorie McClelland, in a report back to Philadelphia following a visit to Rivesaltes, wrote: ‘Everywhere Mary went she was greeted with great warmth and affection and we could not walk very far without being stopped by someone who wished to talk with her.’

Both biographers also report correspondence documenting the at times rocky relations with the Quaker hierarchy in Philadelphia or London; or the disagreements with Howard Kershner, head of AFSC operations in Europe.  On the disappointing side, Paddy Butler’s book is not carefully footnoted, nor uses citations; he only refers at the end of each chapter to the books he drew on, or generally to ‘AFSC archives’. Clodagh Finn on the other hand meticulously cites the page number of each source and to the precise folder and box number in the AFSC archives.

On a substantive point, neither biographer explains the significance of the change from AFSC to Secours quaker, the French Quaker service committee, in November 1942. After the Germans invaded the southern ‘unoccupied’ zone in France all assets and responsibilities for the Quaker operations in Montauban, Toulouse, Perpignan – where Mary was head – and Marseille, were formally turned over to Secours quaker. At that time the nine American staff working at the Marseille headquarters were detained by the Germans and interned for fifteen months in a hotel in Baden-Baden.

In an interview she gave later in life, quoted by Paddy Butler, Mary Elmes says: ‘War is a terrible thing, which is never won. It’s always lost. Everybody loses.’ As in the refugee crises today, the civilian populations, and overwhelmingly women and children, are the principal victims.

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