Mary Elmes

Mary Elmes was born in Cork in 1908, the daughter of a pharmacist, and studied modern languages at Trinity College Dublin and international relations at the London School of Economics. In 1937 she went to Spain with a British relief unit and ran a children's hospital in Almería, then in Alicante, as the Civil War closed in. When the Republic fell in 1939 she followed the refugees across the Pyrenees into France and joined the American Quakers' relief work in Perpignan.

That put her, from 1941, at the Rivesaltes internment camp, a windswept place of huts and mud where the Vichy government held foreign Jews and Spanish republicans, and where children died of hunger and cold. She organised food, schooling and colonies in the mountains to which children could be released. When the deportations to Auschwitz began in August 1942, she used the same paperwork, and when the paperwork ran out she used her car, driving children out in the boot to hiding places in the hills. At least two hundred children are known to have been saved through her office.

The Gestapo arrested her in early 1943 and held her for six months in Toulouse and then Fresnes prison near Paris. She was released and went straight back to work.

After the war she married a Frenchman and stayed in Perpignan. She declined the Légion d'honneur and almost never spoke about what she had done. She died in 2002, and in 2015 became the first Irish person named Righteous Among the Nations.