Remembering two brave Cork women who saved hundreds from Nazi terror

She took some of those children to the Villa Saint-Christophe, a summer house-turned-refuge run by American Lois Gunden, who recorded the moment in her diary: “While we were eating supper Miss Elmes brought seven Jewish children — some of whom can’t speak French.”

She went on to say that the cook made extra macaroni and then noted the theatrics that ensued when they tried to wash the children.

The boys did not want to take off their underpants; a chilling detail that recalls how desperate parents had warned their circumcised sons not to undress to hide the fact that they were Jewish.

Between August and October 1942, nine conveys deported 2,289 Jewish adults and 174 children from southwest France to Auschwitz, via Drancy in Paris. Only 84 people came home. The numbers of the dead would have been much higher without the work of Mary Elmes, head of the Quaker delegation at Rivesaltes holding camp, near Perpignan, and her colleagues. Between them, they saved an estimated 427 children.

One of those children, Michael Freund, who now lives in Canada, says he remembers Mary Elmes every Holocaust Memorial Day, the international day of memorial on January 27 that recalls the more than 6m Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust.

“The one thing that I want to share is that I am truly grateful to Mary Elmes for the life I might not have had, had it not been for her brave actions to save us and many others. She was truly a heroine,” he said.

His brother, Professor Ronald Friend (he uses the English version of their surname), now lives in Portland in the US. He said his life and his brother’s life — and indeed the lives of the three children they have between them — are a testimony to Mary Elmes’s deed and, “in a sense, a refutation to those dark times”. He said:

Mary Elmes rescued my brother and me when nine convoys were leaving camp de Rivesaltes destined for Auschwitz. She was a courageous and humble person who contributed to Jewish survival for which the Irish people can rightfully feel proud.

In 2012, he applied to have Mary Elmes recognised at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The following year, the woman from Ballintemple in Cork was named Righteous Among the Nations, the country’s highest honour given to those, such as Oskar Schindler, who risked their lives during the Second World War to save Jewish lives.

She was honoured in her native city in 2019 when a bridge was named after her. Two more of the children she saved, Charlotte Berger-Greneche and the late Georges Koltein, travelled to pay tribute to her. They also visited her former school, Ashton, where Charlotte urged over 500 students not to forget the past.

“Don’t be influenced by propaganda or people who tell you to hate another person because they are different,” she said.

We are all human beings and we can all live together, so you have to convince those around you that we can live together in peace and love — in spite of our differences.

It was a message that never had more resonance. As Prof Friend says: “Today there are fewer Jewish people than there were in 1939 [some 14.3m compared to 16.6m at the start of WWII] and following the October 7 massacres and the Gaza war, we are once again confronting antisemitism in Europe and North America.”

On Monday, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Mary Elmes bridge in Cork might provide a focus for the singular bravery of a woman who was later arrested and jailed for six months for her work.

There is no similar landmark, at least not in Ireland, for another Cork woman, Sr Katherine Anne McCarthy, who saved the lives of an estimated 200 Allied airmen.

She has been honoured in Béthune in northern France where she has been considered a hero for several decades.

Just after the war, an article entitled ‘The Odyssey of Sr Marie-Laurence’ — the name she took when she entered the Franciscan order at 18 — detailed her work
in the French Resistance, her betrayal and arrest, her death sentence (later commuted) and the many years she spent in prisons and concentration camps, narrowly escaping the gas chambers more than once.

As its author Jean Prévost proclaimed in enthusiastic prose: “Sr Marie-Laurence! It’s a name that many in Béthune know but one that has travelled further because of her heroism. And it’s a name that we say with respect mixed with admiration.”

In recent years, her life story from her birth in Drimoleague in Co Cork in 1895 to her miraculous escape from death in Ravensbrück, Hitler’s hellish concentration camp for women, is much better known largely due to the research of former teacher and historian Catherine Fleming.

She is working on a forthcoming biography which will spell out in detail how, with two local women, mechanic Sylvette Leleu and cafe owner Angèle Tardiveau, she helped servicemen escape from occupied France.

Later, they joined forces with Musée de l’Homme, one of the earliest resistance networks established in France. When that network was betrayed, Sr Kate was arrested on June 18, 1941.

She endured “five very difficult interrogations with the Gestapo”, she said with the kind of understatement that is a feature of many who faced down Nazi tyranny.

Her greatest worry, she said, was that she would implicate others.

After more than a year in solitary confinement, she was taken to a series of camps and prisons. In some of those awful places, she was reunited with friends from Béthune; the camaraderie helped all of them endure day after torturous day.

And yet, despite all, she and her fellow prisoners continued to carry out little acts of resistance; they threw the buttons of shirts they were forced to make down the toilet, or they deliberately burst stitches on belts destined for paratroopers.

Sr Kate recounted one of her prison acts of sabotage with considerable humour: “So that we would not be left inactive, we later on had to mend soldiers’ socks. We had to mend good ones with old ones. But we agreed to do the opposite! We destroyed the good ones and somehow mended the old ones.

And we had fun thinking about the face of the ‘Fritz’ wearing them, who would have to walk with such socks so roughly mended. We certainly were only second-rate workwomen!

Her last days in Ravensbrück were particularly brutal. She was in constant danger of being sent to the gas chamber and managed to avoid selection at least four times, by hiding under the bed and, on one occasion, by climbing out of a window.

At one point, fellow prisoner Germaine Tillion, one of the Musée de l’Homme leaders, commented: “It took the Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney 74 days to die of hunger, how long will it take us?”

Quite apart from the gas chambers, death could come in many forms — exhaustion, disease (Irish resister Catherine Crean died of dysentery in that camp
on April 3, 1945, aged 65) and hunger. When Sr Kate was released in 1945, she weighed little more than four stone (25kg) after years of deprivation, but she made a full recovery.

She moved back to Cork and went on to become mother superior at the Honan Home in Cork. She died in 1971.

Coincidentally, she is buried in St Finbarr’s cemetery in Cork, not far from Terence MacSwiney’s grave.

After the war, the woman who invoked the Lord Mayor’s memory, Germaine Tillion, wrote to the French government twice to request that Sr Kate McCarthy be awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur.

Without success. While she was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance and recognised by the British government, her biographer Catherine Fleming is continuing the campaign to secure her the Grand Croix. She would also love to see her officially honoured at home.

As she once put it: “Even if only 150 of those 200 men [she saved] survived and managed to get married and have children, it’s a massive pebble in a pond.”

The same is true of the hundreds of people brought to safety by Mary Elmes. I often imagine them standing shoulder to shoulder on the bridge that carries her name. They would cross the River Lee several times over.

It’s a hopeful image to bring to Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday when we might remember these two Cork women who, between them, saved more than 600 lives.

Clodagh Finn is the author of ‘A Time to Risk All’, a biography of Mary Elmes, and co-author with John Morgan of ‘The Irish in the Resistance’.