Meet Mary Elmes: The Irish woman who saved children from the horror of WWII concentration camps

A talented student from Ballintemple had a respectable academic career ahead of her, but as Clodagh Finn discovers, she shelved that future to become an aid worker and helped to spare countless children the horror of WWII concentration camps

IT WOULD take Prof Ronald Friend almost 70 years to identify the person who saved his life. Then, one morning in January 2011, an email popped into his inbox with a name. The woman who had extricated him from a detention camp during the Second World War was called “Miss Elms”.

He would later discover that her name was, in fact, Mary Elmes. Other details would follow. She was born in Cork City in 1908 and she had helped to save hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazi gas chambers.