Mary Elmes - Lessons from history must not be forgotten

Cork — and Ireland — has had the honour this week of welcoming two extra-special guests; two people who as young children in 1942, in Vichy France, were saved from what would have been their guaranteed deaths in Auschwitz.

They came to attend the ceremonial opening of Cork’s Mary Elmes bridge, and also the launch of an exhibition about the life of the Ballintemple woman who, as the Third Reich stepped up its programme of murder to industrial levels, played a major part in saving the lives of no fewer than 427 children from the trains that carried the Jews of France from Paris for what Adolf Eichmann described as “emigration” to the east.