Clodagh Finn: We need a Miss Mary of the camps now

Saving the world: Mary Elmes on the balcony of her flat at 30 Avenue des Baléares in Perpignan.

Mary Elmes might be remembered as the woman who saved Jewish people from Nazi extermination camps, but in her lifetime she was much better known as Miss Mary of the camps and tent villages.

She brought supplies and, perhaps more importantly, imaginative solutions to seemingly intractable problems. When shoes were almost impossible to get, she wrote to local garages asking for worn-out tyres so that the rubber could be repurposed as soles.