The Quiet Woman

"Comfort, Comfort My people."

says your God

Isaiah 40:1

Mary Elizabeth Elmes

1909-2003

Born in Cork, Ireland in 1909, Mary Elizabeth Elmes was a

young woman when the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936.

Mary went to Spain where she worked with the American

Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization providing

humanitarian relief for war refugees.

Mary later joined refugees from Spain in 

France where she eventually became director 

of all Quaker humanitarian relief efforts.

After the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, Mary worked 

extensively with Jewish refugees interned in camps in

the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France.

Because of her Irish citizenship, she was able

to remain in France after her British and French

colleagues, now considered enemies

by the occupying Germans and the

collaborating French puppet government at Vichy,

had to leave the country for their own safety.

Her work there later became a rescue mission centering 

around the rescue of Jewish children whose parents 

had been deported from France by the Nazis

and who now faced certain imprisonment and

death in concentration camps located

in Poland and Germany.

Often using the trunk of her car,

Mary smuggled the children out of the camp

and to safe hiding places. 

These missions of mercy became increasingly
 dangerous and Mary was eventually detained

and arrested by the Gestapo.

After being interrogated,

she was first sent to prison in Toulouse,

and later to the notorious Gestapo- run Fresnes

prison on the outskirts of Paris.

However, because Mary was a citizen of Ireland,

which maintained a neutral status during the war,

and due to the efforts of her colleagues

at the American Friends Service Committee,

who appealed her case to Robert Brennan,

the minister of the Irish Legation in Washington DC, 

the Germans eventually agreed to release Mary from prison. 

However, instead of leaving France,

Mary remained defiant in the face of the Gestapo 

and their French collaborators, and continued helping

desperate refugees until the war ended in 1945. 

After the war, Mary stayed in France

and later married a man named Roger Danjou.

She became the mother of two children,

daughter, Caroline, and son, Patrick. 

In 1947, the government of France awarded Mary

its highest honor, the Legion d' Honneur, but she

refused to accept it.

Instead, this brave woman chose to

to forget her war-time activities, living in

relative obscurity in France for the rest of her life.

She died there in 2003 at the age of ninety-four.
In 2013, Mary's name was added to the
roll of the Righteous Among The Nations
at Yad Vashem in Israel. 

Mary (left) at age 94 receives a painting of the Rivesaltes
 refugee camp by her colleague Friedel Bohny-Reiter of the Swiss Red Cross

The uncompromisingly righteous 
shall be glad in the Lord

and shall trust and take refuge in Him;
 and all the upright in heart

shall glory and offer praise."

Psalm 64:1,10