Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM
Psalm 32:7
You are my hiding place; You shall preserve me from trouble; You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.
Philippe Sands had a plaguing question, “Who rescued my mother from the hands of the Nazis when she was an infant?” The British barrister and author was well versed in research and didn’t stop until he revealed the woman responsible for saving his mother. Elsie Tilney’s bravery might have slipped away into total obscurity, unknown but to God and those she helped, but for Sands’ research. Elsie Tilney was born in 1893 in Norwich, England. At 10 years old she became a member of Surrey Chapel, where she grew to become a Sunday School teacher. After WWI, Elsie felt called to North Africa and became a missionary in Tunisia and Algeria for nearly 14 years. After her pastor back at Surrey Chapel recounted Hitler’s “irrational and insane antisemitic fury,” Elsie relocated to France.
In 1939 when that Nazi fury was about to burst into WWII, Elsie traveled from Paris to Vienna. Philippe Sands’ mother, Ruth, barely a year old, was thrust into Elsie’s hands by Ruth’s Austrian Jewish mother, Rita. Ruth’s father, Leon, had already been deported. Elsie successfully delivered Ruth to a French children’s home where the child safely waited out the war. Eventually, Ruth, and both of her parents, were miraculously reunited. But Sands’ research about this remarkable missionary that rescued his mother from a cruel fate didn’t stop there. When Paris fell, Elsie was interned in prisoner-of-war camp, Vittel, along with other British and American citizens among Polish Jews that were being kept for prisoner trade negotiations. In camp, Elsie was selected to work in the German Commandant’s main office as well as serve as an English teacher. In the Commandant’s office, taking great risk, she secured and hid documents that would have incriminated fellow prisoners. Then, when she received word that one of her students, a Polish soldier, was going to be shipped to Auschwitz, she helped him dress as a woman and escape as far as Elsie’s own room. Facing the threat of her own execution, Elsie hid him in her bathroom for five months until Vittel was liberated by Allied Forces.
After the war, Elsie continued her missionary work in South Africa, and then eventually retired near her brother in Florida where she died in 1974. This brave woman never recounted her heroic deeds. We only know of this faithful servant of the Lord because of a grateful son who found a dutiful archivist at Surrey Chapel. Elsie’s only motivation was her Heavenly reward. Matthew 6:4, “Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” One of the women Elsie had helped at Vittel, Shula Troman, stated, “She gave her life, not for power or recognition. To nobody did she say anything to say that she saved Ruth as a baby. She may have done it with others, I don’t know. Such a life should be recognized.”
