THE SURREY CHAPEL TURNED OUT to be a thriving community in the heart of Norwich, under the direction of its pastor, Tom Chapman, to whom I sent an e-mail. He replied within the hour, excited about a “fascinating inquiry,” hoping that it was “the same Elsie Tilney!” He forwarded my e-mail to Dr. Rosamunde Codling, the chapel’s archivist. The next morning, I received an e-mail from Miss Codling, who was “almost certain” that their Miss Tilney and mine were the same.
Dr. Codling connected Miss Tilney to her preacher brother, Albert (she directed me to one of his tracts, Believers and Their Judgment, available years ago from “Mr. A. J. Tilney, 66 Hall Road, Norwich, for 6d per doz. 3⁄6 per 100, “post free”). Other references to Miss Tilney followed, found in the chapel’s newsletter. She was a “doughty” opponent of modernism, Dr. Codling explained. Her “sphere of work” was simply stated: “Jews.”
A few weeks later, I made the first of several trips to Norwich. Dr. Codling was keen to help, because this was the first she (or anyone at the Surrey Chapel) had heard of the story I was now sharing, delighted that the child of a “saved Jew” had made contact. I was welcomed with great warmth by the pastor and Dr. Codling, who brought Eric, an older member of the congregation, to our meeting. Eric remembered Miss Tilney as “a pretty young lady, with a sweet mellow voice.” He said this a little mischievously. “You don’t associate missionaries with being pretty, do you?” he added, wondering aloud whether she ever married (there was no record that she did). Eric recalled Miss Tilney at Sunday school, talking about Africa, an exotic subject on which the children knew little. “We had a map of the British Empire but knew nothing about African culture, the people, or Islam,” Eric explained. “Everything we knew we got from her, the pictures she brought and the pictures she painted.” She was “special,” passionate about Algeria. This was the mid-1930s.
Dr. Codling accompanied me to the Surrey Chapel archives at the Norwich Records Office, where we spent an afternoon plowing through a great number of documents, looking for any sign of Miss Tilney’s activities. These weren’t hard to find: she was an avid letter writer, who also wrote short articles for various evangelical magazines, an articulate and astute observer. As Europe embraced fascism and anti-Semitism, she chose another path. The archive material made clear that she was living in Paris in the spring of 1939, when Leon arrived in the city.
She joined the Surrey Chapel in February 1903 as a ten-year-old, then left on mission to Algeria and Tunisia in 1920, where she worked for more than a decade. In November 1927, she was based in the small town of Nabeul, on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, working with a Madame Gamati. She wrote of visits to Jewish homes, of the “great” welcome she received as she sought to save Jews by bringing them to Jesus (there is no mention of any success). Occasionally, she returned home, spending the summer of 1929 in Bournemouth, at the summer convention of the North Africa Mission. Someone took a group photograph, in which she holds an infant in her arms, one of the few images I found.
In the 1930s, she devoted her activities to the well-being of Jews, having joined the well-established Mildmay Mission. A farewell note prepared by the Surrey Chapel began with a reference to the governing credo: “To the Jew first.” She stayed in close contact with David Panton, the chapel’s pastor, influenced by his writings in The Dawn, which he edited. She must have seen the piece Panton wrote after The Times published the article on July 25, 1933 (the one likely read by Lauterpacht in Cricklewood), on a speech by Hitler, under the headline “By Fighting Against the Jews I Am Doing the Lord’s Work.” Panton attacked the führer’s “anti-semitic fury” as irrational and insane, a hatred that was “purely racial and fanatical,” with no religious basis. Hitler’s views were “entirely independent of the individual Jew’s character or conduct,” Panton wrote. The article would have spurred Miss Tilney, who was living in Djerba, Tunisia. A year later, in the spring of 1934, she moved to France to take up a new activity, to devote herself to “work amongst Jewish people in Paris.”
By October 1935, Miss Tilney had settled in Paris. The chapel’s “Missionary Notes” reported an article in Trusting and Toiling, another journal, which described a narrow escape from a serious accident. Walking along a busy thoroughfare in Paris, Miss Tilney was about to step off the pavement into the road when “a gentleman pulled her back only just in time to prevent her being knocked down by a motor-car.” Of particular interest, indeed a matter for rejoicing, was the fact that the rescuer was “a JEW!!”
In 1936, she moved into the North Africa Mission house in Paris. Speaking excellent French and Arabic, she reported on a visit to the Paris mosque, a building that held no charms for her because of its “Gospel-denying doctrine.” It did, however, offer an excellent couscous in an Arab setting and opportunities for silent prayer and witness (she took pleasure in offering the Gospel of Luke to a “genuinely delighted” waiter from Tunis). She wrote of the mosque’s interior, its “exotic loveliness of flowers, foliage and fountains in the sun-flooded courtyard,” but left feeling “sad, sad,” because everything “seemed to bespeak an insidious denial of our Lord.”
The years 1936 and 1937 were divided between Paris and Gabès in southern Tunisia, where her work was dominated by an outbreak of typhoid. She spent time with Arabs in quarantine, tended to “a dear frightened old Jewess,” yet was still able to look on the bright side because a typhoid outbreak opened “many Jewish and Moslem doors,” allowing her to observe “a young Jewish lad…intently reading the Gospel of St. Matthew.” In Paris, she worked at the Baptist church on the avenue du Maine in the 14th arrondissement. “I was privileged to help and witness to the suffering German Jewish refugees,” she wrote to her friends in Norwich.
In September 1937, she was back in Paris, interviewing German and Austrian Jewish refugees at the Baptist church, working alongside Deacon André Frankl, the American Board of Missions to the Jews’ representative in Paris (born in 1895, the grandson of a Hungarian rabbi, Frankl converted from Judaism and fought in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 on the eastern front, like Leon’s brother, Emil). Miss Tilney reported that the pastor at the Baptist church, Monsieur Vincent, was “throwing open his Church—and heart—to Jewish people.” She spoke at meetings for Jews, worked with refugees, and assisted at interviews to decide on what help could be offered. In January 1939, when Leon arrived in Paris, she was still working at the Baptist church, and it must have been here that she met him as he sought assistance in exile. Miss Tilney’s activities were occasionally reported in Trusting and Toiling, alongside items about the dire situation in Lemberg, where “Jewish students at Lwów University, in Poland, were attacked by anti-Semitic rioters.”
The Baptist church on the avenue du Maine was a hub for refugees from Austria and Germany, including intellectuals, academics, and doctors, aided by the Service d’Aide aux Réfugiés (Assistance for Refugees). The church offered a daily “soup kitchen” for hundreds of refugees like Leon. Friday evening meetings were “especially moving, as the largest part of the hall included Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.” Seven decades later, I spent an afternoon at the Baptist church with Richard Gelin, its current pastor. He shared archival material, including information on the numerous baptisms undertaken by Jews, hoping by this act to save themselves from the coming danger. The archives included much about the church’s assistance to Jewish refugees and their children and several books describing the brave work of Henri Vincent. I found no reference to Leon or Miss Tilney, but several photographs showed Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, offering a powerful impression. One showed a group sitting in the church hallway, “people in difficulty waiting to be received.” I could imagine Leon in this room, impecunious and quiet, alone in Paris.
On July 15, 1939, Trusting and Toiling reported that Miss Tilney was working in Paris. A week later, at some risk, she traveled to Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station to collect a young child. She met Rita, who entrusted to her care an infant who’d just passed her first birthday. I learned from my mother that it was said that Rita went to the station with Leon’s sister Laura, who brought her only child, eleven-year-old Herta, who also expected to travel to Paris with Miss Tilney. At the last minute, Laura decided that Herta wouldn’t travel, the prospect of separation being too painful. The decision was understandable but catastrophic: two years later, in October 1941, young Herta was deported to the ghetto in Litzmannstadt (Lodz) with her mother. Within a few months, Herta and Laura had been killed.
Miss Tilney traveled by train to Paris with only one of the children. At the Gare de l’Est, she was met by Leon. I don’t know how he expressed his thanks or if he ever saw her again. She wrote out her name and address on the scrap of paper, which she then gave to him, and they headed off to different parts of Paris.