A REFUGEE from the second World War – now in her 97th year – who fled from Nazi Germany to Dublin where, ironically, she worked for a time for Hitler’s envoy to Ireland, has spoken for the first time about her extraordinary life.
Elisabeth Sweeney (96), who now lives in Achill Sound in Co Mayo, spoke to The Irish Timesafter reading a report in last Saturday's paper about a portrait of a four-year-old girl – Liv Hempel – which has unexpectedly turned up at Whyte's art auctioneers in Dublin.
She had looked after the child – a daughter of Dr Eduard Hempel, German envoy to Ireland during the war – but the last time she saw the girl was in early May 1945 “when the German community in Dublin gathered at the [diplomatic] residence [in Dún Laoghaire] to be informed that: ‘Hitler is dead and Germany has collapsed’”.
Despite her surname, Elisabeth Sweeney was not an Irish girl hired to care for the diplomat’s children.
She grew up in Germany and came to Ireland in 1937 to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Nazi rule. In fact, she is a baroness, the daughter of an aristocratic German family that had settled in imperial Russia, who was born Elisabeth von Offenberg in 1914, a childhood subject of Tsar Nicholas II.
The family lived in the Baltic region of Russia’s empire (in what is today Latvia) and were forced to flee from the terror of the Bolshevik Revolution which began in 1917. They arrived as refugees, “penniless and without passports or identity papers”, in the new German Weimar Republic which had emerged after the end of the first World War in 1919.
The impoverished family settled in Rostock but were “forced to split up” and Elisabeth, separated from her five siblings, was sent to Lübeck where she grew up in a children’s home.
She later worked for a Jewish family in Nuremberg but was forced to resign “because of new Nazi laws” which forbade “Aryan women” from working with Jews. The family disappeared, she said.
At the age of 23, her family, through contacts, found her a job with Dr Hempel, the newly appointed “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the German Reich” to Ireland.
Still speaking with a very slight German accent, she recalled, with great clarity, the circumstances of her arrival in Ireland. She was “glad to get out of Germany” where she disliked the Nazis and “thought the whole thing was rotten”.
Dr and Frau Hempel travelled to Dublin first to arrange suitable accommodation and, later in 1937, Elisabeth followed with the children, on a transatlantic liner from Bremerhaven. They disembarked “out in Galway Bay” and were transported ashore by tender.
She recalled being horrified by the unkempt back yards she glimpsed from the train as it arrived into Kingsbridge (now Heuston) Station. She thought: “Dublin was the dirtiest city I had ever seen” and quite unlike Germany where “they paint houses at the back as well”.
Due to her aristocratic background, she was not officially employed as a nanny or governess by Dr Hempel and in Ireland was “introduced socially as a baroness and friend of the family”. However, she “received pocket money for looking after the children and helped to run the staff and entertainment and did the flowers and table arrangements”.
Despite the Emergency there was a lively social scene in Dublin. She met senior Irish government figures, “danced with [taoiseach, Éamon] de Valera at the Mansion House and knew all the ministers – they used to come to dinner.”
In 1943, Elisabeth decided that “although the Hempels were very kind to me and I had a lovely time” – it was “time for me to go and make my own life”.
So she moved out of Dr Hempel’s house, took a room in Dublin and earned a living by giving German lessons.
After the war, she was invited by an Irish friend of the Hempel family (who returned to Germany) to go to Achill to help run a hotel at Keel. There she met and married a local man.
