Elisabeth Sweeney, who has died on Achill Island in her 101st year, was a German baroness by birth who survived the first World War, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and what was called the Emergency in Ireland, before settling in Co Mayo for a quieter life.
Her life story began in a “Big House” near Riga in the Russian empire as a subject of Tsar Nicholas II and ended in a cottage in the west of Ireland not long after she received congratulations from President Michael D Higgins on her 100th birthday.
She was born Baroness Elisabeth von Offenberg on June 1st, 1914 – on the eve of the first World War – to an aristocratic émigré German family in the Baltic outposts of the Russian empire. But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 forced her family to flee and they returned, in 1919, as penniless refugees to Germany.
Separated from her parents – father Baron Emmerich von Offenberg and mother Hilda Bruttan – and her five siblings, she grew up in a children’s home in Lübeck. As a young woman she went to Zurich to train as a dietician but, unable to get a job, returned to Germany and was employed as a governess by a Jewish family in Nuremberg. Disappeared She was forced to resign when, as she recalled, “the Nazis banned ‘Aryan’ women from working with Jews”; the family, she said, later “disappeared”.
In 1937, when she was 23, her family, through contacts, found her a job with Dr Eduard Hempel, the newly appointed ambassador of the German Reich to Ireland.
Relieved at the chance to escape “rotten” Nazi Germany, she travelled to Ireland with the Hempel children aboard a transatlantic liner which dropped the passengers at Galway.
She lived with the family in the official residence, “Gortleitragh” in Monkstown, and was introduced socially in Dublin as a baroness and friend of the family. Not strictly an employee, she received what she recalled as being “pocket money for looking after the children”.
She also helped with flowers and table arrangements for official dinners at the house, where she met various Irish dignitaries including cabinet ministers. She attended many social functions in Dublin during the Emergency years and recalled having “danced with de Valera”, who was then taoiseach.
In 1943, she embarked on a new life, moving out of Dr Hempel’s house to rent a room in Dublin and earning a living by giving German lessons.
After the war she was invited by an Irish friend of the Hempel family (who subsequently returned to Germany) to go to Achill to help run a hotel. There she met and married a local man, Niall Sweeney, and they set up home at Achill Sound in a house with an open turf fire, no water and no electricity – which, she recalled decades later, was "an awful shock but I loved it". Childhood portrait In 2011, she read, in The Irish Times, that a childhood portrait by artist Patrick Hennessy of Dr Hempel's daughter Liv had turned up unexpectedly at Whyte's art auction in Dublin and discovered that Liv Hempel, then aged 75, was living in New York.
The two had not met since the day in 1945 when Dr Hempel had informed the German community in Dublin that Hitler was dead and the war was over.
Neither woman knew the other was alive. They re-established contact; Liv Hempel travelled from the United States to Achill for a private reunion and said afterwards: “There is something wonderful about re-establishing contacts later in life.”
Both women spoke publicly about their lives – for the first time – in interviews with The Irish Times. Elisabeth Sweeney's revelations about her extraordinary past surprised many of her neighbours in Achill.
Predeceased in 2001 by her husband, she died at home last month . Following a cremation, her ashes will be interred after a private ceremony in Achill tomorrow, Easter Sunday.
She is survived by her sons Klaus and Peter Sweeney, her daughter Catherine Burke, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.