She was betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured
COUNTESS MARY DE GALWAY O’KELLY (1905-99), a Belgian resistance operative, was born Mary Cummins in Dublin on April 24th, 1905, one of 10 children of Thomas Patrick Cummins, a plumber, and his wife, Ellen Black. She attended Fairview National School before moving to the Dominican College on Eccles Street. Showing a remarkable aptitude for languages while still young, she travelled to Brussels, where she taught English to the 12 children of a Belgian countess and later worked as a translator at the Canadian embassy.
Cummins was in Brussels during the German invasion of May 1940 and became involved with the Belgian resistance. Holding an Irish passport, she was an ideal courier, and also had access to foreign diplomats; she also worked as a translator and smuggled weapons. After some months she was betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested. She was taken to Berlin and imprisoned in a concentration camp, regularly subjected to horrific torture and forced to witness the torture inflicted on others.
She was moved around continually, held in camps in Bremen, Dresden and Essen, among others. At one time she was among those scheduled for extermination but was saved when the train that was supposed to take her to Auschwitz was derailed. On April 25th, 1945, her camp was liberated by American troops who found her starving, weighing only four stone and suffering from numerous ailments, including decalcification of the spine. She spent several months recovering in hospitals in Switzerland and Paris. In 1946 she received decorations from King Leopold of the Belgians and General Eisenhower.
While in Brussels to undergo an assessment for compensation in 1946 she met Count Guy (Gui) O’Kelly de Galway, a barrister descended from Irish military emigres. They were married in 1949 and moved to Ireland. In 1964 she accompanied her husband to Dublin airport before he travelled to England on business. After saying goodbye she never saw him again and, despite strenuous efforts to trace him, never found out what became of him.
Throughout her life she maintained an attitude of stoicism and cheerful optimism. Known by her nieces and nephews as Auntie Bunnie, she was a well-known and popular figure in her locality of Clontarf, and in her 80s gave a lengthy interview to RTÉ radio for a documentary entitled In the Shadow of Death. She died on June 20th, 1999, and was cremated at Glasnevin Cemetery.
David Murphy
From the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie for more details
