Author Bielenberg dies aged 94

Ms Christabel Bielenberg, who has died aged 94, was author of an internationally acclaimed memoir about surviving in Nazi Germany.

The Past is Myself was published in 1968 and later translated into seven languages. Ms Bielenberg moved to Ireland in 1948 with her husband, Peter, and they settled in Tullow, Co Carlow, earning their living from farming.

In an interview in 1999, she recalled that the most painful part of her memoir related to the four weeks after the failed attempt on Hitler's life on July 20th, 1944, when she did not know if her husband, who had been involved in the plot, was alive or dead.

She finally got a letter from a friend saying that he had been arrested. He was taken to a concentration camp and was later transferred to a punishment squad in the army. The others involved in the failed plot were hanged from meat hooks and filmed as they died. "They couldn't nail Peter down, that was it," she later recalled.

Ms Bielenberg also recalled: "All our friends in Germany had been murdered by Hitler, so we left. I couldn't expect my German husband to live in England, which was still very anti-German. So we came to Ireland. My father was Irish, from Corofin, and I had always loved Ireland. I used to come here for school holidays."

Her husband had been a lawyer in Germany, but they soon adapted to the farming life. However, she would later remark: "I am not by nature a farmer's wife. I don't like sheep and I hate cows. I had to milk the rotten cows."

The Past is Myself sold nearly a million copies and earned her a number of awards, including a Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit from Germany and a Golden Medal of Merit from the European Parliament. A television version of the book, starring Elizabeth Hurley, was also made.

She also wrote a sequel, The Road Ahead, based on the years just after the war. Like her mother, she was named after Christabel Pankhurst, one of the early suffragettes. She always took a keen interest in women's rights, but remarked in 1999 that her perspective had changed now that she was an "old bird".

"Women have a role to play and they are playing it now. But it would be a pity if they get too bossy and pleased with themselves." She was predeceased by her husband in 2001.