Countess Mary O'Kelly de Galway (nee Cummins) who died on June 20th, aged 94, was a small, sprightly Dubliner with an indomitable spirit. A tremendous appetite for life hid the effects of four torturous years spent in prisons and concentration camps during the second World War. She was the only Irish person to have worked for the 40-strong Belgian Resistance during the war. This work - translating, passing messages, informing and smuggling arms - resulted in her being arrested at gunpoint by the Gestapo who walked into her Brussels apartment early one morning as she slept. Her landlady had given them the key.
The then 35-year-old was taken to Berlin and sentenced to death. She spent the next four years interned by the Nazis in camps and prisons across four different countries. In an RTE radio documentary In the Shadow of Death, recorded when she was in her eighties, she described in detail the torture inflicted on her and her fellow inmates during this time. She was beaten and trussed up naked while "every orifice" of her body was explored. She witnessed men being dipped into scalding water, others forced to drink liquids laced with crushed glass, other men getting their eyes gouged out.
Thirst in the camps - Bremen, Dresden, Essen; the list grew longer as the years passed - became so great that she and other prisoners drank their own urine. The hunger was so intolerable that some resorted to cannibalism. She narrowly missed extermination at one point when a train supposed to be taking the group she was in to Aushwitz was derailed.
For the last few months of her imprisonment she believed that she was going to die, often fainting from hunger and stress. Her prayer to God was constant: "Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my spirit". By contrast, her early life couldn't have been more comfortable. Mary Cummins was born in 1905 into a wealthy upper middleclass Dublin family of 10 which lived in Waterfall Cottage, a large home with beautiful grounds on Richmond Road in Drumcondra. Her father, Thomas, was a civil engineer and hers was a happy childhood. She attended national school in Fairview and later moved to the Dominican College at Eccles Street. There she excelled at languages, especially French, and it was a reverend mother at the school who suggested that she should travel abroad to develop her knowledge of the language. On completing her studies she travelled to Brussels to take up a post with a wealthy Belgian countess. Her job was to teach her 12 children English. She had her own apartment, a maid and the use of a chauffeur. By 1939 she had mingled with the Belgian royal family, worked as a translator at the Canadian Embassy and made friends with a group of people who as the war clouds began to gather, called themselves the Resistance. The fact that she had an Irish passport and that she spoke English was of enormous value to them. For her part she was "intrigued and certainly a bit nervous". But she had given them her word that she would help and "they were relying on me". The American soldiers came the day after her fortieth birthday, handing bread to the group of starving prisoners. She weighed just four stone when the war ended and spent several months in hospital in Switzerland and Paris recovering from a litany of ailments including decalcification of the spine. She wore a "plaster jacket" for six months.
She finally arrived home, escorted by the Red Cross in 1946, and was decorated by King Leopold of Belgium and General Eisenhower. Returning to Brussels a couple of years later for a compensation assessment, she fell in love with a handsome young Belgian barrister, Count Gui O'Kelly de Galway, thought to be a descendant of the Galway Wild Geese. They married and settled down in Ireland in 1949 but 15 years later he left to go for an interview for a job in England. She kissed him goodbye at Dublin airport and never saw him again despite attempts to trace him for much of the rest of her life.
The Countess never became bitter and had a realistic outlook on life: "The body is not made to last forever and the physical state has to deteriorate, that is the normal run of things," she once said. "I accept that and I do what I can to help myself on the way; I remain optimistic and grateful that I am alive."
These were not empty words. Just a week before she died the Countess was still taking her regular walks on Howth Pier in Co Dublin and was looking forward to going to see Hal Roach. She was extremely well dressed, with her auburn hair and eyebrows dyed regularly; relations said she was "the life and soul of any party". "Aren't I marvellous for my age," she used to say. "They'll have to shoot me".
On June 20th she watched the royal wedding of Edward and Sophie and drank sherry - "We are at a wedding after all," she told her sister-in-law. She died at six that morning, the last one of her nine siblings. She will be greatly missed by her nieces and nephews, who knew her as "Aunty Bunnie". Countess Mary O'Kelly de Galway: born 1905; died June, 1999