TWO WOMEN who left Nazi Germany in 1937, and came to live in Dublin, have been reunited after 66 years.
One now lives in New York, the other on Achill Island off the Co Mayo coast. They last met in May 1945, at a meeting in the Dún Laoghaire residence of Germany’s envoy to Ireland, to be told that Hitler was dead and the second World War was coming to an end. Both went on to lead very different lives. They lost contact and neither knew the other was still alive.
Their reunion, by telephone at the weekend, was prompted by a mysterious portrait of a four-year-old girl – by Irish artist Patrick Hennessy and dated 1939 – which arrived from Germany to be sold at Whyte’s art auctioneers in Dublin.
The girl, Liv Hempel, was traced and discovered to be living in New York, where she has spent most of her adult life. Now aged 75, she explained that the portrait had been commissioned by her father, Dr Eduard Hempel, who headed the German legation to Ireland from 1937 to 1945.
He returned to live in Germany and the contents of his house there – including paintings – were sold after his death. While she remembered the portrait hanging on the wall of her childhood home in Dublin, she never expected – nor particularly wished – to see it again.
It subsequently emerged that the woman who brought her to Ireland, and helped to care for her as a child, was alive and well and living on Achill Island.
Elisabeth Sweeney (96) revealed that she was, in fact, born Baroness von Offenberg, but the aristocratic family had fallen on hard times and she had come to Ireland with the Hempel family to escape the oppressive regime in 1930s Germany. After the war, she remained in Ireland and moved to Achill, which she already knew from summer holidays with the Hempel family.
There she met and married a local man, Niall Sweeney who is since deceased. She admitted that after life on Dublin’s diplomatic circuit moving into a traditional West of Ireland cottage “with an open turf fire, no water and no electricity” was “an awful shock but I loved it”. She remembered having to “draw water from a pump” and, in summertime, choosing, instead, to “wash in a little river”.
When Liv Hempel read about her story in The Irish Timesonline edition in New York, she decided to call her old "nanny". She admitted to being "quite ambivalent about making the call at first, but then was so happy to have done it".
Ms Hempel said afterwards: “I felt elated when I hung up. There is something wonderful about re-establishing contacts later in life. We both felt very comfortable just chatting about the past and what we have done over the years.”
In Achill, Ms Sweeney described their reunion as “a story with a lovely ending and all thanks to the portrait”.
