On 2 May 1945, [prime minister] Taoiseach Éamon de Valera expressed condolences to the German ambassador upon the death of Adolf Hitler. It was criticised nationally and internationally. Angela D Walsh, with an address on East 44th Street, New York, wrote to de Valera the day after, “I am horrified, ashamed, humiliated…You, who are the head of a Catholic country, have now shown allegiance to a devil.”
It also prompted another question, De Valera was a devout Roman Catholic. Suicide always has been considered, by the Catholic Church, as a grave offence, which is one of the elements that constitute mortal sin. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “It is God who remains the sovereign master of life. … We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of” So aside from the obvious genocidal crimes Hitlers had been responsible for, he was in breach of one of the core Catholic teachings, so why offer Condolences to someone who committed a mortal sin? If Hitler had been an Irish Catholic, he would not receive absolution.
The reason why De Valera offered the condolences was that Ireland was neutral, and it was in accordance with diplomatic protocol. De Valera also denounced reports of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp as “anti-national propaganda,” according to historian Paul Bew, this was not out of disbelief but rather because the Holocaust undermined the main assumption underlying Irish neutrality.
However, what De Valera should have known as the leader of his country, was that several Irish citizens were murdered by the Nazis, during the Holocaust.
Ettie Steinberg
Ettie (Esther) Steinberg was born in Veretski (Vericky) in Czechoslovakia on 11 January 1914. She was one of seven children. Her family moved to Ireland in 1925 and lived in Raymond Terrace off the South Circular Road in Dublin. Ettie attended St Catherine’s School in Donore Avenue and after worked as a seamstress.
In 1937, she married Wojteck Gluck, a goldsmith from Belgium, in Greenville Hall Synagogue, Dublin. The couple moved to Belgium to live in Antwerp. From there, they moved to Paris, where their son, Leon, was born on 28 March 1939.
The young family moved several times, ending up in Toulouse in 1942, where they were arrested and detained in Drancy Transit Camp, North of Paris. Ettie’s family in Dublin had succeeded in securing visas for the Gluck family, which would have allowed them to travel to Northern Ireland. However, when the visas arrived in Toulouse, it was too late. Ettie, Wojteck and Leon were rounded-up.
On 2 September 1942, the Glucks were deported by train from Drancy to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in gas chambers two days later, just eighty years ago.
Isaac Shishi
Isaac Shishi’s family came to Dublin from Vieksniai in Lithuania in 1890. Isaac was born in Dublin on 29 January 1891. His sister, Rose (or Rachel), was born in Dublin on 22 April 1892. The family was living at 36 St Alban’s Road, off the South Circular Road in Dublin.
In 1890, Isaac’s Grandfather died in Lithuania. He had been a publican and had a small brewery. In 1893, Isaac’s father, Shaya, his wife, Ida, and their two young Irish children, Isaac and Rose, returned to Vieksniai, where they had three more children. The married sisters remained in Dublin. In 1920, Rose emigrated to the United States, but Isaac stayed in Lithuania, where he married Chana Garbel in 1922, and they had a daughter, Sheine Shishi, born in 1924. In 1941, Isaac Shishi, an Irish citizen, his wife, Chana, and their daughter, Sheine, were murdered by the Nazis in Vieksniai.
Ephraim and Jeanne (Lena) Saks
The parents of Ephraim and Lena Saks made their way from Ponedel in Lithuania to Dublin in 1914 via Leeds and Antwerp. They had three young children when they arrived, and the family remained in Ireland for the First World War duration. Children, Ephraim was born in Dublin on 19 April 1915, and his sister, Lena (aka Jeanne), was born on 2 February 1918.
Sometime after the end of the First World War, the family returned to Antwerp. A Belgian record shows the family was living together with the five children.
Ephraim was a furrier (Furrier is defined: as a person who either makes clothing out of fur, repairs fur garments or sells them) and single, living in France at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was arrested and deported from the Drancy Transit Camp in Paris to Auschwitz on 24 August 1942. There he was murdered by the Nazis.
Jeanne (aka Janie, aka Lena) was single and professionally a salesperson, living in Antwerp during the war. She was captured and deported to Auschwitz. She was murdered there by the Nazis at the camp in 1942/43. Testimony by Julia Apfel, a sister of Ephraim and Jeanne Saks, is on the Yad Vashem website. Three of Julia’s siblings, two of whom, Ephraim and Jeanne (Lena) were born in Dublin and hence were Irish citizens, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Major John McGrath
A county Roscommon native, John McGrath, at the outbreak of the war, left his job as manager of the Theatre Royal in Dublin to join in the war effort. He was a World War I veteran and had remained a reserve officer despite having returned to Ireland. Captured in Northern France after the rescue boats had left Dunkirk in June 1940, he became, for a time, the senior British officer in a camp for Irish-born POWs who the Germans hoped to convert to their cause. McGrath ended up in concentration camps for most of the war after German Army Intelligence (Abwehr) discovered he was conspiring to undermine their scheme.
McGrath languished at Sachsenhausen until 13 February 1943. Then he was transferred to the even more notorious Dachau. He had been designated by the Germans a Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) prisoner—one who was to disappear—officially, whose existence was denied so that his eventual elimination would go unnoticed. Mrs McGrath never knew if her son was alive or dead, although she must have feared the worst before she died in October 1944.
For almost two years, McGrath struggled and survived in the camp. He became the first and only ever
In mid-April 1945, as U.S. Forces neared Munich, the special prisoners were evacuated from Dachau in a convoy of buses and trucks. The last of the Prominenten left just three days before the camp’s liberation. McGrath visited the camp on a pretext, the typhus-ravaged and body-strewn main camp. He was trying to learn if other British army personnel were detained. There he met Lieutenant Commander Patrick O’Leary – in reality, Albert Guérisse, a Belgian resistance fighter who had adapted the name and persona of a Canadian friend – who gave him the names and details of five British prisoners.
As McGrath left Dachau in an overcrowded bus, he watched thousands of ordinary prisoners herded out of the camp on a forced march towards the Alps. Mile after mile, the bus passed columns of these unfortunate prisoners in their striped concentration camp uniforms. In an amazing turn of events, the U.S. Army tracked the S.S. and the prisoners to Tyrol. Taking them by surprise, the U.S. troops arrested the 150 S.S. men who had guarded Dachau.
The liberated prisoners were—quickly—driven to Italy, and from there, McGrath was brought back to Ireland via London. By early June 1945, the Roscommon man was back in Dublin, where he resumed his managerial role in the Theatre Royal. His incarceration had taken a toll on his mental and physical health. He had to resign from the Royal due to a nervous disorder. He also suffered from intestinal problems and died 17 months after his return home. He passed away on 27 November 1946. The fact that he died as a result of his time in the camps makes him a Holocaust victim, in my opinion.
Elsa Reininger
Elsa Reininger was not an Irish citizen. However, there is a direct link between her death and Ireland.
Elsa had fled Austria and arrived in Limerick from England in October 1938. There her passport was stamped for a 48 hours stay, basically a short-term visa.
The experiences she witnessed in Austria disturbed Elsa. She had shattered nerves from what she had seen and experienced in Vienna and the possibility that she might have to return there. She was suffering from depression. On 27 October 1938, she booked a room at the Crescent Hotel. There she took a gun from her handbag, and as she lay on the bed, she put it to her head and pulled the trigger, killing herself at age 57. No one heard the shot. She was right to be concerned because she knew the authorities would deport her back to Austria.
sources
https://www.holocausteducationireland.org/ireland-and-the-holocaust
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