A woman whose family fled the Nazis and moved to Ireland has died days before Holocaust Memorial Day.
Doris Segal died at her home in Terenure in south Dublin on Wednesday at the age of 85.
She was born Dorathea Klepperova in Chomotow, a German speaking town in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, on June 16, 1932. Ms Segal fled along with her parents in 1938 when it became clear that the Nazis were going to occupy Sudentenland.
Last night Leo Varadkar, Charlie Flanagan, the minister for justice, and Mícheál Mac Donncha, the lord mayor of Dublin, were among those who attended a Holocaust Memorial Day event in the Mansion House, Dublin.
The taoiseach met Holocaust survivors Tomi Reichental, Suzi Diamond and Jan Kaminski and gave the keynote address. Rosel Siev, the other survivor who lives in Ireland, did not attend. “We can never recover what was lost or those who were lost. All we can share is a warning from history,” Mr Varadkar told the 600 attendees.
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Ms Segal, her father and mother Gretel travelled by train to Holyhead and arrived by boat in Ireland in the summer of 1939.
Her father Siegfried set up a hat factory in Castlebar, Co Mayo, through a trade mission seeking to attract industry to the west of Ireland.
Her father’s two brothers died in concentration camps and her maternal grandparents were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp north of Prague in 1942 before being deported to Auschwitz where they died. “I was very fond of my grandparents and we were very close. It was very hard saying goodbye to them, even though I did not realise at the time that we would never see each other again,” Ms Segal said in an interview with the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland.
At the age of 12 Doris was sent to boarding school in Dublin. Afterwards she qualified as a physiotherapist and married Jack Segal, who owned a jewellery and metal manufacturing company, in 1958.
They had three children: Henry and Michelle, who live in America, and Robert, who lives in Israel.