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This stroy was gathered and submitted to the WW2 Peoples War site by Oliver Murphy

Mary FitzGerald:
An Irishwoman
in
Bergen-Belsen

James FitzGerald taught Latin and Greek in Belvedere for many years. He was born c1895 and was known to his pupils in Belvedere as ‘Pills’. The nickname comes from a Classical textbook, known as ‘Pills’. At the start of lessons, Mr FitzGerald would tell the boys ‘Take out your Pills.’

James FitzGerald had a sister Mary. The family hailed from Mungret in Co Limerick. Mary was a difficult woman who, according to her grandniece Lucy, ‘riled everyone’. When a member of the FitzGerald family died in 1992, Mary was unhappy about the will, argued with her family and walked out.

Mary FitzGerald made her way to France where she founded a school. She later moved on to Brussels in Belgium where she settled and founded another school. Unfortunately for her, she held on to her British passport, even though she could have acquired an Irish one.

When the Nazis invaded Belgium, Mary FitzGerald was found to have a British passport and so was detained as an enemy alien. She was sent to Bergen-Belsen, which at this stage was a prisoner-of-war camp. Here she passed the last two years of the war. Fortunately, she survived the increasingly horrific conditions in Bergen-Belsen. Numbers in the camp increased to over 60,000 — far in excess of the 10,000 for which the camp was designed. Although Belsen was not officially an extermination camp, starvation and disease (mainly typhus and tuberculosis) ensured that many thousands perished.

It is an extraordinary coincidence that when Fr Michael Morrison SJ, a teacher from Belvedere College who entered Bergen-Belsen as a chaplain on 15 April 1945, the sister of one of his fellow-teachers was a prisoner there. Of course, Morrison did not know this. Indeed, it is unlikely that he ever found out.

Nevertheless, Mary FitzGerald was liberated on that day and later returned to her home at 38 Rue de Belgrade in Brussels. She died there in November 1959, at about 70 years of age. She died alone and unmarried. She left no will.

Her nephew, David FitzGerald attended Belvedere College as a student. He died in 2003. A science laboratory in the new Science and Technology Block at Belvedere has been named after him.

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