Operation Shamrock: how a German girl became an Irish woman

Dublin was covered in a fresh blanket of snow the day Elizabeth Kohlberg and her brother, August, arrived in Ireland.

It was a particularly cold November and home in Aachen felt very far away.

The malnourished eight-year-old felt the bitter chill in the air as she stepped off the ship in Dún Laoghaire harbour, exhausted after a long journey. She fell into the arms of a Red Cross worker.

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Elizabeth’s Irish parents Mary and Roderick McNicholl.

Accompanied by the other children from the ship, the twins were brought from Dún Laoghaire into the valley of Glencree in the Wicklow Mountains to the old military barracks.

When she stepped inside the barracks, the Elizabeth saw a beautiful woman walking towards her: “I saw what I thought was an angel, but it was actually a nun in one of the big white bonnets.

“She was from the French Sisters of Charity. We were taken into a big room and given hot milk, chocolate and lovely fresh soft white bread with butter. I really thought I was in heaven,” she remembers.

Nearly seven decades later, Elizabeth O’Gorman is sitting in her south Dublin home with her husband Jack by her side surrounded by photographs of their five children and seven grandchildren.

Elizabeth was one of the nearly 1,000 German children brought to Ireland in 1946 as part of Operation Shamrock – an Irish Red Cross initiative to resettle children from war-torn Germany.

Holding the woollen cardigan she wore the day she arrived in Ireland, she leafs through a photo album. “I don’t remember my parents,” she says, pointing towards a black and white image of a man standing with two children.

Elizabeth’s mother became ill after she gave birth to the twins in 1938. She and her twin were sent to an orphanage with their older brother Gottfried outside their hometown of Aachen in western Germany. They had no contact with their older sisters, Josephine and Gertrude.

In 1944 their mother died after a bombing in the hospital where she was a patient. Their father, who had been conscripted into the army in 1939, was shot dead in Russia two weeks later.

Elizabeth did not like the orphanage and remembers the women in charge were stern and cool with the children. "We didn't have much, we just had enough food to keep us going. I was one of the helpers that used to go out of the orphanage into Belgium to get milk."

She was too young to understand the war, but knew there was always a risk of bombings. “Every now and then you would hear them and run for shelter and if you didn’t make it you hid under the tables and chairs.”

In 1946, her aunt and uncle signed the release papers for the twins to be sent to Ireland. The day they were due to leave, their older sisters came to the orphanage with gifts for their siblings.

“They gave me a beautiful big doll and my twin brother got a German sausage dog. We were delighted because we never had presents, we never had anything. And these were ours,” she remembers.

On the train to the port a group of older boys told the twins they were being sent to a concentration camp to be slaughtered. By the time they stepped onto Irish soil, they were emotionally and physically exhausted.

The children spent three weeks in the Glencree army barracks before they were collected by their foster families. Elizabeth remembers being driven through central Dublin the evening she was brought to her new home in Sandymount.

“The city was all lit up with Christmas lights and there were big trees down the centre of O’Connell Street. It was enchanting, I’ll never forget that. Passing Henry Street and seeing all the lights, I didn’t know where I was going, it was so exciting from the dull life in Aachen.”

Elizabeth’s foster parents welcomed her into the family home and dressed her in clothes they had knitted for her arrival. Her mother made her a tunic for school and her father gave her a dressing gown with her initials on it.

Unfortunately, the couple was unable to take in her brother and August was sent to live with a family in Glasnevin. "I was very close to my twin brother. He was quite a sick little boy so I spent a lot of time with him in the orphanage looking after him. I remember being sad and knowing it was difficult when I visited him and not feeling very welcome when we did go to that family."

In the beginning, she struggled to communicate with her foster parents. “I had no English and they had no German so it was quite difficult.”

She was also picked on as an outsider in school. “I used to be tormented quite a bit. They would run after me and call me names. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but bit by bit I did learn and I wasn’t proud. I wouldn’t be sticking my name out and telling people I was German because a lot of people didn’t like Germans, that’s for sure.”

After three years, many of the children who had come to Ireland through Operation Shamrock were sent back to Germany. However, both Elizabeth and her twin were adopted into their new families. Her new parents also agreed to invite Gottfried to Ireland for a holiday. “My brother came and he settled in very quickly. He absolutely adored my mother and my mother adored him. Straight away they wanted to adopt him.”

As the years passed, Elizabeth became increasingly aware of the death and destruction that had taken place during the second World War. “When I learned about the different things Hitler did and what happened in Germany and the many people killed, you couldn’t be proud.

“But as you get older you understand better and I realised it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything and I lost my parents over it. You go into another bitterness of what Germany did to you, my own country. For me, personally, I felt that Germany did a lot of harm to their own people.”

She returned to Germany for the first time when she was 18 accompanied by her close German friend Antje, who acted as a translator. By this point Elizabeth no longer spoke German. “I got a longing mid-way through my teen years that I had to go back to Germany. It wasn’t with the idea of wanting to live in Germany, I just wanted to meet my family.”

The two women were met by Elizabeth’s sisters, aunt and uncle. “I saw the tears coming down their eyes when they looked at me. I said ‘Why are your crying’ and they said: ‘It’s because you just are so like your mum; your mannerisms and your appearance.’ I came away from that trip very happy but I had absolutely no doubt that Ireland was my home.”

Her brother August did not feel the same connection with Ireland and moved to South Africa to work in the gold mines when he finished school. He met a South African woman and they married and had a daughter. When he was 29 he died in a car crash.

“I had a letter just two weeks before he died to say it’s been so long since I’ve written to you but let’s make up for the lost years. He said ‘I hope to come to Ireland in a year or two when things settle down’. I never saw him again from when he was 18.”

By the time her brother died, Elizabeth had met her husband Jack O’Gorman and started a family. She’s grateful to the Irish people for giving her the chance to start a new life in Sandymount all those years ago.

“I am really very happy. I’ve a wonderful husband and wonderful children and grandchildren. Now I am proud to be German but I’m definitely Irish.”