Page 7 - C:\Users\JJK Laptop\Desktop\OMS Newsletter Nov 2024\

HOW WEST CORK’S CISS FOUGHT THE NAZIS

By Clodagh Finn
Excerpted from the Irish Examiner, Saturday 7 September 2024

So many lessons come down to us from the past, if only we could hear,
not to mind heed them.

This week, for instance, just as a far-right party secured victory in a state
election in Germany for the first time since the Second World War, a
story emerges of an overlooked Corkwoman whose work with the French
Resistance saved the lives of others.

Angela ‘Ciss’ O’Mahony, born at Brade, Leap, in West Cork in 1922, never
spoke about her work in Angers in western France but, many decades “C’est bien ce qu’elle a fait, votre soeur” (What your sister
after the war, her brother Denis met people who said her warnings had did was good), said one. Another woman, a reluctant
cleaner at the Gestapo office, called to say Ciss was being
saved members of their families from arrest and execution.
held in one of the cells in the basement.
Ciss died just last year in London, without giving any details, but it is Around the same time, another Irish-passport holder,
reasonable to assume her words of caution were based on information
she gleaned while working at the town hall in Angers, a town that became Mary O’Shaughnessy, was working to help Allied airmen
get out of the town at great risk to herself. She hid one
the seat of a regional German military command centre during the
Second World War. of them, a Sergeant Hillyard, in the attic of her employer,
at Boulevard Foch, just a few minutes’ walk away from
Indeed, Ciss, then 21, and her family lived right in the middle of that where Ciss was working.
command centre. They were lodged, with their aunt Mary (Pet), on the
second and third floor of a house requisitioned by the Germans. The Did these two Irishwomen know each other? It is
impossible to say. I researched the latter for a book, with
German miliary police occupied the first floor of their home, 10 rue Denis
Papin, while the Gestapo headquarters ran its odious business in houses John Morgan, on the Irish in the Resistance. Its publication
last week prompted Ciss’s niece, Ann Buckley, to get in
along two streets behind them.
touch. It was exactly what we hoped would happen. In
Five of the nine O’Mahony children had been sent from West Cork to live shining a light on the quiet Irish heroes of the Second
in France with two single aunts, one in Angers and other in Rennes in World War, we hoped others would be revealed.
Brittany. In 1920s Ireland, it was seen as a way of giving them a better
start in life. The O’Mahony siblings did enjoy better opportunities, but And their names remembered. As Dr. Buckley said:
“There’s not a lot I can tell you about Ciss’s wartime
they also found themselves caught up in the Nazi occupation of France.
For a time, it was far from certain that Angela O’Mahony would make her experiences, but I don’t want her name to disappear, if I
can help it.
way out of it.
“She died only last year, but never spoke to anyone about
As her younger brother Denis recalled in his 2002 memoir, From West either her work with the underground movement or her
Cork to Anjou: “One morning in July ’43, at about 5 am, the Gestapo
called…We were herded into one room while they searched the house. personal experiences. Too painful, I’m sure, but also due
My sister [Ciss] was missing. I offered to go to her room to wake her up. to the need to maintain confidentiality for the protection
of others.”
‘She’s not here,’ said the German, ‘she is with us.’”
Yet there is ample evidence from the testimony of those
Denis’s blood ran cold. He had no idea that his older sister was in Angers that her work saved others from the fate that
involved in resistance work or what her imprisonment would mean.
News of her arrest whipped around the town, which responded with awaited her – internment at the Nazi prison Compiègne
near Paris. Many were executed there or deported to
the kind of gratitude that speaks volumes about Angela O’Mahony’s
clandestine work. Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, or other concentration camps.
Mary O’Shaughnessy was sent to Ravensbrück, a place of
At school, Denis was treated with friendly sympathy. Callers to the house
left food parcels; a pound of butter, a small bag of sugar, six unblemished unimaginable cruelty, but Angela O’Mahony fell gravely
potatoes in a string bag. ill and was sent to the military hospital, Val-de-Grâce, in
7