Christabel Bielenberg

Christabel Bielenberg, the author of an internationally acclaimed memoir of her struggle to survive Nazi Germany, died Nov. 2 at her family estate in rural Ireland, relatives said. She was 94.

Mrs. Bielenberg ' s " The Past is Myself, " published in 1968, became a best seller in the mid-1980s after it was turned into the British television drama " Christabel " starring Elizabeth Hurley. Her memoir recounted how her marriage to a German law student placed her on a collision course with history.

Born Christabel Burton in London in 1909, she rejected an Oxford University scholarship to study opera in Hamburg, where she met Peter Bielenberg. They married in 1934 and she renounced her British citizenship just as Adolf Hitler was rising to power.

In 1944, her husband, a civil servant in the Ministry of Economics, supported an unsuccessful plot by generals and government officials to assassinate Hitler. Thanks in part to her diplomatic appeals, he escaped execution and was sent to fight on the Russian front.

After the war, she worked as a correspondent for the British newspaper The Observer, he as a finance official in the first West German government.

Later, they decided to move to Ireland and in 1948 bought an estate near Tullow, 60 miles southwest of Dublin.

" All our friends in Germany had been murdered by Hitler, so we left, " she recalled. " I couldn ' t expect my German husband to live in England, which was still very anti-German. So we came to Ireland. "

In 1988, she received an honorary Commander ' s Cross of the Order of Merit from the West German government. She wrote a sequel to her memoir, titled " The Road Ahead " and published in 1992, that described her family ' s transition from Germany to Ireland.

Her husband died in 2001. They were survived by three sons.