It is being reported that a countess had died in New York after being exiled from her own country.

Ilond Devito, 73, worked at Merrill Lynch on Wall Street for over three decades and colleagues never knew that she grew up in a castle and had fled Hungary with her family to escape the Romanian Communist government, reports the New York Times.

Ilona Devit di Porriasa died April 15 and the truth about her origins is only no being revealed by her relatives.

Her mother was a baroness and her father was a count, who represented Transylvania to Hungary. She had grown up in a castle, which was given to her parents as a wedding present from her grandmother, Countess Ilona Teleki de Szek.

Her father's counsin, Pal Teleki, was a prime minister for Hungary but he committed suicide when Hitler invaded the Hungarian border heading to Yugoslavia and the Hungarian Army joined in.  His death was described by Winston Churchill as "a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack on Yugoslavkia."

But as World War II raged on and the Soviets took control over Hungary and Romania, to which Transylvania had belonged, the Ilona's family became vulnerable. Her father was imprisoned by the government and the Telekis' properties were seized. She was forced to move out of the castle, which now stands as a clinic and botanical garden.

The Telekis ended up living in poverty - a far cry from their life in the castle. They lived in a converted stable with no running water and in a library that her family had founded.

Count Teleki eventually sought asylum in America and his family joined him in 1964 after he bribed Romania authorities to let them leave.

Ilona spoke now English when she first arrived and had took on many jobs, including a hosiery factory in the Bronx.

She married Lino DeVito di Porriasa in 1975.

She rarely spoke of her past to anyone. "She didn't really want people to know, because people think of nobility as having something, and my mother really had nothing when she came here," her daughter said.

Ilona had no college degree, but after taking up a job as a teletypist in Merrill Lynch, she was promoted to market analyst and eventually joined the securities research department in early 1970. She worked until her retirement in 2005 and had quite a reputation for her quick calculations.

Over the three decades Ilona worked at the company, she never mentioned her background. Merrill Lynch broker Tom Webster said: "In all the time I talked to her every day, we talked about Hungary and everything, but she never said a word about her being royalty," said Tom Webster, a Merrill Lynch broker.