My friend Eva Mayer Schay, who has died aged 91, was a violinist with the English National Opera for 30 years. Her family had fled Germany in the 1930s and Eva grew up in South Africa, arriving in Britain in the 50s to escape apartheid.
Eva was born in Cologne to Alfred Schay, an accountant and tax consultant, and his wife, Hermine (nee Wertheimer); two years later her father was hounded out of Germany as a non-Aryan and the family moved to Mallorca, where Eva remembered an idyllic childhood with her mother running a B&B. The idyll came to a brutal end with the Spanish civil war, when they were shipped back to Germany and thence to Milan. They were pitifully poor and fearful for their future. Thanks to family connections in South Africa, in 1936 they settled in Johannesburg, where Alfred managed to find employment.
