My mother, Irene Gill, who has died aged 92, came to the UK as a refugee from Nazi Germany and spent much of the rest of her life teaching German, while also pursuing her interest in progressive causes. In later life she wrote about her experiences in the autobiographical How to Be a Refugee: Life Lessons Learned By One Who Escaped the Holocaust (2022).
Irene was born in Freiburg to the eminent Hellenist Günther Zuntz and his wife, Leonore (nee Hempel), a nurse, who were both secular Jews. In 1936, when Irene was three, her family fled Germany, first to Denmark and then, in 1939, to Britain. They arrived in Oxford, where her father wangled a job at one of the college libraries, and she did her secondary education mainly at Oxford high school. After a year at a radical alternative boarding school called the École d’Humanité, in Switzerland (1948-49), she got a first-class degree and a master’s in German medieval poetry at University College London. There she met my father, the poet David Gill; they were married in 1958 and took part in the first Aldermaston march the same year.
