My mother, Dorli Meek, who has died aged 98, arrived in Britain as a refugee from Nazi Germany aged 12. Although she had been baptised, under the Nazi regime three Jewish grandparents meant that she was Jewish.
At school in Berlin she was subjected to racial purity tests. An SS officer visited the school, seeking girls to stand as an honour guard for Adolf Hitler. Dorli was selected – she had blond plaits and blue eyes – and although her teacher said that she was not Aryan, it made no difference. Swastika hair ribbons were issued. After Kristallnacht, Dorli was expelled.
Born in Bonn to Martha (nee Plaut), a doctor, and Fritz Schulz, a professor of Roman law, Dorli moved with the family to Berlin in 1931; her father was pensioned off for his political views in 1935.
Dorli was the youngest of four children; her sister and two brothers were sent to Britain ahead of her. Her journey to the UK was organised with the help of a young Englishman whom her mother had spotted on the U-bahn reading the Times. In Hamburg, she was strip-searched on the docks (ostensibly looking for hidden jewellery), before she boarded the boat. Then she chucked her yellow star overboard.
Dorli landed at Southampton; passengers on the boat train shared their chocolate with her. She loved Britain. Her foster parents – a don at Queen’s College, Oxford, and his wife – bought her a pale blue coat like the ones worn by Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
Her parents arrived in England from the Netherlands in August 1939 and the family were reunited and settled in Oxford. Dorli went to Milham Ford school and then to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she studied French and Russian.
After graduating in 1948, Dorli went to Paris and worked as a precis writer at the third session of the UN general assembly, and later as a research assistant at Glasgow University. Dorli met Ronald Meek, a professor of economics, in Glasgow, and they married in 1951. She published Soviet Youth, a collection of translated excerpts from the Soviet press, in 1957. Dorli later taught Russian, French and German at Longslade school, Leicestershire, and became deputy head of Beauchamp college, Oadby, in 1978.
Later in life, she took up the cello so that she could play in string quartets, and also sang in the Midlands chorus and in the Leicester University choir. She was a member of two book clubs, enjoyed hill walking in the UK and in Europe, was a keen gardener, a regular at Stratford-upon-Avon and Opera North, and an active granny.
She joined her local U3A, and in her late 80s started up its ping pong group, which played at a local youth club. They eventually wound up the group after too many trips to A&E because competition was so fierce.
Dorli felt so lucky in life, but she viewed Brexit with horror and by the last year of her life had stopped watching the news.
Ron died in 1978. Dorli is survived by me, two grandchildren, Gus and Kitty, and a great-grandson, Douglas.
