My mother-in-law, Eva Sommerfreund, who has died aged 98, had a hazardous early life until she settled in London and enjoyed, with others who had escaped Nazi Germany, the music, art and literature that underpinned her life.
Her early childhood in Vienna was happy and much influenced by her parents’ friends, who included the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky and the writer Karl Krauss. Her mother, Ilonka Schaeffer de Mayo, who danced with her sister under the stage name Hermanas Santos, came from a Sephardic Jewish family where Ladino was still spoken. Her father, Hans Oplatek, who ran the Vienna office of his father’s steel company, Meva, was from a prosperous family of Czech nationalists.
Eva loved music and, after her parents separated, she lived with her mother and younger sister, Madeleine, near the Staatsoper, where she stood in the gods several times a week, learning arias by heart. She took private singing lessons and in 1935 joined a group called the Singing Babies, touring Europe, performing at many major venues, including the Paris Lido and the London Palladium and, in Ankara, Turkey, catching the eye of Kemal Atatürk.
In 1937 she left the Singing Babies and went to Prague for screen tests. When the Germans invaded the city two years later, she obtained exit visas for herself and her husband, Walter Oplatek, a lawyer and distant relative, whom she had met in the Czech capital. She said goodbye to her father, who had opened a piano bar in Wenceslas Square. He was later killed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Taking the train into Austria and on to Italy, she always worried that her exit visas might be forgeries. From Milan she crossed into France, and in Paris joined her mother and sister; they had left Vienna in 1938, at the time of the Anschluss.
In Paris she worked in an ordnance factory, while Walter joined the Free Czechoslovak Army. In May 1940 the three women fled when the Germans invaded, and walked nearly 500 miles to the south of France, even though Eva was five months pregnant. In Marseille they met up with Walter and boarded a coal ship with the remnants of the Czech army, docking several weeks later in Liverpool.
In 1940 her son, Henry, was born with Down’s syndrome. Her husband wanted nothing to do with his son and left. Eva suffered a nervous breakdown.
After marrying Andrew Krajkeman, a Polish chemist and musician, whom she met in 1944, she had two daughters, Catherine and Diana. The family settled in Cricklewood, north-west London. Eva kept in close touch with Henry, who lived in sheltered accommodation in London, until his death, aged 69.
A lover of music, literature and art, she and other central Europeans recreated the world they had been forced to leave, the Cosmo café on Finchley Road, north London, the Czech club, concerts and parties contrasting greatly with the drab postwar society around them.
In 1969 Eva and Andrew divorced. She married Henry Sommerfreund, a jeweller whom she had known in Vienna in the 30s. They divorced 10 years later.
Eva is survived by Catherine, Diana, three grandsons and two great-grandsons.
