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.
Afterwards they spent two years teaching in Uganda before returning in 1964 to Oxford, where they lived for most of the years that followed. Irene first taught German as a tutor at some of the Oxford colleges and then later at Lady Verney high school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire (1972-85).
While in Oxford she also worked as a part-time volunteer on the national executive of Oxfam and was a founding member of a small charity called Oxford Aid for Children in Vietnam. She and my father were leading lights in the Oxford branch of CND for decades. Mum became vegetarian in the early 1970s and Dad, at first reluctantly, followed suit.
Irene’s early experiences had left her with a lingering fear of rejection and isolation, which she called her “refugee complex”. But they also gave her an unwavering empathy with those who suffered as she had done. On various occasions she welcomed refugees to her house, including from Yemen and Iraq.
Irene also wrote two books about her family history: Oma, Mu and Me (2005), which was chiefly about her illustrious grandmother, Olga Hempel, who battled sexism and antisemitism to become one of the first women to qualify as a surgeon in prewar Germany, and her autobiography.
David died in 2017. Irene is survived by their three children, Jackie, Nick and me, and five grandchildren.
