Irene Gill, peace campaigner, dies at 92

Being on the run from Hitler at the age of three was something Irene Gill would never forget. These traumatic early years left her feeling rejected by Germany and never fully accepted by Britain. Irene Gill, who has died aged 92, called it her “refugee complex.” Years later she would write about it in her memoir, How to be a Refugee: Life Lessons Learned by One Who Escaped the Holocaust (Caseroom Press, 2022). And well before then she would reclaim her lost heritage by teaching German and embracing the progressive, peace causes triggered by her hatred of war.

Vera Irene Gabriele Beate Zuntz was born in 1932 in Freiburg, southern Germany into a secular Jewish family. Her father, Günther Zuntz, was an eminent Hellenist, and her mother, Leonore née Hempel, a nurse.

In 1936 the family were forced to flee, first to Denmark, then in 1939 to Britain, where Günther found a job in one of the Oxford college libraries, and a house in Summertown, with support from the local refugee committee. The family formed an integral part of a Jewish immigrant intelligentsia dedicated to bringing more refugees from Europe to Britain, including some of the 10,000 Kindertransport children who came between 1938 and 1939. For many, Oxford proved a hub of safety and intellectual growth. Some stayed at the Zuntz house in Thorncliffe Road. But assimilation proved challenging for Irene. On arrival in Oxford she spoke no English. She was a quick learner, but on the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 matters took a turn for the worse. Her father was interned as an enemy alien and she was ostracised at school, facing taunts from fellow pupils who called her a “dirty German rat.”

Despite this she made rapid academic progress at primary school followed by Oxford High School, where she passed her exams with flying colours.

In 1948 she spent a year at a radical alternative boarding school, l’École d’Humanité in Switzerland. But she rejected the academic world in favour of acting.

To support herself she took on a variety of short-term jobs – as a props designer, a dance hostess, and even a member of a female swimming group – the Mayfair Mermaids – who performed water ballet.

But entry into repertory proved elusive. In 1953, despite her hatred of academia, she decided to study German at University College London, gaining a first-class degree and a master’s in German medieval poetry.

It was at UCL that she met a fellow student, the poet David Gill, whom she describes in her memoir as “shy and gauche, but kind and intellectually brilliant.” They married in 1958. Their lives were unusually closely intertwined. They were both founder members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and took part in the first Aldermaston March. The couple had three children. Tom was born in 1960, and they took him with them to Uganda in 1962, where they spent two years teaching. They believed that the Equator would be relatively free from the fall-out from the atmospheric nuclear tests being carried out at the time. They went on to have another son, Nick, and adopted a baby girl, Jackie, a child of mixed British and Jamaican heritage, as their own contribution to making Britain a harmonious multicultural society.

Irene’s time in Uganda stayed with her. She corresponded with former students for many decades, and paid for the education of several of them. They returned to Oxford and to teaching jobs in 1964; David at Magdalen College School, Irene as a German tutor at several Oxford colleges, followed by Lady Verney High School in High Wycombe, in 1972, and later Maidenhead. In 1982 they were back in Oxford again, with Irene teaching German at the old Oxford College of Further Education, now City of Oxford College.

From the 1960s to 1970s Irene served on the national executive of Oxfam, whose founders in 1942 included several prominent members of Oxford’s Jewish émigré community. She also co-founded Oxford Aid for Children in Vietnam.

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Her son Tom Gill told The Guardian: “She and my father were leading lights in the Oxford branch of CND for decades.

“My mother became a vegetarian in the early 1970s and my father, 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 they had done. On various occasions she welcomed refugees to her house, including from Yemen and Iraq.”

In her late 80s Irene successfully applied for German citizenship, finding reassurance in the possession of both British and German passports. To outsiders she appeared dedicated and self-confident.

The truth was she was plagued by self-doubt. There is a revealing passage in her memoir: “I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, like a bad smell – a fatal flaw which made me incapable of success… No doubt it went back to my childhood, when I was an ‘Enemy Alien’, a ‘Jerry’, a ‘dirty little German rat’, when the Germans wanted me dead because I was half-Jewish, and the English wanted me dead because I was German.”

Yet those who worked with her have more positive memories. A colleague at the girls’ high school in High Wycombe where she taught remarked: “She brought wonder and delight and rigour into the classroom… She cared about her students, she cared about her subject, but she never allowed a concern for the subject matter of the lesson to overcome her concern for individuals. She was someone that students could talk to.”

Irene and David left the Labour Party over PM Tony Blair’s support for the war in Iraq, and began voting Green. Apart from her memoir, Irene wrote a book on her family history. Oma, Mu and Me (2005), which concerned her maternal grandmother, Olga Hempel, a noted campaigner against sexism and antisemitism, who became one of the first women to qualify as a surgeon in pre-war Germany.

As their children grew older, the couple travelled widely, to Israel, Poland, Japan, Vietnam and Uganda. Sadly these trips abruptly ended in 2012 when David was diagnosed with dementia. In the chapter of Irene’s memoir, Living with Dementia, she describes how her husband descended rapidly into outbursts of uncontrollable behaviour. Irene wrote at the time: “I am a carer now – that’s all… It means my days – and nights – are entirely devoted to keeping the routines going: guiding him, coaxing him through the days. Helping him to get up, washed, dressed. The reverse process at bedtime. Trying to keep him active, to stimulate his darkening mind, thinking of games, outings, TV programmes… giving him simple jobs to do, like stirring the soup, or washing up, or putting things away, anything to make him feel useful, to ward off the despair that’s hanging over us both.”

It was a tragic end to 60 years of harmonious and deeply collaborative marriage when David died on May 19, 2017. Irene retained her strong commitment to CND all her life. After David’s death she sold the family home in Botley and moved to Risinghurst, to live close to her children. She is survived by Tom, Nick, Jackie and her niece Liz.

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Irene Gill: born December 17, 1932. Died February 24, 2025