My stepmother, Trude Holmes, who has died aged 102, fled Austria in 1938, the year of the Anschluss, and came as a refugee to Britain, where she first worked as a domestic servant.
She was born Trude Falk in Vienna, to middle-class parents who were Jewish but not religious. Her father, Berthold, played chess in the Café Central, which was famously frequented by Trotsky, Freud and Lenin. Her mother, Olga, sang with the Vienna State Opera chorus. Active in the socialist youth movement, Trude was a close friend of Wolf Speiser, whose father, Paul, was deputy mayor in "Red Vienna". She completed a doctorate in psychology at the city's university in 1935.