Sofie Landau, my colleague at the University of the Third Age in London (U3A), has died aged 89. She began to work in the U3A office in 1990, was soon elected to the executive committee and in 2000 became the chair, holding that office for nearly 10 years. Sofie was among the foremost of the many people who have helped to shape and maintain the particular spirit of the London U3A: collegiate, friendly, unhierarchical, unbureaucratic.
She took many classes herself and, after she stepped down from the chair, ran a class on politics and current affairs. At the same time she continued to help at the office – the last time was a week before she died.
Sofie had a highly developed sense of duty, but one never felt that she was being "dutiful": it all came so naturally to her. Many are the hospital visits she made when she knew that someone in U3A was ill and many were the funerals of U3A members that she attended.
From 1990 to 2002, she also worked as a volunteer at the Day Centre of the Association of Jewish Refugees, joining the management committee of the AJR in 1995.
She was born Sofie Marx in Neuffen, near Stuttgart, southern Germany, where her father ran a weaving factory. In 1937, she was sent to England for her education, returning to Germany in the school holidays; she was in England when the second world war broke out, and she remained there. Her parents and two brothers managed to emigrate to the US. She was married, though briefly, to Tom Landau. He was a member of the Communist-run Free German Youth, and so for some years she could not get a visa for the US to visit her family there.
I had known her since 1953, because from then until 1980 she worked as a secretary, first to my father and then to my brother, directors of the foundation garment and swimwear company Silhouette. She became the firm's export manager. From 1980 to her retirement in 1990, she worked for Dushinsky, a company making costume jewellery.
She is survived by her brother, Walter, and his family.