My mother, Halina Sand, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands of Polish Jews lived and died during the second world war. Halina was four when the ghetto was established by the Germans in 1940, and some of her earliest memories were of its horrors, among them the terrifying selections in which the Nazis lined up Jews for transport to the camps – a fate which she herself only narrowly avoided.
Shortly before the destruction of the ghetto after the uprising of 1943, Halina's parents, Ewa and Mieczyslaw Pokorny, and her grandmother, aunt and uncle, escaped into hiding in a house owned by a Polish family outside Warsaw. Halina and her mother, who were both blonde, had false papers and could move around as Poles. In this way Halina's mother helped support the hidden family members.
It is testament to Halina's maturity and self-control that she never once allowed her assumed identity to lapse, nor ever let slip the family's secret. She spent much of her sequestered childhood immersed in books and by the age of 10 was familiar with literary classics both Polish and English (in translation). Halina's and her father's accounts of their time in hiding and unbelievable luck in surviving have been recorded by the Imperial War Museum in London.
It was thanks to the influence of Ewa's brother, the Manhattan Project physicist Joseph Rotblat (later knighted and in 1995 a Nobel peace laureate), that the family was able to settle in England in 1946. With the help of her father, who had taught himself English in hiding (and who anglicised the family name to Parker, and his own and Ewa's to Martin and Eve), Halina rapidly became fluent herself.
She graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1957 and would later achieve a first in English literature in 1981 from University College London as a full-time mature student. She had a long career as a publisher's editor, including stints at Macmillan Dictionary of Art and the Dictionary of National Biography.
Halina was married to Peter Sand for 46 years and together they built a life full of family and friends, music, art and opera. She was a person of rare erudition and unusual literary recall and critical ability, with a sharp sense of humour. She approached life with stoicism and an acute awareness that what she was able to enjoy had been denied to all but a handful of the children she had known during her few years of life in Warsaw.
She is survived by Peter, their daughters Harriet and myself, and three grandchildren, Stella, Alex and Jeremy.