Abstract
Mrs Mirjam Finkelstein
Mrs Mirjam Finkelstein, the widow of Professor Ludwik Finkelstein OBE FREng, Professor of Measurement & Instrumentation and latterly Pro-Vice-Chancellor at City University of London, died on Sunday 29 January 2017.
Her husband Ludwik was very active in the work of the Institute as President in 1975 and as both a long-standing member of Council and representative of the Institute on the General Council of IMEKO, the International Measurement Confederation. This involved travelling a lot on behalf of the Institute where he regularly was accompanied by Mirjam who played an important role in fostering the links between the UK delegation and many other groups in Europe and beyond, drawing on her warm personality and the breadth of her linguistic skills in so doing. She also served for many years as the Executive Assistant to the Journal Measurement (which was started in the United Kingdom and run for many years from Gower Street) when Ludwik became its Editor in the 1980s and for some 15 years taking responsibility (in the pre-e-mail age) for the rather tedious ‘hard copy’ communications with authors and the publishers. During that time she also taught mathematics and had many overseas academic visitors to stay at her home – again especially in the days when the Iron Curtain was drawn firmly across Europe and Eastern European engineers lacked the hard currency needed to stay in ordinary hotels – and did so with pleasure knowing that she could help people to make contacts and help her visitors to experience the western way of life when otherwise they would not be able to do so.
However, Mirjam’s story is so much more than being the wife and supporter of the distinguished scientist and engineer who was her husband. Mirjam was born in Berlin on 10 June 1933, the daughter of Dr Alfred Wiener and his wife Margarethe (whose legacy created the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide). Although the family emigrated to Holland a year later, Amsterdam soon became unsafe, and although her father had obtained visas for them to leave, the Nazis invaded Holland, and in 1943 they were deported to the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Eventually, Mirjam and her family were included in a rare prison swap and Mirjam later settled in London and married Ludwik, himself a survivor of being deported to Siberian prison camps under the Stalin regime. She said ‘we lived happily ever after’ – and everyone who knew the Finkelsteins could agree with that – ‘I think of myself as a person, a wife and mother first, and a survivor last’. She was indeed a remarkable person to have known.
See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1120828/My-mothers-life-Anne-Frank-Daniel-Finkelsteins-mother-persecuted-like-Anne-today.html, http://www.timeout.com/london/blog/holocaust-memorial-day-the-stories-of-survivors-living-in-london-012717 and https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/