Loeffler Sabine

Sabine Loeffler

Born Sabine Kuczynski on December 2nd 1919 in Berlin, her father was Robert Kuczynski, an academic who was forced to flee Germany in 1933. His wife, Bertha, and two children Sabine and her elder sister Renate followed and the family settled in London, where Robert found a lectureship at the LSE and the two girls attended school in Hampstead. An elder sister, Ruth, later became infamous as the KGB agent `Sonia'. Their brother was an eminent Marxist scholar at Humboldt University.

In 1941, Sabine married Frank Loeffler (see separate entry), the Secretary of the Refugee Council, which was devoted to aiding anti-fascist exiles. She worked assembling radio parts during the war and joined the Camden Communist Party. Sabine went on to do some work in journalism and volunteered as a translator in the late 1960s for the World Peace Council, attending conferences in Helsinki and Sri Lanka and then worked for the Morning Star.

She established the Lissenden Gardens (Gospel Oak) Tenants Association in 1972, which successfully campaigned to transfer the flats from private ownership, planning to sell the Parliament Hill mansions to a property developer, to Camden Council management as well as achieving modernisation of the blocks.

For two decades she was the archivist at the Morning Star, retiring from the paper in 1989 at the age of 70. A volunteer at the Marx memorial Library for a time after that, she died on January 8th 2005, aged 85 years.

Camden New Journal 27th January 2005 (cutting courtesy of John Green)