A talented teacher of English as a foreign language and a trainer of other EFL teachers, Nina Hajnal was a consummate linguist whose first language was in fact German.
An expert in pronunciation, she created a teaching game called Verbingo. She was fluent in German, Dutch and French, and competent in Spanish, Italian and Russian.
She taught in summer schools at home and abroad, and was an examiner and team leader for EFL exam boards. But she only came to an English-speaking country at 17.
Her Warsaw-born father, Leo Lande, and Riga-born mother, Beila, were brought up in Moscow but left after the 1917 Russian revolution. They met and married in Berlin but moved to Holland when Hitler gained power in 1933.
With the 1940 German invasion of Holland and 1941 ban on education for Jews, they fled with their daughter and son, Alexander, who survives her, until reaching Vichy-ruled France.
Through the New York Jewish Labour Committee, the family were admitted to Cuba but were then interned for six months. Nina's father started a school for camp children. In 1942 he was appointed director of the ORT school in Havana, training refugees to make leather goods and work as electricians.
Allowed into the US in 1944, Nina - who had caught up on her schooling - came out top of her final year at a prestigious New York school and gained a degree in French at Radcliffe, the women's section of Harvard University, in 1949.
While training as a teacher at Columbia University, New York, she met a fellow German-born refugee, John Hajnal-Konyi, who was working for the United Nations. His Hungarian-born parents had also left Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime and settled in Britain. The couple married in 1950.
In 1953 they moved across the Atlantic. John became professor of statistics at the London School of Economics. Nina worked at Barnet College until a week before entering hospital, some three months before her death.
Passionate about causes and the natural focus of a large circle of friends, she was a keen photographer, a staunch campaigner on local issues, and generous in helping others.
She is survived by her husband, John; three daughters, Miriam, Paula and Sarah; son, Joseph; and three grandchildren.