the family), pilfering from the larder . . .". After boarding school at Schule Schloss Salem she trained as a pianist in Lausanne and spent her young years in Paris, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1933 when Hitler came to power she emigrated with her parents to Sanary-sur-Mer in southeastern France. In 1934 she studied music and history of art in Florence, taking private piano tuition from the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola. Later career In Florence she met the Hungarian art historian Jenö Lányi and in 1938 the couple left Italy for London, where they married on 2 March 1939. They left for Canada in 1940 on the SS City of Benares, carrying 90 child evacuees, their ten escorts, 91 paying passengers (including 10 children), and 215 crew. On 17 September the ship was sunk by a torpedo from the German submarine, U-48. The couple managed to climb into Lifeboat 6 (also containing Anthony Quinton and his mother). As the lifeboat began to lower, the blocks slid out of place, and the stern end of the boat fell, flinging more than two thirds of the roughly sixty people into the sea. The couple fell into the water. Monika grabbed and clung on to a large piece of wood floating nearby. Jeno, however, drowned, and she heard him call to her three times before he went under. She floated around in the sea for several hours, before a lifeboat, the same Lifeboat 6 from which she had fallen, found her drifting in the sea. The lifeboat was heavily waterlogged and only 23 people were still in the lifeboat. Slowly, one by one, 15 of the occupants died. Mann was one of eight people who survived. Only one other woman, Letitia Quinton, in this lifeboat survived. The only child survivor was Quinton's son, Anthony. After 20 hours they were rescued by a British ship and taken to Scotland. Of the 406 people on board the Benares, only 148 had survived. Among the 258 people who had died, were 81 children out of 100. She reached New York on 28 October 1940 on the troopship Cameronia, and joined her parents, who had moved to the US in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II. For a while she lived with her parents, who showed little sympathy for her. Her traumatic loss of her husband and her attempts at a new beginning with