Obituary: Liane Thurau
Prepared by the Thurau family
Liane Thurau (née Lowenheck) was born in Vienna July 17, 1929, and died Jan. 17 in East Setauket.
She was the third child of Polish immigrants from Lemberg and Kraków who opened and ran a successful hat shop. In January, 1939, after the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, her parents placed her on a Rothschild Kindertransport to England. On the way to England, an aunt and uncle living in Strasbourg took her off the train and cared for her as they lived in hiding in France. There, Liane quickly mastered French as her second language.
After the war, she attended the Sorbonne and pursued her interest in Russian at L’École des Langues Orientales, making lifelong friends and learning how to read her favorite 19th-century Russian novels in the original Russian. Upon graduation, she became a translator working for various political causes.
On a vacation in Germany in 1955, she met her American husband, Norman, who was also fluent in German. They married and came to New York in 1957.
After teaching in Long Island junior high schools, she spent most of her career teaching French, German and Russian at Suffolk County Community College. When interest in those foreign languages diminished, she obtained a master’s degree in English literature from SUNY Stony Brook.
In the 1990s Liane joined the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Stony Brook University where she was an avid participant and workshop leader. She is likely remembered by all students for her strict discipline, strong accent and scent of lavender.
She and her husband loved to travel. They explored France, Germany, Holland, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and England, the USSR, including its central republics before they were opened, as well as India and China. In addition to being steeped and conversant in politics, she enjoyed reading literature from all over the world, excelled at French and German cooking and had a green thumb.
Liane loved her family passionately. She is survived by two children, Lisa H. and Thoma E. Thurau, and four grandchildren, Emma, Daniel, Sophia and Gabe. Liane’s home was decorated with dozens of framed pictures of her grandchildren whom she loved very much and worried about constantly.
A memorial in her honor will be held on Saturday, April 27, at 2 p.m. in The Gillespie Room in the Carriage Museum at The Long Island Museum, 1200 Route 25A, Stony Brook.
Those seeking to honor Liane, can send gifts to the Frank Melville Memorial Foundation (at 1 Old Field Road, Setauket, NY 11733), which maintains the ponds in Setauket, a place where Liane loved to walk and find peace.
