EVA KOLLISCH was born on this date (d: 2023) to a Jewish family outside Vienna in 1926. Her mother, Margaret, was a writer, and her father, Otto, was an architect. She “recalls being beaten by a group of children for being a ‘dirty Jew’ when she was 6.”

In 1939, Eva fled Vienna on the Kinderstransport, a rescue mission of nearly 10,000 children to Britain. In 1940, she and her brothers went to the U.S., where they were reunited with their parents.

She attended Brooklyn College, then Columbia University, where she studied German literature and science.  Eventually she became a professor of comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence.

Her brief marriage, in 1942, to Stanley Plastrik, who helped found Dissent magazine, ended in divorce. She later married Gert Berliner, an abstract expressionist artist and fellow refugee who was born in Berlin.

She and Mr. Berliner were among the founders and operators of Cafe Rienzi, a bohemian haunt in a former noodle factory on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village that was frequented by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac and Richard Wright in the early 1950s.

The couple moved to New Mexico, where he painted and she wrote while working as a cook at a uranium mine and as a social worker. There she gave birth to Uri, who is now an editor at NPR. He and a grandson are her only survivors.

After the family returned to New York, Ms. Kollisch and Gert Berliner separated, in 1959. Ms. Kollisch, who had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in German literature from Brooklyn College in 1951, earned a master’s in German from Columbia University in 1963, the same year she was hired at Sarah Lawrence. While teaching there, she worked closely with her colleague and Greenwich Village neighbor Grace Paley, the writer and social activist. She was a lover of Susan Sontag.

In 2009, Ms. Kollisch married her partner, Naomi Replansky, a poet and labor activist who pre-deceased her at the age of 104 in January 2023.

She married two men; she had a son with one of them; and she was a lover of Susan Sontag’s.

Eva published two memoirs, Girl in Movement and The Ground Under My Feet, both detailing her experience as being a Jewish refugee and a Holocaust survivor. Grace Paley described The Ground Under My Feet as “beautifully written. It has more history in it than most historians give us.”

Ms. Kollisch was an activist from an early age, joining the Trotskyist Workers Party in the mid-1940s, though she ultimately became disillusioned with its rigidity and bureaucracy. She never wavered in her opposition to the war in Vietnam and was arrested twice in protests.

She was unusually candid for the time about gay rights and her own sexual orientation. In an interview for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project in 2004, she explained that she never felt entirely comfortable revealing her private life, but believed she was, in a way, obligated to herself and to the gay and lesbian rights movement.

“You know, I’m one of these people for whom the emotional, sexual, private life is a very private thing,” she said. “It was a real burden to me to have to discuss it and to make it public, because it doesn’t feel quite natural to tell people who don’t know you whom you love, or why you love them.”

She added: “To me, it’s amazing that straight people don’t understand that this is not a choice we make because we are exhibitionists, you know, because we have no sense of boundaries or discretion. It’s about our own survival and self-respect that we have to do it.”