Published: 31 January, 2013
by DAN CARRIER

STELLA Mann, who has died aged 100, narrowly avoiding losing her life in the Holocaust, in which both her parents perished.

The SS knocked on the door of the house she was staying in Belgium, hunting for her – but she used all her charm and extraordinary good looks to persuade the officers she was not the person they were looking for.

She had travelled there from her native Austria and managed to work, but soon after the country was occupied, she made her way to France. She was arrested as she crossed the border – but had married a Yugoslavian national called Brunov in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, and was released after being held by the Gestapo.

Stella was born in Vienna in 1912. Her father worked at the Singer Sewing Machine factory and her uncle was a professional dancer who inspired her from an early age. By the age of 17, she was teaching modern dance and when Germany declared an Anschluss with Austria, she had her own school with 500 pupils.

She met British officer Derrick Ashby-Mott in 1944 as the Nazis were pushed back: he was a talented ballroom dancer. The pair married and came to England in 1946.

They settled in Swiss Cottage and Stella established her own dance school in Hampstead. She offered a haven to European refugees, helping youngsters come to terms with the horrors they had experienced through dance.

Stella had many talents: she wrote poetry and verse, could paint well and played the piano. She would say in her autobiography, which the New Journal reviewed in 2004, that the many artistic facets of her character were formed by the rich cultural upbringing she enjoyed in pre-war Europe.

In 1985, she retired, selling her school and moving to Majorca with her husband. She returned to London after his death in 1991.

She was a Anglophile, writing in one poem: “And still they joke, they laugh, are funny and kind. / Long live England and its open mind.”

In 2009, she was presented with Austria’s Decoration of Merit in Gold in Vienna, and her legacy lives on through the many thousands of young people who have benefited from her classes.