My friend Christopher Ligota, who has died aged 93, was one of the refugee intellectuals who had fled the Europe of the dictators in the 1940s. As a scholar-librarian at the Warburg Institute, which had itself been forced to flee Germany, he enriched the holdings of its library by using his profound learning to decide which books to buy. As a historian he made a major contribution to historiography, the history of how history is written.
Born Krzysztof Lilienthal in Warsaw, he was the only child of Mieczysław Lilienthal, an insurance executive, and Zofia (nee Sterling), whose father was the pulmonologist Seweryn Sterling. The family had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and changed their surname to Ligota after Christopher’s birth. When, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, Mieczysław was called up, and Zofia and Christopher joined the streams of people fleeing Warsaw. In the winter of 1940 they crossed the snowy Tatra mountains into Hungary. Poorly shod, they fell behind their fellow refugees and were saved only by Zofia’s sense of direction.
