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Marion Kozak, who has died aged 91, was a socialist feminist, campaigner for justice and peace, and reformer for children’s rights. She was also the wife of the leading Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband, who died in 1994, and mother of their two sons, David and Ed, respectively Labour foreign secretary from 2007 to 2010 and Labour party leader from 2010 to 2015.

Both parents encouraged their sons to join discussions from an early age, fostering their confidence and belief in political action. Marion’s influence is seen in their roles, for she always supported the Labour party, happily campaigning and canvassing for it – tasks that Ralph never liked, even when he was a member.

The socialist intellectuals who flocked to the Miliband home in Primrose Hill in north London were in Ralph’s international network, but it was Marion who provided the excellent food and much of the warmth in the atmosphere.

Later she became a leader in her own field, as the first chief executive of the Daycare Trust (1989-94), campaigning for high-quality, affordable childcare for all, to enable women to work alongside family responsibilities; the charity became the Family and Childcare Trust in 2013 and is now Coram Family and Childcare.

Marion had an outgoing and engaging personality, but her history was also one of tragedy, courage and resilience. Born in Częstochowa, Poland, as Dobra Jenta Kozak (she took the name Marion in 1947), she was the elder of two sisters, with Hadassa four years younger. Her parents were Bronisława (nee Landau) and Dawid Kozak, who owned a large enterprise in metal products and cutlery. The family’s crisis began in September 1939 – Marion not yet five – with the Nazis soon taking control of the factory.

In late 1942, the mass deportations began. Dawid stayed to look after his elderly parents, but Bronisława managed to escape from the city’s Jewish ghetto with her two daughters and her sister-in-law, Cecylia. The four would spend the rest of the second world war in appallingly difficult and dangerous conditions, sometimes separated.

One episode that was deeply traumatic for Marion occurred in a convent near Warsaw, when a nun tried to make Marion swear that Hadassa was not her sister as she looked Jewish and Marion did not.

In August 1944 during the Warsaw uprising, Cecylia was probably shot in the street while ferrying people and goods across the city. Meanwhile, in Częstochowa, Dawid was betrayed and transported to a concentration camp near Hailfingen, south-west Germany, where he would die.

In total, Marion lost about 60 relatives in the Holocaust. Yet her subsequent attitude was remarkable. She had no doubt that the genocide must never be forgotten, but she was not bitter. She was deeply conscious of the fact that many non-Jews had risked their lives to save her family, and she and Hadassah successfully campaigned for the recognition in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre, of Helena and Andrzej Sitkowski, who had hidden and protected them in Warsaw.

After the war, Marion’s life and education remained disrupted. In 1947, at the age of 12, she was sent alone to Britain to an orthodox Jewish family near Stamford Hill, north London, through a scheme to get Jewish children out of Poland. Her secular upbringing made this difficult, but she would remain with the family until she was 16. She joined her mother and sister in Israel in 1951, but soon returned to the UK.

She managed to take A-levels and at 18 began her degree in economic history at the London School of Economics. She attended some classes taught by a fellow refugee, Ralph Miliband, who had escaped from Belgium when the Nazis invaded in May 1940.

The intellectual environment at the LSE was immensely important for Marion, but in 1959, after working for a period in public relations, she went back to Israel for a year. She soon knew that this was not the place for her and became ever more critical of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. Much later, she was an early member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which was established in 2002; its work was of great importance to her, although she worried that her activism could be difficult for her sons.

Marion and Ralph met properly in 1960, on her return from Israel, and they married in 1961. From the start, she played a key role in his work. She read and criticised the manuscript of his first book, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), and this active engagement would continue. In 1995, she contributed the essay How It All Began: A Footnote to History, in Socialist Register, which Ralph had founded, and co-edited for 30 years until his death in 1994. Marion’s article demonstrated her sensitivity to historical context, the personalities involved and the ideas that the journal sought to promote.

She also had a key part in sustaining the Lipman Trust, founded in 1974 by a socialist businessman to support socialist education projects and led by Ralph as its director until his death. It was then renamed the Lipman-Miliband Trust, with Marion playing the pivotal role and ensuring it pursued an inclusive and feminist view of socialism.

Marion had taught history parttime at Camden school for girls in the late 1960s before returning to academia after both her children were born. Although she successfully completed a PhD on women munition workers during the first world war for the University of Hull in 1976, she realised that her real interests lay outside historical research.

Perhaps her own lost childhood was a factor in leading her to an acute awareness of the needs of children and an active role in effecting change, initially through the National Childcare Campaign throughout the 1980s, and then leading its successor organisation, the Daycare Trust. She wrote a number of reports, including Employment, Family Life and the Quality of Care Services (1998), a review of recent research for the Department for Education and Employment.

These publications in the field of childcare followed an earlier book for the Observer. In 1963 she was commissioned by the newspaper to make a selection of its 19th-century articles, which was published in 1966 (under her married name) as The Observer of the 19th Century, with an introduction by Asa Briggs.

Marion always put others first and was never happy in the limelight, but she had an extraordinary influence on numerous people. In a joint statement after her death, her sons paid tribute to her as “a force field of love and life”.

She is survived by David and Ed, four grandchildren, and her sister Hadassa.

• Marion Kozak, activist and campaigner, born 22 December 1934; died 27 May 2026