Sophie Maj and her Jewish family fled Poland for Russia as the German forces invaded in 1939. They escaped the Holocaust, unlike many of their relatives, surviving the war in Central Russia, Siberia, and Turkmenistan, and spending the immediate post-war years in Paris. In 1948 the family returned to Poland, where Sophie studied aeronautical engineering in Warsaw. With her husband and her parents and brother, Sophie migrated to Australia in 1958 and has worked in the Metallurgy Department at the University of Melbourne since 1961, rising from senior demonstrator through principal demonstrator to lecturer.
