Nelee Langmuir
1931-Aug. 11, 2010
Stanford, California

Nelee Langmuir, 78, Holocaust survivor and Stanford French lecturer since 1972, died Aug. 11, 2010, in her Stanford home of cancer.

She was born in Paris in 1931 to a Lithuanian couple. After the 1940 Nazi invasion of France, she found shelter with her sister in Chabanais, France, from local Resistance leader Albert B?raud. When World War II ended, her family immigrated to Sacramento.

She married Paul Wanner and had two daughters. Meanwhile she taught adult classes in French at Menlo-Atherton High School. In 1972, she received a master's degree from Stanford. Later that year she divorced Wanner and married Gavin Langmuir, a founder of Stanford's Jewish Studies program and the Program in Medieval Studies.

In 1979 and 1980 she and her husband taught at the Stanford-in-France program. She won the Walter J. Gores award for excellent teaching in 1979. She taught at Stanford until 2008. She made a film, "Tomb?es du Ciel," about her family's Holocaust survival. The movie will be shown at a Stanford screening April 28, 2011.

She is survived by her sister Mina Parsont of Gaithersburg, Md.; daughters Jennifer Wanner of San Francisco and Debra Wanner of New York City; stepdaughter, Valerie Langmuir of Millbrae; two sons-in-law and two granddaughters.

Tags: teacher/educator