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Helena Percas de Ponseti died on January 1, 2011, at the age of ninety. She had suffered a stroke on Christmas Day and never regained consciousness.
Helena was born in Valencia in January 1921. Her father, Nicol?s Percas, was the son of a Greek father and an Italian mother. Her moth- er, Ana Babenco, was from the Ukraine. Helena was convinced that her mother was Jewish, but she was never able to verify this, because her mother was extremely secretive about her background. Helena's parents met in Alexandria, Egypt, where her father was born and raised. Nicol's Percas-who spoke Greek, Italian, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian-founded the school of languages at the University of Valencia.
Helena attended progressive coeducational schools in Valencia. When her high school, the prestigious Instituto Escuela, closed due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, her parents sent her to England. This was a traumatic experience for fifteen-year-old Helena, who hated leaving her home and her friends to go to a strange country. It took her two weeks to get to England by boat. She soon adjusted to her new school, the Polytechnic Institute, and by the summer of 1937, she had become fairly fluent in English. Then her parents sent for her to join them in Paris, where her father had been appointed Commercial Attach? at the Spanish Embassy by the Republican government. She arrived in Paris in time to attend the 1937 World's Fair. She would al- ways remember what a profound impression Picasso's mural Guernica- then on display in the Spanish Pavilion-made on her. Her parents en- rolled her in the Institut Maintenon, a boarding school for girls, where she would master yet another foreign language, and complete her high school education.
She had just graduated when the Civil War ended with Franco's de- feat of the Republic, and her father lost his job. He soon found a new post teaching literature and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Caracas, and Helena's little family was again transplanted. She taught English and tutored high school students in Venezuela while saving up to come to the United States. She was admitted to Barnard College in 1940 and completed her BA there in 1942.
She then entered graduate school at...