Helga Engel, who started what is now the Leeds Trinity University meditation group in her home nearly 30 years ago, has died at the age of 96. Helga began meditating at Cockfosters in London and brought meditation to Yorkshire when she and her husband moved to Leeds to be near their four children.
She was an active member of the UK Meditation Community from the beginning and did much to establish and build the Yorkshire Community into what it is today.
She helped to organise retreats and quiet days and was actively involved in arranging Fr Laurence’s first visit to Leeds Trinity, after which the Yorkshire Region began to grow with groups blossoming all over the county.
Helga was a remarkable woman and an inspiration to all who knew her. She was born in 1929 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, (Czech Republic), to German parents, whose families had lived in Prague for generations. After the Second World War most ethnic Germans were expelled from the country, and Helga and her family, together with other Germans, were put in camps and herded from place to place until they finally arrived in Terezin.
This was a notorious camp where Jewish people had been held just recently. Helga, now in her teens, her mother and two younger sisters were separated and kept in cells. Their father who had gone missing during the war, was never heard of again. After time spent in Terezin they were finally put on a transport for the Russian Sector in East Germany. Thanks to the ingenuity of Helga’s mother, after a while they were able to escape from East Germany into the Western sector.
Helga met her husband Gunther at a dance in Frankfurt in 1951. His family moved back to England where they had been living before the war, and she finally followed him and moved to work in London in 1956. They were married in Hull in 1958, where Gunther had found a job.
When Helga set up the first Christian Meditation group in her home in Leeds, she soon drew people to her. Although she rarely spoke about her experiences after the war, there was a depth and tenacity about Helga that had obviously been forged during that time. She was a remarkable inspiration to us all and a great example with her absolute fidelity to the practice. Because of Helga, others were enabled to discover Christian Meditation which has sustained and nurtured them in both their spiritual and everyday lives. We owe her a great debt.
Sue Giuntoni
Leeds Trinity University Meditation Group