My mother, Thelma Koorland, known as Talmy, who has died aged 82, defied all odds as an orphaned survivor of the Warsaw ghetto to become a successful businesswoman possessed of a rare joie de vivre and generosity of spirit.

For more than 40 years, she distinguished herself in business with her firm Thelma Koorland Caterers, which she started in 1963 in Cape Town, South Africa, and then brought to London in 1979.

She employed hundreds of people, many of whom were inspired by her dedication to her clients. Talmy herself had nearly starved as a small child with rickets in her native Poland during the German invasion that sparked the second world war.

Talmy Koorland in Glowno, Poland, 1938. This small photograph survived only because it was sent in a letter to South Africa before September 1939

Born in Łódź, she was the only child of Asia (nee Rudzka), a paediatrician, and Salomon Szymson, an engineer. Both perished in the ghetto in 1943.

Talmy was smuggled out of Warsaw to be hidden in a safe house until 1946, when she was sent first to relatives in Paris, then, two years later, to Cape Town, to be adopted by her great-aunt Rachel Gilinsky. As Thelma Gilinsky, she was sent to board at the Huguenot girls high school in Wellington, an hour north-east of Cape Town, from where she ran away aged 16. She married Victor Koorland, an industrial chemist, three years later, in 1955.

Talmy initially taught cooking, before beginning her catering business. But in the late 1970s, fed up with seeing her black staff expelled to the townships, and her Roeland Street premises an island amid bulldozed rubble in the inner-city District Six area targeted by the apartheid regime’s brutal enforced “relocation” policy, she and Victor moved to Britain with my youngest brother, Yuri, and settled in Muswell Hill, north London. My other brother, Neil, was doing army service, and I stayed in Cape Town to finish my degree.

In spite of the violence she experienced during the war, Talmy was nonetheless the recipient of much kindness, and it was her mission to do the same for people in need.

Victor returned to Cape Town in 1982, and they divorced the following year; he died in 1995. My mother married Alex Mitchell, a buyer in the East End rag trade, in 1985; he died in September.

Talmy is survived by me, Neil and Yuri, six grandchildren, her stepsons, John and Alan, and four step-grandchildren.