Irina Herrnstadt was born at the height of the Second World War in Moscow, to where her German-born Jewish father, the lawyer turned journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt (1903-1966) had fled from Warsaw following the twin-pronged invasion of Poland in September 1939. Moscow was at war when Irina was born. Life was a struggle for survival and there were only soldiers and military vehicles on the streets. The city had been evacuated in response to the German invasion. Only people deemed essential for the war effort had stayed on the city. Her father was editor-in-chief of a German language newspaper produced for prisoners of war. That was important for the war, so the Herrnstadts had stayed behind when the city was evacuated. It was in Moscow that Rudolf Herrnstadt had met Valentina Veloyants (Валентина Велоянца), Irina's mother: she wanted to take her new friend dancing but he "could not [dance]". The child was always told, later, that when her parents met her mother was a scholar of Germanistics, originally from Siberia. In 1945 the family were returned to Germany in April/May 1945, far sooner than most of the many thousands of German political exiles who had escaped to Moscow from Germany after 1933: this was because her father had been nominated to membership of the 30-man "nation building" Ulbricht Group, even though at the last minute his name was removed from the list on account of his Jewish provenance. They nevertheless settled in what was left of Berlin, based in that part of the city included in the Soviet occupation zone: till 1953, her father built for himself a successful career as a journalist-politician.