War ended in May 1945 and Anne-Lise Stern, liberated by the Red army, returned to France, arriving in Paris on 2 June 1945. Her parents had both survived the Holocaust years. Other family members had not. Her mother's sister Ilse was killed at Auschwitz. In Moscow another of her mother's sisters, the gynaecologist and noted abortion rights campaigner Martha Ruben-Wolff, had committed suicide in 1939 after was unexpectedly branded an anti-Soviet spy and "purged".