Irena Kirkland, who died yesterday at 82, spent the first decades of her life surviving totalitarianism in Central Europe and her last decades fighting for freedom as half of one of Washington’s most visible power couples.

Kirkland was a longtime member of the board at the International Rescue Committee and served on several presidential commissions on refugees and other committees. But it was in her twin roles as a Washington hostess and the epitome of her political views that she was best known.

She was married in 1973 to Lane Kirkland, a high-level AFL-CIO official and outspoken advocate of freedom who led the union organization between 1979 and 1995. Irena Kirkland became a familiar figure in Washington, D.C., hosting a stream of dissident figures ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to members of Solidarity and the Kurd leader Mustafa Barzani at the couple’s brick split-level home near Rock Creek Park. She was also known for hosting a Christmas Eve party for the capital’s Jews where officials such as Alan Greenspan and Rep. Stephen Solarz would gather to eat her famous pumpkin pie.

It was a long way from Prague, where she grew up as Irena Neumann, the daughter of a prosperous family with a long-standing tradition of participating in the politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. Young teenagers at the outbreak of World War II, Irena and her identical twin, Alena, were transported first to the Theresienstadt ghetto and then, in November 1944, to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The sisters lied about their birthdates to avoid becoming subjects of Dr. Joseph Mengele’s twin experiments. They threw away their eyeglasses and were judged healthy and ready to work, thus avoiding the gas chamber. Working at an East German munitions factory near the end of the war, the sisters managed to escape back to Prague. Remarkably, their parents had both survived.

After a crash summer course, the twins enrolled at Charles University. Irena joined the Social Democratic Party, even as communism was beginning to overwhelm Czech society. In 1948, she was interrogated and then jailed, asked to denounce her friends. Eventually, she was released and the twins soon immigrated to the new state of Israel. Alena married a South African businessman and settled in Israel. Irena moved to Britain to study English. Eventually, she married a theatrical producer.

Irena Neumann had first met Lane Kirkland in Paris in 1956, but the two did not become a couple until 1971, when each was separated from their respective spouse. After their marriage in 1973, she turned their home into “a nerve center for the freedom struggle then unfolding in the world,” in the words of the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman. Lane Kirkland died in 1999, but Irena remained active in refugee causes, especially on the International Rescue Committee. A former American ambassador to China and a fellow IRC board member, Winston Lord, told The New York Sun that Irena was “a fierce fighter for human rights and refugee causes around the world.”

Last week, as Irena Kirkland lay seriously ill at her home, a former Czech president, Vaclav Havel, paid a visit and presented her with the Czech foreign minister’s award, Gratias Agit. Also on hand was the Czech-born former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

Irena Kirkland

Born Irena Neumann in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on August 25, 1925; died January 24 at her home in Washington, D.C., of cancer; survived by her sister, Alena.