  Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5 1871 in Zamość, a predominantly Jewish centre in south-eastern Poland, then occupied by Tzarist Russia. She was the youngest of five children in a progressive family of assimilated Jews who were timber merchants. Her father, Eliasz (Eduard) Luxemburg, like her elder brothers, was educated in Germany. Her mother, Line, nee Löwenstein, was a well-read and highly articulate woman with a passion for classical literature, especially German and Polish, which she tried to inculcate on her children. Two years after Luxemburg’s birth, in 1873, the family moved to Warsaw. At the age of three, Luxemburg contracted a hip disease which was wrongly treated as tuberculosis, and caused her to walk with a limp for the rest of her life. She was bedbound for a year, a period during which she taught herself to read and write.