During an episode of That’s Life in February 1988, the presenter Esther Rantzen thumbed through a scrapbook listing hundreds of children, mainly Jewish, who in 1939 had been brought to Britain from under the noses of the Nazis. One of them was Vera Diamant, a ten-year-old girl who had arrived with her older sister, Eva.
Vera, by then Vera Gissing, was in the studio audience. As the camera picked her out, viewers noticed an elderly man next to her. Neither knew that they had been “set up” by the producers. Amid gasps from the audience, Rantzen announced that the man was Nicholas Winton and that 49 years earlier he had been instrumental in saving the life of Gissing and hundreds of other children. The two embraced and as Winton wiped a tear from his eye, she leaned in and whispered: “Thank you.”
Her story began on March 15, 1939, when her hometown of Celakovice, 20 miles east of Prague, was occupied. “Line upon line of German soldiers were marching into our square and there were an awful lot of the inhabitants lining the street,” she recalled. “And then suddenly, with one voice, they started singing the Czech national anthem. It started with, ‘Where is my home?’ And I didn’t realise then that our home was no longer ours anymore.”
Later there was a knock at the family’s door and a voice called: “Heil Hitler!” Their best room was being appropriated for the town’s new commandant, who demanded that they spoke German. “Father looked him straight in the eye and he said, ‘I am the head of this household, and as long as I live, we shall speak Czech, and German only in your presence’,” Gissing recalled. “The commandant stood up and he spat in my father’s face. And, you know, I can still see the saliva running down his cheek.”
Learning that trains were taking children to safety, her mother queued for four days to register her daughters. “Then one day we were having supper and sitting around the table and mother suddenly put her knife and fork down and looked at father and she said, ‘I heard today that Eva and Vera can go to England’,” Gissing wrote.
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“There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised . . . all at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, ‘All right, let them go’.”
Gissing recalled her own reaction: “I was flabbergasted, and at the same time a little bit afraid and a little bit excited, because as far as I knew no one from our town had ever been in England.” The girls left Prague on July 1, 1939. “I was lucky because my sister was next to me and she put her arm around me and she said, ‘Don’t cry, you always have me’.” Everyone made light of the evacuation: “I was told before I left, ‘You’ll be back within a year, you’ll see’.”
Their mother gave them clothes, “so that we would come to England in style”; her father presented her with a leather-bound diary. “And he said, ‘When you’ve got something to say you’d like us to hear, put it down in the diary, so that when you come back to us we can all sit round the table and read the diary together.”
Over the next six years she filled 15 books with “my thoughts, my hopes, my fears”.
On their arrival Eva was sent to a boarding school in Dorset and Vera went to the Rainfords, a Methodist family in Bootle, on Merseyside. She recalled her first encounter with “Mummy Rainford” at a hall in London: “All the other 239 children, including my sister, had gone to their respective guardians. And I was left there all alone, scared to bits. Then this door opened, and there stood a little lady, hardly taller than myself. As she saw me she started laughing and smiling and crying at the same time. She ran towards me, flung her arms around me and she spoke some words I didn’t understand then, but they were, ‘You shall be loved’.”
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The Rainfords were not well off, but made their guest welcome. “They felt the most significant thing was to make me happy, to make me one of them,” Gissing recalled. Years later she asked “Daddy Rainford” why they had taken her in. “He said, ‘I knew I couldn’t save the world, I knew I couldn’t stop war from coming, but I knew I could save one human life’.”
When the bombing started she was evacuated again with the family’s daughter, Dorothy, to near Preston. There was little news from her parents, just occasional notes via Switzerland. “I felt so fortunate at having the sun and the stars and my diary, through which I remained close to them for ever.”
In 1943 she wrote a letter of support to Edvard Benes, leader of the Czech government in exile in London, who sent an acknowledgement. Later she heard that he was visiting the theatre in Liverpool and during the interval she requested a meeting. Benes told her about a Czech school in Shropshire. “He got me there within a week,” she said, adding that during holidays she returned to the Rainfords.
The school moved to the Abernant Lake Hotel in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells, where in 1985 Gissing helped to organise a reunion. She was interviewed by BBC Wales and mentioned her diaries for the first time. Soon afterwards she decided to publish them as Pearls of Childhood (1988), the title a reference to the “tears of pearls” that she cried after injuring herself on a prewar holiday camp. Unknown to her, its publication coincided with Winton’s wife, Grete, discovering his scrapbook in their attic.
On That’s Life Rantzen invited those in the audience who had been on the Kindertransport to stand: more than two dozen rose to their feet and applauded. She then asked if anyone present was a child or grandchild of one of those saved: the rest of the audience stood up. Winton had helped 669 children to escape; by contrast, of the 15,000 Czech-Jewish children sent to the concentration camps, only about 100 remained after the war.
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“There would have been no possibility of me surviving had I stayed behind, if my parents did not have the moral courage to let us go,” Gissing said, acknowledging the horrendous dilemma her family had faced. “It took an awful lot . . . just tremendous love, and tremendous strength, to let us go.”
Veruska Diamantova (or Vera Diamant) was born in Celakovice in 1928, the daughter of Karel Diamant, who owned a wine and spirits business, and his wife Irma (née Kestner), who ran her husband’s office; both spoke German when they did not want the children to understand them. Karel was shot during a death march in December 1944 and Irma, having survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, died of typhoid in April 1945, two days after liberation.
Eva was four years Vera’s senior. “My sister was very serious and studious. I was a ragamuffin who always got into scrapes,” Vera recalled. She enjoyed a carefree childhood, collecting stray cats and riding her horse, Vana, bareback to the river. The family attended synagogue on Jewish festivals, but otherwise “religion didn’t play major roles in our lives”, she said.
After the war she returned to Czechoslovakia to study English at Prague University. She lived with an aunt, who showed her a letter from her mother saying goodbye. “I cried my eyes out after I read it and I said, ‘I should have been with them.’ And my aunt just went ballistic, she said, ‘Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you realise that the one happiness both your mother and father had, and I, was knowing [you were] in safe hands in England’.”
She worked as a translator at the defence ministry but after the 1948 Communist takeover “found myself being interrogated because I could never keep my mouth shut”. Eventually she bribed an official to secure a passport and in 1949 escaped for a second time to Britain, where she became a literary translator. She married Michael Gissing, “a handsome, charming, non-Jewish Englishman” who ran a leather goods business in Hertfordshire. He died in 1995 and she is survived by their children, Clive, an architect and businessman, and Nicola, an artist; another daughter, Sally, a fashion designer, died ten years ago.
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In August 1968 she was visiting her homeland when the Prague Spring was crushed by Russian tanks. “Suddenly my 11-year-old daughter put her arms around me, she said, ‘Mummy, now I know how you must have felt when you were my age and saw the Germans march in’.” She collaborated with Muriel Emanuel on the book Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation (2001), took part in Holocaust memorial events and gave talks in schools. Last year the story of the Kindertransport was told in a children’s book, Nicky & Vera, by Peter Sis.
Latterly Gissing lived in Berkshire, close to Winton (obituary, July 2, 2015), who had been knighted in 2003. Yet she said it was only during a visit to the Jewish Museum in Prague that she found her true identity. “I realised I was proud to be Jewish,” she said. “But I was Jewish by race, Czech by birth, and English by choice — a mixture of all three.”
Vera Gissing, Kindertransport diarist and literary translator, was born on July 4, 1928. She died on March 12, 2022, aged 93