Vera Gissing obituary: Rescued by ‘Britain’s Schindler’

Vera Gissing
Born: July 4th, 1928
Died: March 12th, 2022

On July 1st, 1939, about three months after Nazi troops goose-stepped into Prague and three days before Vera Diamantova’s 11th birthday, she was bundled onto a train bound for Britain with hundreds of other Jewish children. All but three of the 16 relatives she left behind would perish in the Holocaust.

Vera survived. As Vera Gissing she became a translator in England and raised a family there. She would often recount the moral courage of the parents who sent her and her older sister to safety, the English couple who offered her sanctuary and Nicholas Winton, the young London stockbroker who, she learned only belatedly, had anonymously organised convoys, known as Kindertransport, to evacuate vulnerable children, most of them Jewish, by train from what was then Czechoslovakia before Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.

Gissing died on March 12th at a nursing home in Wargrave, a village in Southeast England, her daughter Nicola Gissing said. She was 93.

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For decades Winton did not reveal his part in organising the rescue mission. Only in the 1980s, when he was in his 70s and his wife discovered his dusty scrapbook in their attic, did he begin speaking publicly about the experience. In 1988, when he was nearly 80, he appeared on the BBC television program That’s Life and was introduced to Vera Gissing and others whose lives he had saved.

When the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish

Winton, who was Jewish and a socialist, abandoned a ski trip to Switzerland late in 1938 to join friends and refugee organisations in Prague in arranging eight trainloads that evacuated 669 children.

A ninth train, with a manifest of 250 children, including two of Gissing’s cousins, was cancelled when the war began. All but two of the passengers scheduled to take that train would die in concentration camps during the war.

Only about 100 of the 15,000 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia interned in the camps survived the war.

“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 in an interview in 2006 with a Holocaust survivors archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

“The scene at Prague station will be with me forever,” the Daily Telegraph quoted her as recalling. “The forced cheerfulness of my parents – their last words of love, encouragement and advice. Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my beloved mother and father could no longer mask their anguish.”

She and her 15-year-old sister, Eva, wore dresses that fit exactly, in the hope that they would return soon enough not to need larger sizes to grow into. Gissing said she was given a leather-bound diary in which to deliver messages to her parents indirectly during the interim.

“Every day I wrote my parents a letter,” she said.

She had filled the pages of more than a dozen diaries by the end of the war, when she learned that her father had been fatally shot while on a death march from the Terezin concentration camp in December 1944 and her mother had died from typhoid two days after she was liberated from another camp, Bergen-Belsen.

Gissing wrote an autobiography, Pearls of Childhood (1988), and collaborated with Muriel Emanuel on Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation (2001). Her story was recounted in a children’s book by Peter Sís, Nicky & Vera (2021), fictionalised in the movie All My Loved Ones (1999) and told in the documentaries Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000), which won an Academy Award, and The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton (2002), which won an International Emmy.

Veruska Anna Diamantova was born in Prague on July 4th, 1928 to Karel Diamontova, a wine merchant, and Irma (Kestner) Diamontova, who worked in her husband’s office. She grew up in Celakovice, about 32km (20 miles) east of Prague.

All at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, whilst we all waited in silence

“My sister was very serious and studious,” she said in the interview for the University of Michigan archive. “I was a ragamuffin who always got into scrapes.”

She recalled that it was snowing gently when the Germans occupied her town in March 1939. An officer commandeered the Diamantovas’ house. Residents were lining the streets silently, she said, and then, “as if with one voice, they started singing our national anthem that started with the words, ‘Where is my home?’ I didn’t realise that our home was no longer ours, and I didn’t realise that this was the end of our happiness and the beginning of the occupation”.

Vera’s mother queued up for four days to apply for the Kindertransport; then, one evening, she announced to her husband at dinner that the girls had secured seats and would be going to England.

“There was a deathly silence. Father looked shocked and terribly surprised,” Gissing wrote in her memoir. “All at once his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, whilst we all waited in silence. Then he lifted his head, smiled at us with tears in his eyes, sighed and said, ‘All right, let them go’.”

Eva was sent to study at Dorset; she would become a nurse, marry a doctor and move to New Zealand in 1949. Vera was placed with a Methodist foster family, the Rainfords, near Liverpool, but moved farther north with the Rainfords’ daughter when German bombing began. She enrolled in a school for Czech refugee children in Shropshire, on the Welsh border, after she audaciously asked Edward Benes, the self-exiled former president of Czechoslovakia, to intervene on her behalf.

After the war she studied English in Prague and worked as a translator for the defence ministry. But she fled the country again when the communists seized control in 1948, returning to England. There she became a literary translator and married Michael Gissing, who ran a leather goods business. He died in 1995.

In addition to their daughter Nicola, an artist, she is survived by a son, Clive, an architect and business executive; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Sally, a fashion designer, died before her, as did her sister, Eva.

Winton was often likened to Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, and became known as “Britain’s Schindler”. He died in 2015 aged 106.

While Gissing credited her parents and Winton with moral courage during the war, she never forgot the Rainfords, the couple who took her in, even though they knew caring for another child would mean making sacrifices.

Their daughter, Dorothy, choosing from photographs of six possibilities for a younger foster sister, chose Vera – for her smile.

“When, years later, I asked Daddy Rainford – the man of the family – why did he do it? Why did he choose me?” Gissing remembered in 2006, “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. And as Hitler broke – as Chamberlain broke his pledge to Czechoslovakia and Jews were in the direst danger, I decided it must be a Czech Jewish child’.”

As the last child left waiting in London for a guardian, Vera recalled, she was greeted by Mummy Rainford.

“And as she saw me, she started laughing and smiling and crying at the same time and she ran toward me, flung her arms around me, and she spoke some words I didn’t understand then, but they were, ‘You shall be loved.’ And loved I was.

"And, you know," Ms Gissing added, "those are the most important words any child in danger, any child in need, can hear." – This article originally appeared inthe New York Times.