Vera Diament / Vera Gissing (F / Czechia, 1928), Holocaust survivor

Vera Diament / Vera Gissing (F / Czechia, 1928), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Refugees> <Kindertransport> <England>

Biography

Vera Gissing was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1928. She lived in Celakovice, outside of Prague, with her mother, father, and sister, Eva. After the Germans invaded their town, Vera's mother contacted Nicholas Winton about having the girls sent to England. Vera and her sister left Czechoslovakia in July 1939 and were put into foster care with two separate families. Vera stayed with the Rainfords, a poor Christian family, before enrolling in a Czech refugee school in England where she spent the duration of the war. After the war, Vera went back to Prague to study and became a literary translator but eventually moved back to England. While being interviewed by the Welsh BBC, Vera revealed her diaries that she kept of her experience during the war and decided to translate and publish the entries in the book Pearls of Childhood.

USHMM Profile

Vera Diament (later Vera Gissing) was born on July 4, 1928, to Karel and Irman Diament in Celakovice, Czechia, to a family of assimilated Jews. In 1938 she and her older sister Eva baptized as Christians in an attempt to escape rampant anti-Semitism. In June 1939 Eva and Vera were sent to England, Given her diary by her father shortly before her departure, Vera began writing on the journey and continued throughout her years of exile. Vera and Eva were welcome into two different families. Their parents perished in the Holocaust. In August 1945 she went back to Czechia to be reunited with her mother's sister, who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In 1949 she returned to England, which she adopted as her permanent home. Excerpts of her diaries and letters were published in Vera's memoirs, Pearls of Childhood (1988).

Book : Pearls of Childhood (1988)

• Vera Gissing, Peals of Childhood: The Poignant True Wartime Story of a Young Girl Growing Up in an Adopted Land (New York: St. Martin's, 1988).

In 1939, Gissing's mother had the foresight to arrange for Vera and her older sister to join a transport of Jewish children fleeing German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The ten-year-old refugee passed the war years in England, literally dependent for survival on the kindness of the British families who took her in. When she returned home in 1945, she learned that only one aunt had survived the Holocaust. Despite the loss, Gissing attempted to make a new life in Czechoslovakia. Finally disillusioned by the anti-Semitism she constantly encountered, Gissing returned to England, where she still lives. Gissing kept a diary throughout the war years, so her recollections are especially vivid.