Vera Gissing (born Věra Diamantová; 4 July 1928 – 12 March 2022) was a Czech-British writer, translator, and one of "Winton's children", the children saved by the actions of

Nicholas Winton Sir Nicholas George Winton (born Wertheim; 19 May 1909 – 1 July 2015) was a British humanitarian who helped to rescue children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at ...

. Her sister, who accompanied her on the kindertransport, was the diarist and nurse

Eva Hayman Eva Hayman (born Diamantová), January 1, 1924, Prague, Czechoslovakia – August 22, 2013, Auckland, New Zealand) was a Holocaust survivor, diarist, and nurse. Her sister was the writer and translator Vera Gissing. Biography When she was only 15, ...

Life

Gissing was born in

Čelákovice Čelákovice () is a town in Prague-East District in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 12,000 inhabitants. The town is part of the Prague metropolitan area. Administrative parts Villages of Císařská Kuchyně, Sedl� ...

near

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

on 4 July 1928. She was one of the Czechoslovak Jewish children in 1939 who was rescued from transport to the United Kingdom by British broker and humanitarian

. After the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, when most of her family perished in concentration camps during

the Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

, she returned to Czechoslovakia, where she lived until 1948, then emigrated again to the United Kingdom, where she resided. Her story was depicted in a 2021 book by Peter Sís, called ''Nicky & Vera''. Gissing is the author of the autobiographical book ''Perličky dětství'', composed "not only of personal memories of the pre-war and war years, but also of diary entries and letters that Věra wrote mainly with her parents and later with her sister."

Bibliography

*''Pearls of Childhood'', 1990 *''Perličky dětství'', 1992. *''Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good'', 2002.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gissing, Vera 1928 births 2022 deaths People from Čelákovice British people of Czech-Jewish descent British Jewish writers 20th-century British translators 21st-century British translators 20th-century British women writers 21st-century British women writers Czechoslovak emigrants to England Kindertransport refugees