QUARANTINE BLOG # 694

April 1, 2022

I love to read.  When I receive a package from Amazon, Bonnie usually asks, “What’s this book?” because most of the shipments are books (or Lego Star Wars kits).  And anyone who has been in the Lego Room, formerly my study/office, knows that the other things that collect in here are books. 

Well, this past Saturday I spent about 5 hours reading some of the best articles I’ve ever pored over from The New York Times.  They were obituaries, or as I think they should properly be called “biographies.”  

I read the story of a paralyzed athlete who was instrumental in the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act; a lady who began blogging at age 99 and built up a world wide following; the doctor who developed a cure for childhood leukemia; an actor who was for four decades a star on Sesame Street; a baseball pitcher who threw the last pitch in a losing World Series and 2 years later threw the last pitch in a winning World Series; an athlete who changed professional wrestling; and for the first in a new Friday series, Vera Gissing, an 11 year old girl rescued from almost certain extermination because Adolph Hitler’s fanatical hatred of the Jewish people.

Each of these Friday pieces will be taken almost entirely from the obituaries, and the original author will be recognized – with apologies that I have edited his or her work.  These are the stories of fascinating people, who passed through life unknown to most of us.  I hope you enjoy meeting them.

Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by ‘Britain’s Schindler,’ Dies at 93

By Sam Roberts

She was not quite 11 when train convoys organized by a London stockbroker carried her and hundreds of other Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II.

Vera Gissing in an undated photo. She and her sister were able to flee what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939 thanks to Nicholas Winton,  a young London stockbroker.

On July 1, 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, ultimate destination Britain, with hundreds of other Jewish children. All but three of the 16 relatives she left behind would perish in the Holocaust.

Vera 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 organized 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 1, 1939.

For decades, Mr. Winton didn’t reveal his part in organizing 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. And in 1988, when he was nearly 80 and appearing on the BBC television program “That’s Life,” he was introduced to Mrs. Gissing and some of the other children whose lives he had saved.

Mr. Winton, who was Jewish, joined friends and refugee organizations in Prague in arranging eight train loads that evacuated 669 children.

Vera Gissing (then Vera Diamantova) in 1934. Only about 100 of the 15,000 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia interned in concentration camps survived World War II.

Nicholas Winton, who became known as “Britain’s Schindler,”  with one of the hundreds of Jewish children whose lives he saved during the war. 

Vera 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. Mrs. Gissing said she was given a leather-bound diary in which to deliver messages to her parents indirectly during the interim. She later learned that her father had been fatally shot in 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.

Mrs. Gissing wrote an autobiography, Pearls of Childhood (1988), and collaborated with Muriel Emanuel on Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation (2001). 

Veruska Anna Diamantova recalled that it was snowing 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 realize that our home was no longer ours, and I didn’t realize 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,” Mrs. 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 of London began. After the war, she studied English in Prague and worked as a translator for the defense 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.

Mrs. Gissing in 2011. She often spoke of the moral courage it took her parents to send them away, as well as that of Mr. Winton and the Rainfords, the Methodist couple in Britain who took her in.

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

While Mrs. Gissing credited her parents and Mr. Winton with moral courage during the war, she also 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 among photographs of six possibilities for a younger foster sister, chose Vera – for her smile.

“When, years later, I asked Daddy Rainford why did he do it? Why did he choose me?” Mrs. 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.’”

Vera recalled being 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,” Mrs. Gissing added, “those are the most important words any child in danger, any child in need, can hear.”

Vera Gissing died on March 12. She was 93.

🛐  Today’s close is from Praying with the Psalms, by Eugene H. Peterson.

“The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing” (Psalm 34:10).

Youth and vigor are no defense against disaster.  The suffering person must not look enviously at the “young lions” who appear not to have a care in the world.  Security and gladness come from God.  Wholeness of life is reserved for those who share his life.

Prayer: Father, make me more attentive to the realities of your presence than to the illusions of the world, more trusting in the “angels of the Lord” and less envious of the “young lions.”  I wait upon you in my need for the wholeness you promise in Jesus Christ, in whose name I pray.

Amen.

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