“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,” Mrs. Gissing mentioned in an interview in 2006 with a Holocaust survivors’ archive on 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 attire that match precisely, within the hope that they’d return quickly sufficient to not want bigger sizes to develop into. Mrs. Gissing mentioned she was given a leather-bound diary by which to ship messages to her dad and mom not directly throughout the interim.
“Every day I wrote my parents a letter,” she mentioned.
She had stuffed the pages of greater than a dozen diaries by the tip of the struggle, when she realized that her father had been fatally shot whereas on a loss of life march from the Terezin focus camp in December 1944 and her mom had died from typhoid two days after she was liberated from one other 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). Her story was recounted in a youngsters’s e-book by Peter Sís, “Nicky & Vera” (2021), and within the documentaries “All My Loved Ones” (1999), “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport” (2000) and the Emmy Award-winning “The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton” (2002).
Veruska Anna Diamantova was born in Prague on July 4, 1928, to Karel Diamontova, a wine service provider, and Irma (Kestner) Diamontova, who labored in her husband’s workplace. She grew up in Celakovice, about 20 miles east of Prague.
“My sister was very serious and studious,” she mentioned within the interview for the University of Michigan archive. “I was a ragamuffin who always got into scrapes.”