On July 1, 1939, about three moths after Nazi troops entered 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. 

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 had anonymously organized convoys known as Kindertransport to evacuate vulnerable children, most of them Jewish, by train from what was then Czechoslovakia. Vera Gissing died on March 12 in a nursing home in Wargrave, a village in Southeast England. She was 93.

“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 said in an interview in 2006  “The scene at Prague station will be with me forever. 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.”

Vera’s mother had 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 said. “All at once, his dear face seemed haggard and old. He covered it with his hands, while 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.’”

All but three of the 16 relatives young Vera left behind would perish in the Holocaust. Her father was fatally shot while on a death march from the Terezin concentration camp in December 1944, and her mother died from typhoid two days after she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen.