Gerda Mayer

Gerda Kamilla Mayer (9 June 1927 – 15 July 2021) was an English poet.

Mayer was born in 1927 in Karlovy Vary, a spa city in the then mostly German-speaking Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia.

Her father, Arnold Stein, had a small shop in the town selling ladies' coats and dresses, and her mother Erna (née Eisenberger) owned a knitwear business there.

Mayer had an elder half-sister Johanna from her mother's previous marriage to Hans Trávníček, a Roman Catholic.

This co-educational, non-denominational school had been founded in 1934 by German émigré Dr Hilde Lion and Quaker activist Bertha Bracey, to provide an education for mainly Jewish refugee children from Nazi Europe.

Three of Mayer's favourite teachers there, Dr Lion (head teacher), Dr Emmy Wolff (German language and literature) and Dr. Luise Leven (music) are celebrated in her poem "A Lion, a Wolf and a Fox".

The family fled east to Prague in September 1938, shortly before the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland.

The city was already home to many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, and Mayer's parents spent the next six months chasing between official offices and consulates in a vain attempt to emigrate.

This rescue operation was part of a wider project set up in October 1938 by Doreen Warriner, with later assistance from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), aimed initially at helping exiled anti-Nazi Sudeten leaders to escape the country.

As the scope of the project expanded to include these leaders' families, the responsibility for evacuating refugee children was taken on by Nicholas Winton who had come to Prague just before Christmas 1938 to help with the rescue.

After weeks dealing with various agencies and interviewing candidate families, Winton returned to London to find guarantors for the children and deal with the sluggish British authorities.

Before giving any child a permit for entry to Britain the Home Office needed a guarantor, in this case a person or organisation willing to keep and educate the child up to the age of seventeen and pay £50 to cover the cost of their eventual repatriation.

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Trevor Chadwick had originally gone to Prague to select two boys to be looked after at his family's preparatory school in Swanage, Dorset.

Soon after delivering them, however, he decided to return to the city to help with the evacuation of other children.

Born to a Jewish family in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, she escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organised by Trevor Chadwick.

Having composed her first poem, in German, at the age of four, she continued her education in Dorset and Surrey and began writing poetry in English.

She has published several volumes of verse and her poems have appeared in many anthologies.

She has been described by Carol Ann Duffy as a fine poet "who should be better known."

As a last resort, in February 1939 her father made a direct approach to Trevor Chadwick, an Englishman who was organising the Prague end of an operation to rescue children at risk from the Nazis.

He remained in Prague until June 1939 and organised a number of Kindertransport trains, working in partnership with Winton at the London end.

Chadwick found a place for Mayer on a flight to Britain which left Ruzyně Airport on 14 March 1939, one day before German troops marched into Prague.

He also arranged for her to be sponsored by his widowed mother and to live, at first, with his own family in Swanage.

Mayer's father Arnold was sent to the Nisko concentration camp in Poland in 1939.

He escaped and made his way to Soviet-occupied Lemberg/Lwów, joining Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern Front.

His last letter to his daughter was written in June 1940.

Although Mayer generally had a good relationship with her guarantor, Muriel Chadwick, they were not particularly close and in 1940 she was enrolled at a boarding school in Swanage.

Here her native language meant she was wrongly perceived to be German and she was then teased by the other pupils.

Her mother Erna was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in October 1942, and then the following year to Auschwitz where she too died.

Mayer's half-sister Johanna was half-Jewish and survived the war, working as a bank clerk in Prague.

After the war she suffered from mental illness and was hospitalised in East Germany.

By 1942 the school was in decline and Mayer left to become a boarder at the Stoatley Rough School in Haslemere, Surrey where she was much happier, describing it as "heavenly".

The dedication in Mayer's 1988 collection A Heartache of Grass is "to the memory of Muriel Chadwick and her son Trevor Chadwick to whom I owe my preservation".

Johanna died in 2007.

Upon arrival at Croydon Airport to the south of London, Mayer and another girl, Hanna Stern, left the other refugee children and travelled down to Dorset by car with Hanna's guarantors.

Mayer was taken to Chadwick's family home in Swanage where she was welcomed by his wife.

Chadwick had remained with the main group and the following day set out again for Prague, which was now under Nazi occupation.

A semi-fictionalized account of Mayer's rescue is used for the character Hugo in the children's book War Games by Jenny Koralek, Chadwick's niece.

Interviewed in 2010 for a Channel 5 (UK) documentary, Mayer describes how her father and a few companions were initially welcomed by the Russians.

But she learned after the war that he had subsequently been sent to a Soviet labour camp where she believes he perished.