The atrocities of the Holocaust still live on for Vera Schaufeld MBE, 95, but not for the reasons you’d imagine. Stories of concentration camp horrors and unimaginable versions of hell are sadly commonplace for the few remaining survivors in the UK, but Vera faced a different type of pain - saying goodbye to her parents at just nine years old.
In an exclusive chat with us from her care home in North London, she painfully remembered that “when the letters stopped coming, I knew something had happened to them". Born in Prague in 1930, Vera had what she called a “happy childhood” growing up in a small town named Klatovy, just south of Prague, and laughed as she remembered “being spoiled” as an only child by her mum and dad. “I remember everything about my childhood. In 1934, my grandmother moved from Germany to live with us in Klatovy to avoid persecution by the Nazis. It was a very happy home, all of us together.”.
Her father was the head of the Jewish community in town, and her mother, of German origin, was also a well-respected female in the community who studied medicine - a rare accomplishment in a pre-World War II era. she said: “It was very unusual for a girl to be studying medicine. They had to send her to the boys' high school in order to study because the girls' high school didn't do sciences at that time, but she proudly finished her medical studies and got her degree.
