Gerda Mayer
| Gerda Mayer | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 June 1927 Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia |
| Occupation | Poet, writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | British |
| Spouse | Adolf (Dolfi) Mayer (died 2009) |
| Relatives | Arnold Stein (1890-1940?) father Erna Stein (née Eisenberger) (1897-1943) mother Johanna Travnicek (1920-2007) half-sister |
Gerda Kamilla Mayer (born 9 June 1927) is an English poet born to a Jewish family in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia. She escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organized 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."
Mayer was born in 1927 in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), a spa town in the then 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 Travnicek, a Roman Catholic.
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. As a last resort, in February 1939 her father made a direct approach to Trevor Chadwick, an Englishman who was organizing the Prague end of an operation to rescue children at risk from the Nazis.
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 organization willing to keep and educate the child up to the age of seventeen and pay £50 to cover the cost of their eventual repatriation. This is equivalent to £2,796 in 2015. 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. He remained in Prague until June 1939 and organized a number of Kindertransport trains, working in partnership with Winton at the London end.
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