My friend Gerda Mayer, who has died aged 94, was a talented poet with a gift for expressing the deepest of feelings in the simplest of ways. Her poetry is mostly observational, with its subjects being herself and those around her. As a child refugee, whose family largely perished during the Holocaust, she had much personal experience on which to draw.
The daughter of Erna (nee Eisenberger) and Arnold Stein, Gerda was born in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), a town in the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, where her father ran a clothing shop.
In September 1938, just before the annexation of those lands, her Jewish family fled east to Prague. In March 1939, one day before the German army arrived, Gerda escaped to the UK by plane thanks to the efforts of her parents and a Dorset schoolteacher, Trevor Chadwick, who was part of a British refugee rescue team there.
Gerda initially stayed with Chadwick’s wife and children in Swanage, having been sponsored by his mother, Muriel, before moving to a local boarding school. In 1942 she was sent to a second boarding school, Stoatley Rough, in Haslemere, Surrey, which had been established in 1934 for the education of refugee children.