Barbara Barnett

Although she wrote some of the material herself, Barnett insisted she did not interview the children. “If they wanted to talk about it then they could, I did not cross-examine them, I did not encourage them.” But at first she had no intention of publishing the material as a book. That came after prompting by others some 50 years later.

For Barbara Barnett, who has died aged 100, it was a labour of love and recognition of the anguish of others. She had no experience of the Holocaust. She said: “My family haven’t known persecution in living memory, we’ve been in England for generations, so for me I was doing something to help people.”

Barnett had hosted Jewish refugees in London, but her deeper interest in survivors’ stories was triggered by a visit to Israel where she met Olga Grossman who, with her twin sister Vera, had been experimented on in Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, known as Dr Death, or the angel of death.

The two girls had been transported to Colyn Castle by Schonfeld and Olga Grossman asked Barnett to help her write about her personal debt to Schonfeld.

“We worked together on her memories and this led to my collecting stories from others, too,” said Barnett. It launched her on a mission to trace other Slovakian refugees and seek out their stories. Not everyone was willing to discuss life in the camps. “They did not want to contaminate their children with the horrors they had been through,” she said. “They later opened up more – they realised that they had a responsibility to talk about the past.” But gaining their trust was a long term, complex issue.

Barbara Joan Pinto was born in north London into a mixed Sephardi and Ashkenazi family that had been rooted for centuries in Britain. She was the eldest of the three children of Ralph Pinto, a chartered accountant who had served on the Western Front in the First World War, and Celia Davis. Her two younger siblings were Geoffrey and Margaret.

First educated at a Parents’ National Educational Union School, she was evacuated to the Lake District with the school at the outbreak of the Second World War. But then her mother died and she was sent to join her Canadian cousins in Quebec in July 1940.

She told the Ham & High in 2013 that despite zig-zagging across the Atlantic on the SS Duchess of Richmond to avoid German U-boats, her move to Quebec “was nothing like the concentration camps. But it gave me an idea of what it would be like to lose your family and to be in a completely different environment.”

After leaving Quebec High School in 1943, Barnett went on to join the Canadian Air Force, serving on air traffic control including on Vancouver Island. She returned to England in 1945 and studied social work at the LSE, graduating in 1948.

Her involvement with helping Holocaust survivors was initially triggered by joining the Primrose Club in North London’s Belsize Park, in which children who had survived the Holocaust were cared for within the Jewish community. It was later famously renamed the ’45 Aid Society. She met Richard Barnett, who had worked at Bletchley Park during the war. They married in 1948 and he became keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum. The couple had a daughter, Celia and twin sons, Colin and Robert.

Barnett lectured in social work at the former Polytechnic of North London, now University, from 1969 and became a consultant social worker. She was also active in Israel, launching Bayit L’Kol Yeled (A Home for Every Child) a body which supported abused children, and which was her chosen subject for her MPhil at Brunel University in 1980.

Perhaps a symmetry with her husband’s interests in antiquities led her to co-found the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, of which she became vice-president. After her husband’s death from motor neurone disease in 1986, she sponsored the Society’s annual Richard Barnett memorial lecture.

Despite her concern for Israel, Barnett later expressed criticism of the Israeli government’s policy regarding the Palestinians. She moved from Hampstead to Hackney where she became involved in many of the community’s local activities. In May, 2013, she described how her book came to be written in a talk she gave to the Irish Jewish Museum, recounting the children’s personal stories and their lives after leaving the castle.

Barbara Barnett is survived by her daughter, Celia, an art director and their twin sons, Colin, a computer programmer, and Robert, a professor of modern Tibetan history and politics at the school of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her brother and sister predeceased her.

Barbara Barnett: born December 4, 1924. Died July 13, 2025