She was lined up to be shot by the Nazis but rescued at the last moment by the Russian army in 1945. This was one of the many terrors experienced by the young Vera Elyashiv which she described, at the age of 16, in A Letter I Wrote in 1945. It remains her only testament to her Holocaust experiences.
Elyashiv, who has died aged 97, and whose letter was published in The Jewish Quarterly in 1970 wrote: “I hope that it will be remembered that it was written by a bewildered little girl with neither writing nor publishing ambitions about how her father and entire family perished and she alone survived without really trying, but feeling guilty and ashamed for that.”
Vera was 12 when the Nazis ordered all the Jews in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania into the town square at 5am on the morning of October 27, 1941. She and her father watched “huddled and bent shadows emerging from all directions. All were going – the old and the crippled, some limping, some hopping, sick ones and paralysed ones carried with their beds. But you could hear hardly anything but the uneven shuffling of feet – it was like a speechless funeral.
“I stood there, clinging to my father’s arm with one hand and grandmother’s with the other, her other hand being held by grandfather.” But suddenly she saw her grandparents thrown to the left. “Of all the terrible moments that were to follow this was one of the worst for me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget their big, helpless eyes. They kept turning to us with outstretched arms and their lips were moving but no words came out. Two Gestapo officers pushed them brutally away.”
That day 10,000 people were killed by the SS in a fort outside the town.
Elyashiv’s letter describes years of Nazi killing sprees, shrivelling the ghetto of its inhabitants. In July, 1944 the ghetto was emptied and burned to the ground. Finally, 8,000 starving, stiff-limbed people were sent to the railway station, thrown into trucks with closed windows lying one on top of each other, half suffocated, their clothes wet and steaming.
When they reached Germany, Vera began screaming at her father to kill her. “I screamed that it was his responsibility since he had brought me into the world and it was his responsibility to free me from all this.” As her father held her close to calm her, others also became hysterical, banging the wagon walls with their fists.
Two days later the wagon stopped and a Nazi officer ordered the women and children outside, and the men to remain. Vera stumbled out, when suddenly the wagon doors closed. “I could hear Father crying out my name, his cry almost drowned by the noise of the engine and the other cries. I must have tried to run because I fell and when I got up I could see the back of the fast-disappearing train. This was the last time I saw my father.”
Vera Eliyashiv was born into an upper-middle class, observant Jewish family in Kovno, Lithuania in 1929. Her father, Solomon Gutman, was a civil servant. Her mother Rachel née Gotlieb, died when Vera was six. Solomon taught her to read, and she studied Russian, Lithuanian and German at school during the pre-Nazi era when Jews and non-Jews could freely study together.
In August, 1941 the invading Germans forced them into the Kovno ghetto. After his parents were deported Solomon found a fisherman’s family outside the ghetto willing to take Vera in. However, she refused to stay and ran away back to join her father in the ghetto. They remained together until he was sent to Dachau and she to Stutthof concentration camp.
In her letter, she lists her experiences in the camp, the selections, the death marches and her discovery of the gas chambers, the many moments when her life almost ended. At one point she escaped the gas chamber by an act of fate and continued as a slave labourer in the camp. “I don’t think I fully grasped this then and who knows whether I can now,” she wrote.
In 1945, after a winter death march through Poland, Vera and her fellow prisoners were liberated by the Russian army, but far from celebrating freedom, they were held inside an abandoned hotel for eight months suspected of being Nazi sympathisers. She returned to Lithuania to search for her father but discovered he had been killed in Dachau. She spent time in displaced persons camps in Poland, Austria and Italy as an interpreter, before being smuggled into British Mandate Palestine in 1948.
She quickly mastered Hebrew, served in the IDF and with a new name, Elyashiv, became a political journalist with the Israeli daily Davar, covering the Eichmann trial in 1961. She studied sociology and joined Mapai, Israel’s former socialist democratic party. Elyashiv married her first husband, Haggai, and moved to London, becoming involved with London’s cultural scene, particularly the Roundhouse Theatre, which reopened in 1964, and whose leader, playwright Arnold Wesker, would become godfather to Vera’s son Jonathan with her second husband, John Bickerdike.
After John’s death in 1982, she married Professor Robert Audley, vice provost of University College London, in 1990, and worked as the culture correspondent of the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
As West Germany launched diplomatic conversations with the State of Israel in the 1960s, Vera collaborated with a West German TV studio to produce a documentary on the relationship between Jews and Germans in the post-war era. Mit den Augen einer Israeli: Beobachtungen in der Bundesrepublik (Through the Eyes of an Israeli: Observations on the German Federal Republic) was produced in 1962.
Elyashiv argued that this hitherto neglected film conveys an exceptional image of West Germany towards the end of the Adenauer era that challenged the concept of “the new Germany”. She examined the limited success of the postwar denazification process and the war crimes trials and concluded that while Germany as a state was not antisemitic, Germans continued to have mixed feelings about Jews and could not relate to them normally, with some believing the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves due to their own behaviour.
Her book on post-war Germany, Deutschland kein Wintermaerchen (Jews, Israelis: The Indissoluble Complicity) was published in 1964 by Elon Verlag.
The journalist Michael White, a long-term friend and fellow critic on the London art circuit, recalled how she and Audley kept open house in Hampstead, throwing massive Sunday lunches where writers such as Wesker and actors like Billie Whitelaw were regulars. “Within the world of north London Jewish émigré intelligentsia, she was a significant presence,” he said, “And she was one of its last survivors.”
At Elyashiv’s funeral, Rabbi Lily Solochek said Vera took pride in her stubbornness and survival. “She writes about feeling a secret selfish pride in living, in staying relatively healthy in the camps; she felt that she was pushing back against the Nazis directly with the sheer determination of will to live. This contrarian attitude would prove to be one of the secrets of her survival, a trait hard to soften after the war ended, that would follow her throughout her life.”
In 1970 Elyashiv wrote: “More and more I am reaching the conclusion of the impossibility of writing about what really happened there. Those who have not been there are not equipped to grasp an experience of such intensity; those who have been there are unable to write about it because they have gone through an experience which has put them on an entirely different plane of perception.”
Elyashiv celebrated her 97th birthday, surrounded by her friends and family. Her grandson Billy had the honour of presenting her birthday cake while everyone sang together. She said goodbye to her son Jonathan and passed peacefully at home, with the Shema said over her by neighbours.
Vera Elyashiv is survived by her son Jonathan, her grandson Billy and extended family. Her husband predeceased her in 2020, aged 91.
Vera Elyashiv: born May 29, 1929. Died June 4, 2026
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