Hella Pick (1929–2024)

Hella Pick was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Her parents divorced when she was three years old and her father emigrated to the USA; she never saw him again. She was raised in middle-class comfort by her mother and maternal grandparents. In 1939, following Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria and a visit from the Gestapo, her mother put 10-year-old Hella alone on a Kindertransport to the UK. Her mother was able to obtain a visa and joined her daughter three months later. Pick stayed with different foster families while her mother worked as live-in domestic servant and cook to support them. They moved to the Lake District, where Pick attended the Fairfield School at Ambleside, Westmorland, and learned English. In 1948, she became a British citizen. She studied at the London School of Economics and began her career as a journalist in the 1950s working as a foreign correspondent in West Africa. In 1960, she was named the United Nations correspondent of The Guardian in New York City. The paper's chief USA correspondent, Alistair Cooke, was her mentor. She also wrote for the New Statesman. She was the director of the Arts & Culture Program at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent think-tank based in London. She has also served on the advisory board of the German-Jewish Studies Centre at the University of Sussex. She regularly visited Austria, and became famous there and in Germany for her appearances on the weekly TV current affairs shows Frühschoppen and Presseclub, as well as the BBC's World Service and World Service TV. In 2000, she was named CBE for her work as a journalist and writer. She is the author of several acclaimed books, including Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice (1996), Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (2000) and her autobiography, Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of Her Life (2021).