Vera Eliyashiv was born into an upper middle class 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. Her father taught her to read and employed a governess to look after her after her mother died. She learnt Russian, Lithuanian and German at school where Jews and non-Jews alike mixed. The family was observant but not strict orthodox.

When the Germans invaded they sealed off a ghetto in Kovno in August 1941. Vera (aged 12), her father and his parents were forced to move into the ghetto. During one of the roundups the grandparents were deported. Her father found a fisherman’s family outside the ghetto who took Vera in. However she didn’t like it there and ran away back into the ghetto to be with her father. She and her father remained in the ghetto until it was liquidated by the Germans in 1944. She was deported to Stutthof concentration camp and her father was deported to Dachau. She never saw her father again. At one point she escaped the gas chamber by an act of fate and continued as a slave labourer in the camp, then was made to go on a forced march until she was freed by the Russian army.

After the war she went back to Lithuania to search for her father but discovered that he had been killed in Dachau. She then ended up in several DP camps Poland, Austria and Italy as an interpreter. In 1948 she illegally entered Palestine where she mastered Hebrew quickly, studied sociology and became active in the Mapai party. She became a political journalist. Eventually she settled in the UK with her third husband, the psychology professor, Robert Audley. She continued as the culture correspondent of the Kölner Stadtanzeiger.