ca-006572-i0238
type: RecordSet
biographical history: Vera (nee Pick) Gara (b. May 1, 1933, Vienna, Austria) is the only child of Hungarian parents Irma and Moric Pick. Vera’s parents both worked in a salami factory in Vienna owned by her father. The Pick family fled Austria in 1938 or 1939, after Vera’s father was arrested on false charges of fraud, and moved into Vera’s grandmother’s bungalow apartment in Szeged, Hungary. The family owned a radio which they used to secretly listen to English news broadcasts from London. In an interview with Carleton University in 2016, Vera recalled her father instructing her to tell anyone who asked that they were listening to music on the radio. After the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, the more than 4000 Jews living in Szeged were confined to a ghetto. The Pecks’ bungalow, which was already inside the confines of the ghetto, became home to 17 people while a wooden wall was built outside their windows. Vera’s family were eventually forced to relocate to the small farming village of Loitzendorf by cattle car and truck, where the adults were forced to work cutting down trees in the forest. While in Loitzendorf, the Picks were helped by a local family whose young daughter secretly brought them food in the middle of the night. Vera and her family were then sent to another work camp at a stone quarry in Spitz an der Donau, Austria, in September of 1944. They stayed there only a few weeks before they were again forced to travel by cattle car to Bergen-Belsen, where they arrived on the 8th of December 1944 after a 9km walk from Hanover. Vera’s father passed away while the family was at Bergen-Belsen. Vera was eventually moved to Theresienstadt in March 1945, and was liberated in May or June of 1945. Following the end of the Second World War, Vera completed her high school education in Szeged, then moved to Vienna where she briefly attended language school. Sponsored by family friends, she moved to London, England and obtained her nursing qualifications at the West Middlesex Hosp…
related material: Shoah (Holocaust) Documentation on Survivors and Children of Survivors from the Ottawa area, unpublished, 1995 and an Oral History interview, November 20, 2000.
has beginning date: 2001-01-01
has end date: 2001-12-31
has or had holder: ca-006572
has or had identifier: 1
has record set type: Fonds
identifier: I0238
record resource extent: 1 video cassette
scope and content: Fonds consists of 1 video cassette produced by CPAC (Canadian Public Affairs Channel) entitled Searching for Nazi Looted Art, January, 29, 2001.
title: Vera Gara fonds