My mother, Vera Schaufeld, who has died aged 95, came to Britain from Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport train in 1939. Later she became a primary school teacher, latterly specialising in taking on pupils for whom English is a second language. Over her last three decades she also talked about her early experiences with countless groups of children and adults, encouraging them to treat people with empathy.
She often spoke at the invitation of organisations such as the Holocaust Education Trust and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, but also responded positively to requests from other channels. In 2019 she was appointed MBE for her services to Holocaust education and an honorary doctor of the University of Roehampton, where she had done her teaching training.
Born Věra-Helga Löwyová in Prague, she was the only child of Jewish parents, Eugen Löwy, a lawyer, and Else (nee Leseritz), a paediatrician, and was brought up in Klatovy, where she had a secure and happy upbringing.
However, at the age of nine, with Nazi Germany intent on occupying Czechoslovakia, she had to say goodbye to her parents on Prague station and travelled to Britain without them. She was taken in by Leonard and Nancy Faires, a Methodist couple in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, who had a daughter of their own, Betty. Not long after the second world war ended, Vera learned that her parents, grandmother, aunt and uncle had all died in concentration camps.
After secondary education at the East Anglian school for girls in Bury St Edmunds she trained as a primary school teacher at Southlands College, now part of the University of Roehampton. In 1951 she left her job at Stepney Jewish school to join a kibbutz in Israel, and on her first night there she met Avram Schaufeld, a Polish concentration camp survivor who was working as a shepherd.
They married in 1952 and settled two years later in the UK, where Vera taught in various primary schools in London while Avram qualified as a physiotherapist. They had two daughters, Rachel and me, and moved to Wembley in north west London.
After a career break from 1956 to 1963 during her children’s early years, in 1972 Vera joined Brent Language Service, teaching English to primary and secondary schoolchildren who had recently arrived in the UK. After gaining a diploma in teaching English as a second language (ESL) from Ealing Technical College she became a part-time practical assessor on the course she had just taken, while working as a full-time ESL adviser at the London borough of Brent.
Always interested in discussing ideas, in the 1960s Vera enjoyed taking classes on philosophy and literature that were organised through the Housebound Wives’ Register. Her love of literature sustained her throughout her life, and her participation in book and poetry groups continued even when she moved into a care home in 2022.
Avram died in 2017 and Rachel predeceased her in 2023. She is survived by me, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
