The Washington Post - USA (2022-03-27)

SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9

obituaries

BY EMILY LANGER

When Vera Gissing boarded
the train that would deliver her
out of Czechoslovakia on the eve
of World War II, she was certain
she would be home, back in the
arms of her family, within a year.
That was what her parents had
told her — what they, too, fervent-
ly hoped — as they readied Vera,
10, and her older sister, Eva, to
journey alone to England.
Along with her sister, Mrs.
Gissing was one of at least 669
girls and boys, most of them
Jewish, rescued from the Holo-
caust by a young English stock-
broker called Nicholas Winton,
although they would not learn his
name for nearly half a century.
Winton, who dismissed his ef-
forts as nothing more than a
“wartime gesture,” did not speak
of his past until the 1980s, when
his wife discovered in their attic a
scrapbook containing the records
of his rescue mission. Reported
first by the British media,
W inton’s story made news
around the world, and made him
known as a hero in the mold of
Oskar Schindler.
In 1988, the BBC television
program “That’s Life!” devoted an
episode to Winton, who by then
was nearly 80 years old. Unbe-
known to him, Winton was sur-
rounded in the TV studio by the
children he had saved. At one
point, the host, Esther Rantzen,
turned to Mrs. Gissing and an-
nounced, “I should tell you that
you are actually sitting next to
Nicholas Winton.”
“Hello,” Mrs. Gissing whis-
pered, cradling his hand in hers
as Winton wiped tears from his
eyes.
Rantzen then addressed the
entire studio. “May I ask,” she
said, “is there anyone in our audi-
ence tonight who owes their life
to Nicholas Winton? If so, could
you stand up, please.”
Everyone around him rose.
Mrs. Gissing — who chronicled
her Holocaust story and Winton’s
in books and interviews, offering
her survival as evidence of the
good that can be achieved
through the kindness of a single
person — died March 12 at a
nursing home in Wargrave, in
Berkshire, England. She was 93.
Her daughter Nicola Gissing
confirmed her death but did not
cite a cause.
Veruska Anna Diamantova was
born in Prague on July 4, 1928,
and grew up just to the east in the
town of Celakovice. Her father
was a wine merchant, and her
mother worked for the family
business. They were Jewish but
not especially observant.
Mrs. Gissing recalled a child-
hood full of delight. “My sister

was very serious and studious,

and I was a ragamuffin who al-

ways got into scrapes,” she said in

an interview for a Holocaust oral

history archive at the University

of Michigan at Dearborn.

But their lives were upended

by the German invasion of the

Czech regions of Bohemia and

Moravia on March 15, 1939. (The

Czech territory known as the Su-

detenland had already been ced-

ed to Adolf Hitler in the Munich

Pact of 1938.)

“German armored cars, motor-

cycles and tanks followed by line

upon line of high-booted, march-

ing soldiers were moving along

the street, filling our square,” Mrs.

Gissing wrote in her memoir,

“Pearls of Childhood.” “Suddenly

our home was no longer ours.”

Winton, who was 29 at the

time, had traveled to Czechoslo-

vakia with a friend, who worked

with the British Committee for

Refugees from Czechoslovakia,

and who promised Winton a

“most interesting assignment.”

Winton threw himself into the

organization’s mission, modeling

his efforts on the Kindertrans-

port, the effort to shepherd chil-

dren out of Germany and

N azi-occupied Austria.

Over a period of weeks, he

collected thousands of applica-

tions from Jewish families seek-

ing passage for their children out

of Czechoslovakia. Parents wait-

ed in line for days. Among those

parents was Mrs. Gissing’s moth-

er.

One evening, Mrs. Gissing

wrote in her memoir, her family

was gathered at the dinner table,

but her mother could not bring

herself to eat.

“Suddenly she pushed her

plate aside, looked at father and

said, ‘I heard today that both Eva

and Vera can go to England,’ ”

Mrs. Gissing wrote.

“There was a deathly silence,”

she continued. “Father looked

shocked and terribly surprised.

... All at once his dear face
seemed haggard and old. He cov-
ered it with his hands, whilst we
all waited in silence. Then he
lifted his head, smiled at us with
tears in his eyes, sighed and said,
‘All right, let them go.’ ”
The girls left on July 1, 1939,
three days before Mrs. Gissing’s
11th birthday. Their mother
dressed them in stylish clothes
exactly their size; she could not
bear the thought, Mrs. Gissing
said, that her daughters would be

away long enough to grow into

larger garments. Her father gave

her a leather-bound diary, where

he instructed her to record all her

experiences during their separa-

tion, in order to share them when

the family was together again.

“The scene at Prague station

will be with me forever,” the Daily

Telegraph quoted Mrs. Gissing as

recalling. “The forced cheerful-

ness of my parents — their last

words of love, encouragement

and advice. Until that moment, I

felt more excited than afraid, but

when the whistle blew and the

train pulled slowly out of the

station, my beloved mother and

father could no longer mask their

anguish.”

Mrs. Gissing’s transport was

one of eight organized by Winton

between March 1939 and August

1939. A ninth, which was to carry
      Mrs. Gissing’s two cousins, was
      scheduled to leave in September
      but was canceled after Hitler in-
      vaded Poland, precipitating the
      outbreak of World War II. All the
      children chosen to depart on that
      train were believed to have
      p erished in the Holocaust.
      In England, Winton and his
      associates had arranged for the
      children to be placed with foster

families or in boarding schools, as

happened with Eva. Mrs. Gissing

was placed with a Methodist fam-

ily in Liverpool, the Rainfords,

whom she remembered with

deepest affection.

“The door opened and there

stood a little lady, barely taller

than I was,” Mrs. Gissing wrote in

her memoir, remembering her

first encounter with “Mummy

Rainford.” “Her hat sat askew on

her head and her mackintosh was

buttoned up all wrong. A pair of

bright eyes peered at me rather

anxiously from behind glasses

before her rosy-cheeked kind-

looking face broke into a wide

warm smile. She ran toward me

then, laughing and crying at the

same time, and hugged me tight-

ly, talking to me with words I

could not understand.”

Four of those words, she later

learned, were: “You shall be

loved.”

“And loved I was,” Mrs. Gissing

wrote.

For a period, Mrs. Gissing at-

tended a school for young Czech

refugees in Wales, visiting her

foster family for vacations.

She returned to Czechoslova-

kia after the war, but not to be

greeted by her parents, as she had

long hoped. Both had been de-

ported to concentration camps.

Her father was executed during a

death march. Her mother died of

typhoid days after the liberation

of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Mrs. Gissing studied English at

a university in Prague and was

working as a translator at the

Defense Ministry when Commu-

nists assumed control of the

country in 1948. She returned to

England, where she worked as a

literary translator, and married in

1949.

“We somehow felt that we had

to achieve something,” she said

years later of herself and the

other rescued children, “to repay

the fact that we were alive while

our loved ones, who had made the

ultimate sacrifice of wrenching

themselves away from their chil-

dren, did not survive.”

Mrs. Gissing learned of Win-

ton’s part in her survival while

writing her memoir, which was

published in 1988, the same year

that he and the children were

reunited on “That’s Life!” As it

happened, Mrs. Gissing and

W inton lived several miles away

from one another.

Also among the children saved

by Winton were Dagmar Simova,

a cousin of former U.S. secretary

of state Madeleine Albright;

K arel Reisz, the director of the

1981 film “The French Lieuten-

ant’s Woman”; and the Labour

Party politician Alfred Dubs.

Mrs. Gissing appeared in and

contributed to several documen-

tary films about Winton. With

Muriel Emanuel, she co-wrote the

book “Nicholas Winton and the

Rescued Generation” (2001) —

the title a reference to Mrs. Giss-

ing’s contention that Winton had

“rescued the greater part of the

Jewish children of my generation

in Czechoslovakia.”

She and Winton were also the

subject of the children’s book

“Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of

the Holocaust and the Children

He Rescued” (2021) by Peter Sís.

Mrs. Gissing’s husband, Mi-

chael Gissing, died in 1995. Their

daughter Sally Gissing died a

decade ago.

Besides her daughter Nicola, of

Bristol, England, survivors in-

clude a son, Clive Gissing of

Thame, Oxfordshire; four grand-

children; and four great-grand-

children.

Winton died in 2015 at 106.

“He has,” Mrs. Gissing told the

Daily Mail in 1998, “become the

much cherished father-figure of

the largest family in the world,

because our own parents had

perished in the Holocaust — as

surely we would have done, with-

out his swift and timely interven-

tion. To him we owe our freedom

and life.”

VERA GISSING, 93

As a child, saved from Holocaust in renowned mission

PESKA STAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vera Gissing and Nicholas Winton at the Prague Congress Center on Oct. 9, 2007. Mrs. Gissing was one of at least 669 children — many of

them Jewish — whom Winton saved from the Holocaust on the eve of World War II, arranging their transport out of Czechoslovakia.

BY BEN SUMNER

Scott Hall, a professional wres-
tler who rose to fame in the 1990s
as the “Scarface”-inspired Razor
Ramon, becoming a charismatic
mainstay of World Wrestling En-
tertainment before joining the
New World Order stable of vil-
lains with World Championship
Wrestling, died March 14. He was
63.
His death was confirmed in a
statement by WWE, which did
not share additional details. Mr.
Hall, who was twice inducted
into the WWE Hall of Fame, had
hip-replacement surgery recent-
ly and was hospitalized in Mari-
etta, Ga., after suffering multiple
heart attacks, according to the
pro wrestling website PWTorch.
Mr. Hall’s Razor Ramon was a
cool, cocky, toothpick-flicking
heel based on Al Pacino’s drug
lord character Tony Montana,
from the 1983 film “Scarface.”
After a decade of wrestling for
various companies under names
such as Diamond Stud and Star-
ship Coyote, Mr. Hall’s newest
character made him famous in
1992 after he rejoined WWE,
then known as the World Wres-
tling Federation.
“Say hello to the bad guy,” he
would say, in a nod to the “Scar-
face” line “Say hello to my little
friend,” which Montana says be-
fore firing his machine gun. In
short videos used to promote his
character, he drove around Mi-
ami in a convertible and wore a
white suit and gold chains, imi-
tating Pacino’s Cuban character
from the film. WWE executive
Vince McMahon loved the bit,
although he had never seen
“Scarface” and didn’t realize the
character was inspired by the

movie, according to Mr. Hall.

“I just started doing that

shtick, and he loved it and he

thought I was a genius,” Mr. Hall

told Canada’s Kingston Whig-

Standard in 2016, recalling his

audition for WWE. “I’m ripping

off the movie and he thinks I’m a

genius. Of course I never correct-

ed him about the genius part.”

In WWE, Mr. Hall won the

Intercontinental Championship

belt four times while battling

stars such as Randy “Macho

Man” Savage, Ric Flair and

Shawn Michaels in a famous

“ladder match” at WrestleMania

X. But he couldn’t shake a demon

that had been haunting him

since 1983.

While working as a bartender

at a topless club in Orlando at

age 24, Mr. Hall got into a fight

with the manager, wrestling a

.45-caliber handgun from the

man and fatally shooting him,

according to an account in the

Orlando Sentinel. Mr. Hall was

charged with second-degree

murder, and while the case was

dropped due to lack of evidence,

he said he was traumatized by

the incident and turned to alco-

hol and drugs.

“Just pills and booze, it be-

came such a routine,” he said on

HBO’s “Real Sports With Bryant

Gumbel” in 2013. “As soon as I hit

that curtain and walked down

that aisle, that guy’s life, Razor,

doesn’t have any problems. Scott

Hall’s life is falling apart. He’s

getting divorced. His kids don’t

talk to him. But the escape of that

fake guy was the only thing

keeping me going at that time.”

Mr. Hall joined many of his

WWE colleagues in signing with

WCW, owned by media mogul

Ted Turner, in 1996. Dropping

the Razor Ramon moniker, he

joined a gang of bad guys called

the New World Order with “Hol-

lywood” Hulk Hogan and Kevin

Nash. The group’s storylines be-

came the driving force in WCW’s

ratings war with WWE.

As Mr. Hall’s struggles with

substance abuse continued,

WCW worked his personal issues

into a wrestling storyline, pre-

senting him as a drunk during

matches. He bounced between

wrestling companies beginning

in 2000, landing with WWE for a

time after it purchased WCW and

later making sporadic appear-

ances at wrestling events.

Scott Oliver Hall was born in

St. Mary’s County, Md., on Oct.

20, 1958. His father served in the

Army and was later stationed in

West Germany, leading Mr. Hall

to attend high school in Munich.

Mr. Hall was twice married

and divorced to Dana Lee Burgio.

A marriage to Jessica Hart also

ended in divorce. He had two

children with Burgio: a son,

Cody, who became a pro wrestler,

and a daughter, Cassidy. Com-

plete information on survivors

was not immediately available.

During the filming of “The

Resurrection of Jake the Snake,”

a 2015 documentary about pro

wrestler Jake Roberts, fellow

wrestler Diamond Dallas Page

and Roberts reached out to Mr.

Hall, urging him to get sober.

“I’m dying, Jake, I’m dying.

I’ve been drinking vodka for

breakfast,” Mr. Hall said, accord-

ing to footage of the phone call.

Mr. Hall later moved in with his

two longtime friends, doing yoga

with Page and Roberts and work-

ing toward sobriety. He was in-

ducted into the WWE Hall of

Fame in 2014 as Razor Ramon

and in 2020 as a member of the

New World Order.

“Hard work pays off,” he said

at his first induction ceremony.

“Dreams come true. Bad times

don’t last, but bad guys do.”

SCOTT HALL, 63

Villainous Razor Ramon was mainstay of World Wrestling Entertainment

WORLD WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT

Scott Hall’s Razor Ramon was a cool, cocky heel based on Al Pacino’s drug lord character Tony Montana, from the film “Scarface.” Razor

Ramon made Hall famous in 1992 after he rejoined World Wrestling Entertainment, then known as the World Wrestling Federation.