Hella Pick

Hella Henrietta Pick CBE (24 April 1927 – 4 April 2024) was an Austrian-born British journalist.

Quotes

• [Willy Brandt] said: "Come back to my hotel room and we can talk." I went back and we sat down and he asked about my background and we talked and we talked and we talked. I didn't get out until three in the morning and everyone on the Guardian thought: "She must have gone to bed with him."
  Well, she didn't go to bed with him but she became completely reconciled to Germany because she had got to know Willy Brandt.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Hella Pick: 'I'm not a war reporter, but I'd fight any political battles'", The Guardian (20 March 2017)

• When I started work, women who were doing any kind of political foreign affairs reporting were really very, very thin on the ground. You could really name them all.
  • Interviewed by Emma Graham-Harrison, as cited in "'A woman, a refugee, and a Jew': pioneering reporter Hella Pick on breaking down walls", The Guardian (21 June 2022)

• Many refugees who fled Austria before or during the Second World War still refuse to set foot there. But I, a Kindertransport survivor, have no compunction about visiting my native country and cannot recall being made to feel uncomfortable there.
• More than 64,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust. The fortunate were able to emigrate, but only after all their possessions had been seized. Several thousand Jewish children were saved and put onto the Kindertransport to Britain.
  • "Nazis in the cellar: is antisemitism coming out of hiding?", Prospect (August/September 2023)

• The journey of my life has been the constant search for escape from the feelings of insecurity as a refugee, which has never gone away.
  • From an interview, as cited in Kate Connolly "‘Into the arms of strangers’: child refugees of Nazi Germany remember", The Guardian (31 January 2024)
  • On visiting an exhibition in Berlin commemorating the (mostly Jewish) child refugees who were rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe just before the second world war

About Hella Pick

• [S]he once tripped over and fell, literally, into the arms of President Kennedy. In Washington, she was frequently mistaken for Henry Kissinger's wife. On one occasion after her plane, which was also carrying President Nixon, nearly crashed on the way to Minsk, an absent-minded subeditor bylined her Hella Pinsk.
  • Lindsey Hilsum "Invisible Walls by Hella Pick review – from Cold War to Brexit Britain", The Guardian (21 April 2021)