Hella Pick
Kindertransport refugee turned diplomatic correspondent who scooped her male Fleet Street rivals
HELLA PICK, who has died aged 96, broke into the male-dominated world of 1950s journalism and went on to win global acclaim for her work as a foreign and diplomatic correspondent.
Lucky in having Clare Hollingworth as a friend and mentor (who as a young journalist at The Daily Telegraph had broken the news of the outbreak of the Second World War), Hella Pick reported on the end of Empire in West Africa, getting to know the region’s post-independence leaders. She once tripped over and fell into the arms of John F Kennedy, later covering the president’s assassination. She covered the 1968 événements in Paris; reported on Britain’s accession to the EEC; and in 1974 was on a plane carrying President Nixon when it nearly crashed on its way to Minsk.
Later, she witnessed the birth of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the end of the Cold War, was served Russian coffee on a ship moored in Valletta harbour by Mikhail Gorbachev, and often found herself being mistaken for the wife of Henry Kissinger. (She professed herself thrilled when Kissinger exclaimed, testily: “She’s not my wife. My wife doesn’t criticise my work,” concluding that “Kissinger must have read something I had written.”) She ended up as The Guardian’s diplomatic editor from 1982 to 1993.
An indefatigable networker, Hella Pick seemed to know everyone, from diplomats to presidents, and was so good at running her contacts to ground – and scooping her competitors – that on one occasion the (all male) British delegation to the UN fled to the gents to try avoid her.
But in Invisible Walls, a memoir she published in 2021, Hella Pick described the insecurities that plagued her life from March 15 1939 when, as an 11-year-old child, bearing the label No 4672, she arrived at Liverpool Street station with a small suitcase courtesy of the Kindertransport.
“The journey of my life,” she said, “has been the constant search for escape from the feelings of insecurity as a refugee, which has never gone away.”
An only child, Hella Henrietta Pick was born in Vienna on April 24 1927. Her parents divorced when she was three and she barely knew her father, who emigrated to the US.
Hella remembered very little of her early life, though she could recall an occasion after the Anschluss, when the Gestapo arrived one night and took her mother Hanna away: “Luckily, she did return, but she was obviously very frightened and uncertain of the future. As far as I can tell, it was at that stage that she decided that I had to be put on a Kindertransport.” She had only the vaguest recollection of arriving in London and “huddling in a big hall with the other children on my Kindertransport, as we waited to be claimed by British families”. Knowing just a word of English, she greeted the family that took her in with a “goodbye”.
Luckily her mother managed to make her escape from Vienna, arriving in Britain just before war broke out, and mother and daughter moved to the Lake District, where her mother had found work as a cook. Her grandmother, who remained in Austria, died in Theresienstadt.
But Hella Pick could never shake off that sense of insecurity: “Even as a schoolchild I had to carry documents describing me as an enemy alien,” she said. “For several years I refused to speak German. Nor could I bring myself to acknowledge that I was Jewish until my first visit to New York, when it dawned on me that it was possible for large numbers of Jews to assimilate into a national culture and lead unmolested lives.”
She became fluent in English, acquiring a cut-glass accent from which any vestige of German had been expunged. With the help of generous sponsors she was privately educated at a day school in the Lake District and, aged 17, won a place at the LSE, where she studied economics under Harold Laski. After graduation she worked for a while for the Colonial Development Corporation and fell into journalism accidentally in her mid-20s when she got a job as the commercial editor of West Africa magazine.
She joined The Guardian as its UN correspondent in 1960 at a time when very few women were reporting foreign affairs and women journalists were routinely discriminated against. The Foreign Office shut her out of its regular briefings, and at the end of ambassadorial dinners she was ushered out so that the men could talk politics over port and cigars.
She had considerable resourcefulness, however. When, on her first day as the Guardian’s Washington correspondent in 1972, she found that her predecessor had cleared the bookshelves of reference volumes, press cuttings and address books – all vital for a journalist in pre-google days – she phoned a few friends. One threw a party to boost her contact list, while the Washington Post gave her access to its own library and archives.
In her memoir, Hella Pick recalled a meeting with the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s as a turning point in her life. “I was asked to interview him about trade relations [but] ended up discussing his attitude towards the Holocaust, to Nazism and to modern-day Germany. It was one of those conversations that really changed my perspective and converted me to a better understanding not just of Germany and the Holocaust but of my own personal history, too.”
She became reconciled to her country of birth while visiting Vienna to interview the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, whose biography she published in 1996, and while researching Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (2000). In that book she took issue with the myth, propagated by Austria’s post-war leaders, backed by the Cold War Western powers, that the country had been a victim of Nazism, rather than a willing collaborator, but she acknowledged that the country had changed after the more recent cathartic reopening of wartime wounds.
Hella Pick admitted to unhappiness in her personal life: “I always thought that I could combine a career with a happy relationship and have children. But in that regard I have not been so successful, to put it mildly.”
A four-year relationship with Narendra Singh, India’s deputy head of mission at the UN in the 1960s, foundered due to family pressures on Singh’s side. In the 1970s she developed a relationship with Ralf Dahrendorf, director of the LSE, but that, too, came unstuck.
Some of Hella Pick’s problems probably came down to her ultra-possessive mother, Hanna, who insisted on moving with her daughter when she went to university and when she got her first job, and thought nothing of phoning the Guardian editor to demand that her daughter not be given so many foreign postings.
Hella Pick continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines well into her retirement. In 2019, while working on her memoir, she suffered a bad fall, breaking her pelvis and neck. She survived an operation and went on to complete her book.
In 2000 she was appointed CBE, and last December she travelled to Vienna to receive the city’s Golden Medal of Merit, then travelled to Berlin to be guest of honour at an exhibition commemorating the Kindertransport in the Bundestag.
According to her obituary in The Guardian, one of her editors, Martin Woollacott, described Hella Pick as imperious and occasionally arrogant, but warm and with a gift for friendship: “Like her mother, she was a brilliant cook, and was still giving large dinner parties in her 90s.”