Journey to Life

Journey to Life

By Vera O'Brien

Vera Harth’s story poignantly describes how Hitler affected the life of one child, and determined her future. Her parents put her on the Kindertransport train to Britain on 1 July 1939. She never saw them again. She spent the War years in Sheffield with a foster family.

Then her life took her round the world with her husband John O’Brien, who served first in the British, then the New Zealand Army. They were stationed twice in Malaya, but came to call the tiny New Zealand settlement of Waiouru home. There, Vera and John raised a family of six healthy, happy children.

Vienna, Prague, Sheffield, Malaya, Waiouru—and back to Austria and Slovakia to find her family’s roots: Vera O’Brien was truly, as her daughter Veronica says, ‘the Ultimate Survivor’.