Gerta Vrbova obituary

My mother, Gerta Vrbova, who has died aged 93, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped from the Gestapo and went on to become a professor of developmental neuroscience at University College London.

She was born in Trnava, Slovakia, to Maximilian Sidon, a butcher, and his wife, Jozefina (nee Frankova), who ran a company making blinds. Her early years were happy and peaceful. It was in 1939 that things changed, following the Nazi invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia. Gerta’s life during the second world war years was a matter of changing identities and crossing borders in order to stay alive.

In 1944 she met up with a childhood friend, Rudi Vrba, who, against all odds, had escaped from Auschwitz to describe the camp in a document that would become known as the Auschwitz Protocols. He forewarned her of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. After she and her mother were arrested, she made the desperate decision to leave her mother by jumping out of a first floor window in the Gestapo building in Bratislava.

Both her parents died in concentration camps.

After the war, Gerta began her new life in communist Czechoslovakia. She married Rudi in 1947, becoming Gerta Vrbova. They had two daughters, but divorced in 1956.

Gerta studied medicine at Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1950. She briefly practised as a doctor in Prague, but it soon became clear that her true destiny was science, not clinical medicine. Early on she developed an interest in the function of nerves and muscles, and how they interact in states of health and disease, an interest she pursued for the rest of her career.

A new period in her life began after she met Sidney Hilton, a British scientist with whom she fell in love. In 1958, she undertook a daring escape from Czechoslovakia, crossing the border into Poland on foot with her two daughters to join Sidney in the UK. They married in 1959, but were divorced in 1972.

Once in the UK, she worked at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School, King’s College London and the University of Birmingham. In 1976 she moved to UCL, where she became professor of developmental neuroscience.

Her research groups at the University of Birmingham and University College London developed electrical muscle stimulators that are widely used today in rehabilitation and sport.

She always strove to inspire young scientists, showing a special interest in supporting women, under-represented in the field.

In her later years, Gerta began to feel the need to share her experiences of the Holocaust through an autobiography, Trust and Deceit, and by giving frequent talks. She wanted her story and those of others to serve to remind humanity of what we are capable of.

Gerta is survived by her children Peter and me, from her marriage to Sidney, and by six grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Her two other children predeceased her.