The red thread

Gitta Deutsch, Viennese and half Jewish, was born in 1924. After her mother's early death, she was looked after by her father, the musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch - he catalogued Franz Schubert's works and the "D Numbers" are named after him. She experienced the Anschluss and the first months of the 1938 persecution of Jews as a schoolgirl in Vienna. To protect her, she was sent to England through the Quakers at the age of fourteen. As a memento of Vienna, she wore a locket containing a red thread - hence the title - pulled from a seat of her beloved Burgtheater. Nine months later her father managed to escape to England, and together they experienced the outbreak of war when German and Austrian refugees were classified as enemy aliens. In 1940 she and her father were interned on the Isle of Man. After the war Gitta, who was married at the time, remained in England, although she visited Vienna frequently. Finally in 1969 after thirty-one years, Gitta returned to Vienna, where she worked for the United Nations for fifteen years.