Gerda Mayer

{{Short description|English poet (1927–2021)}} {{Use British English|date=October 2021}} {{Use dmy dates|date=October 2021}} {{Infobox writer  | name = Gerda Mayer | image = | caption = | birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1927|6|9}} | birth_place = Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia | death_date = {{death date and age|2021|7|15|1927|6|9|df=y}} | death_place = Chingford, London, England | occupation = Poet, writer | nationality = British | spouse = Adolf (Dolfi) Mayer (d. 2009) }} '''Gerda Kamilla Mayer''' (9 June 1927 – 15 July 2021) was an English poet.<ref name=poetrymag>{{cite web |last=Mayer |first=Gerda |title=Pain into Poetry |url=http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record9658.html?id=25605 |website=Poetry Magazines (ARTEMISpoetry Issue 2) |accessdate=19 September 2022}}</ref> Born to a Jewish family in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, she escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organised by Trevor Chadwick. Having composed her first poem, in German, at the age of four, she continued her education in Dorset and Surrey and began writing poetry in English. She has published several volumes of verse and her poems have appeared in many anthologies. She has been described by Carol Ann Duffy as a fine poet "who should be better known."<ref name=duffy>{{cite web|title=Older and wiser: Carol Ann Duffy introduces poems of ageing|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/13/carol-ann-duffy-poems-ageing|website=The Guardian|date=13 March 2010|accessdate=12 August 2015}}</ref>

==Early life== Mayer was born in 1927 in Karlovy Vary, a spa city in the then mostly German-speaking Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. Her father, Arnold Stein, had a small shop in the town selling ladies' coats and dresses, and her mother Erna (née Eisenberger) owned a knitwear business there. Mayer had an elder half-sister Johanna from her mother's previous marriage to Hans Trávníček, a Roman Catholic.<ref name=lawson />

The family fled east to Prague in September 1938, shortly before the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. The city was already home to many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, and Mayer's parents spent the next six months chasing between official offices and consulates in a vain attempt to emigrate.<ref name=prague>{{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Gerda |title=Prague Winter |publisher=Hearing Eye |date=2005 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oJhlAAAAMAAJ |isbn=1870841-12-3}}</ref>{{rp|16–18}} As a last resort, in February 1939 her father made a direct approach to Trevor Chadwick,<ref name=gissing>{{cite book |last1=Emanuel |first1=Muriel |last2=Gissing |first2=Vera |title=Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation |publisher=Valentine Mitchell |date=2002 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P71tAAAAMAAJ |isbn=0-85303-425-7}}</ref>{{rp|102}} an Englishman who was organising the Prague end of an operation to rescue children at risk from the Nazis.<ref name="thejc-porter">{{cite web |last=Porter|first=Monica|title=Why this knight is different|url=http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=21066&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=trevor%20chadwick&srchtxt=1&srchhead=0&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0|date=10 January 2003 |website=The Jewish Chronicle|accessdate=14 June 2015 |url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304102700/http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=21066&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=trevor%20chadwick&srchtxt=1&srchhead=0&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0|archivedate=4 March 2016 }}</ref><ref name=rescue>{{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=William |title=The Rescue of the Prague Refugees 1938–39 |publisher=Matador |date=2010 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vyKVuRfLiQ8C |isbn=978-1848765-047}}</ref>{{rp|64–86}}{{Page range too broad|date=June 2019}}

This rescue operation was part of a wider project set up in October 1938 by Doreen Warriner, with later assistance from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), aimed initially at helping exiled anti-Nazi Sudeten leaders to escape the country.<ref name=rescue />{{rp|1–36}}{{Page range too broad|date=June 2019}} As the scope of the project expanded to include these leaders' families, the responsibility for evacuating refugee children was taken on by Nicholas Winton who had come to Prague just before Christmas 1938 to help with the rescue. After weeks dealing with various agencies and interviewing candidate families, Winton returned to London to find guarantors for the children and deal with the sluggish British authorities.<ref name=gissing />{{rp|59–103}}{{Page range too broad|date=June 2019}}<ref name=rescue />{{rp|37–63}}{{Page range too broad|date=June 2019}} Before giving any child a permit for entry to Britain the Home Office needed a guarantor, in this case a person or organisation willing to keep and educate the child up to the age of seventeen and pay £50 to cover the cost of their eventual repatriation.<ref name=gissing />{{rp|75}} This is {{Inflation|UK|50|1939|fmt=eq|cursign=£}}.{{Inflation-fn|UK}} Trevor Chadwick had originally gone to Prague to select two boys to be looked after at his family's preparatory school in Swanage, Dorset. Soon after delivering them, however, he decided to return to the city to help with the evacuation of other children.<ref name=gershon>{{cite book |editor-last=Gershon |editor-first=Karen |title=We Came As Children |date=1989 |orig-year=1966 |publisher=Papermac |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EC1VYAAACAAJ |isbn=0-333-48611-0}}</ref>{{rp|22}} He remained in Prague until June 1939 and organised a number of Kindertransport trains, working in partnership with Winton at the London end.<ref name=rescue />{{rp|73,83}}

Chadwick found a place for Mayer on a flight to Britain which left Ruzyně Airport on 14 March 1939, one day before German troops marched into Prague. He also arranged for her to be sponsored by his widowed mother and to live, at first, with his own family in Swanage.<ref name="thejc-rothenberg">{{cite web |last=Rothenberg|first=Rut |title=Honour sought for another hero of Kindertransport|url=http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=21903&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=family&srchtxt=1&srchhead=0&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0|date=3 November 2000 |website=The Jewish Chronicle|accessdate=14 June 2015 |url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304112027/http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=21903&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=family&srchtxt=1&srchhead=0&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0&scsrch=0|archivedate=4 March 2016 }}</ref> The dedication in Mayer's 1988 collection ''A Heartache of Grass'' is "to the memory of Muriel Chadwick and her son Trevor Chadwick to whom I owe my preservation".<ref name=heartache>{{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Gerda |title=A Heartache of Grass |publisher=Peterloo Poets |date=1988 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eEEhAQAAIAAJ |isbn=0-905291-96-4}}</ref>

Mayer's father Arnold was sent to the Nisko concentration camp in Poland in 1939. He escaped and made his way to Soviet-occupied Lemberg/Lwów, joining Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern Front. His last letter to his daughter was written in June 1940.<ref name=lawson /><ref name=heartache />{{rp|48}} Interviewed in 2010 for a Channel 5 (UK) documentary, Mayer describes how her father and a few companions were initially welcomed by the Russians. But she learned after the war that he had subsequently been sent to a Soviet labour camp where she believes he perished.<ref name=wiener /><ref name=bss>''[https://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmItems/153968039 Britain’s Secret Schindler]'', produced: ''[http://www.testimonyfilms.com/work/revealed-britains-secret-schindler Testimony Films]'', developed: ''[http://brightsidefilms.co.uk/bs_projects/britains-secret-schindler Brightside Films] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150224203230/http://brightsidefilms.co.uk/bs_projects/britains-secret-schindler |date=24 February 2015 }}'', commissioned: ''[http://www.channel5.com/shows/revealed/episodes/britains-secret-schindler Channel 5 (UK)]'', broadcast: 27 January 2011, Producer/Director Steve Humphries.</ref>{{rp|36 min}} Her mother Erna was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in October 1942, and then the following year to Auschwitz where she too died. Mayer's half-sister Johanna was half-Jewish and survived the war, working as a bank clerk in Prague.<ref name=lawson /> After the war she suffered from mental illness and was hospitalised in East Germany. Johanna died in 2007.<ref name=wiener /><ref name=bernini />{{rp|20}}

==England== Upon arrival at Croydon Airport to the south of London, Mayer and another girl, Hanna Stern, left the other refugee children and travelled down to Dorset by car with Hanna's guarantors. Mayer was taken to Chadwick's family home in Swanage where she was welcomed by his wife.<ref name=poetryrev>{{cite journal |last = Mayer |first = Gerda |date = Winter 1998–1999 |title = Flight to England |url = http://www.poetrysoc.com/content/publications/review/backcopy/pr763to921/pr88no4/ |journal = Poetry Review |publisher = The Poetry Society |volume = 88 |issue = 4 |page = 25}}</ref> Chadwick had remained with the main group and the following day set out again for Prague, which was now under Nazi occupation.<ref name=gershon />{{rp|23}} A semi-fictionalized account of Mayer's rescue is used for the character Hugo in the children's book ''War Games'' by Jenny Koralek, Chadwick's niece.<ref name=koralek>{{cite book |last=Koralek |first=Jenny |title=War Games |publisher=Egmont Books |date=2002 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WNMYAAAACAAJ |isbn=1-4052-0074-X}}</ref>{{rp|ack,215}}

Although Mayer generally had a good relationship with her guarantor, Muriel Chadwick, they were not particularly close<ref name=whiteman>{{cite book |last=Whiteman |first=Dorit Bader |title=The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy |publisher=Insight Books, Plenum Press |date=1993 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NNB3JpUmvnYC |isbn=0-306-44467-4}}</ref>{{rp|236}} and in 1940 she was enrolled at a boarding school in Swanage. Here her native language meant she was wrongly perceived to be German and she was then teased by the other pupils.<ref name=lawson /> By 1942 the school was in decline<ref name=heartache />{{rp|15}} and Mayer left to become a boarder at the Stoatley Rough School in Haslemere, Surrey where she was much happier, describing it as "heavenly".<ref name=lawson /><ref name=ajriJan93 /> This co-educational, non-denominational school had been founded in 1934 by German émigré Dr Hilde Lion and Quaker activist Bertha Bracey, to provide an education for mainly Jewish refugee children from Nazi Europe.<ref name=baumel>{{cite book |last=Tydor Baumel-Schwartz |first=Judith |title=Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain, 1938–1945 |publisher=Purdue University Press |date=2012 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SYTPLxQljI4C |isbn=978-1557536129}}</ref>{{rp|31,32}} Three of Mayer's favourite teachers there, Dr Lion (head teacher), Dr Emmy Wolff (German language and literature) and Dr. Luise Leven (music) are celebrated in her poem "A Lion, a Wolf and a Fox".<ref name=bernini>{{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Gerda |title=Bernini's Cat |publisher=IRON Press |date=1999 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Rg1bAAAAMAAJ |isbn=0-906228-69-7}}</ref>{{rp|48}}<ref name=wolfenden>{{cite book |last=Wolfenden |first=Barbara |title=Little Holocaust Survivors: And the English School that Saved Them |publisher=Greenwood World Publishing |date=2008 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=F2gMAQAAMAAJ |isbn=978-1846450532}}</ref>{{rp|78}} Mayer finished her schooling at Stoatley Rough in 1944 aged seventeen and joined her guarantor, who by then was living at Stratford-upon-Avon.<ref name=lawson />

At the beginning of 1945, Mayer left for ''hachsharah'' (preparation for kibbutz life in Palestine), working on farms in Worcestershire and Surrey.<ref name=lawson /><ref name=highbeam /> But after seventeen months she felt no vocation for life on the land and at the end of May 1946 moved to London to take up office work.<ref name=bernini />{{rp|biog}}<ref name=ajriJan93 />

She became a naturalised British citizen in 1949 following her marriage to Adolf Mayer in September that year.<ref name=highbeam>{{cite web|title=Mayer, Gerda (Kamilla)|url=http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G2-3401600460.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160417194810/https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G2-3401600460.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=17 April 2016|website=HighBeam Research|accessdate=27 April 2015}}</ref> He too had come to England in 1939 as a refugee, in his case from Vienna. He served in the British Army between 1940 and 1946 and then worked as an office manager. In 1960 he set up his own import business, where Mayer helped with clerical tasks whilst working on her poems.<ref name=wiener>{{cite web|title=GERDA MAYER: PERSONAL PAPERS, 1916–2007|url=http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Search-document-collection?item=2673|website=Wiener Library|accessdate=3 February 2015}}{{Dead link|date=September 2025 |bot=InternetArchiveBot }}</ref><ref name=ajriJan93 />

In her thirties Mayer read for a degree at Bedford College, University of London, graduating in 1963 with a BA in English, German and History of Art.<ref name=lawson /><ref name=highbeam /> Her course included lectures at Birkbeck College given by Nikolaus Pevsner, author of the 46-volume series ''The Buildings of England''. In late 1963 she was employed by him as a part-time research assistant on the ''Bedfordshire'' volume but the work (gathering building references from the ''Victoria County History'') was unfulfilling, and to Pevsner's great annoyance she left after a few months to resume her writing.<ref name=ajriJan93 /><ref name=harries>{{cite book |last=Harries |first=Susie |title=Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life |publisher=Chatto & Windus |date=2011 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wyjGN3mhI-YC |isbn=978-0701168391}}</ref>{{rp|600,823}}

Gerda Mayer died on 15 July 2021.<ref name=thetimes>{{cite news |title=Births, Marriages and Deaths |newspaper=The Times |issue=73551 |page=45 |date=16 August 2021 |access-date=19 August 2021 |location=London |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/births-marriages-and-deaths-monday-august-16-2021-6x0rqdllp}}</ref>

== Poetry ==

{{Quote box |width=300px |align=right |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right |quote =<poem> What he liked in her voice was his name called over & over and the mirrorlike look in the weeping eyes of his lover; ...

Changed to a flower he stood by the river a sad case of rooted vanity; he never forgave the reflecting water for rippling his face.

</poem>

|source =From "Narcissus", <br>''Monkey on the Analyst's Couch'', Ceolfrith, 1980<ref name=monkey>{{cite book |last=Mayer |first=Gerda |title=Monkey on the Analyst's Couch |publisher=Ceolfrith Press |date=1980 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=edDyAAAAMAAJ |isbn=0-904461-62-9}}</ref> }}

Much of Gerda Mayer's poetry draws on the trauma of her uprooting and loss of family in 1939, but her creativity was apparent many years before that. In fact her first poem was composed when she was just four years old and was recorded by her father in a ''Babys Tagebuch'' (German equivalent of "Baby Diary"), a journal he had kept from her birth until her departure from Prague that year.<ref name=prague />{{rp|17,50}}<ref name=ajriJan93 /> At school in England her reading was soon on a par with that of her classmates but the poetry took much longer to catch up, as she recalled in 2009: "My first English poem, written at the age of twelve was no better than one I had composed (in my pre-literacy days) at the age of four ... and a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen was on a level with one I had written at the age of eleven, just before leaving home."<ref name=poetrymag />

During the 1950s and 1960s Mayer's output increased and in 1975 her first major collection appeared in ''Treble Poets 2''. She continued to have poems published in magazines and anthologies and appeared regularly at poetry readings, on one occasion speaking at the Aldeburgh Festival.<ref name=lawson>{{cite book |last=Lawson |first=Peter |editor-last=Kremer |editor-first=S. Lillian |title=Holocaust Literature: Volume II, Lerner to Zychlinsky |publisher=Taylor & Francis |date=2003 |pages=812–814 |chapter=Gerda Mayer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BAQ2VtfH3awC |isbn=0-415-92984-9}}</ref><ref name=ajriJan93>{{cite journal |last = Grunberger |first = Richard |date = January 1993 |title = The flesh made word |url = http://www.ajr.org.uk/journalpdf/1993_january.pdf |journal = AJR Information |publisher = Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain |volume = XLVIII |issue = 1 |page = 2 |archive-date = 5 March 2016 |access-date = 26 April 2015 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20160305012924/http://www.ajr.org.uk/journalpdf/1993_january.pdf |url-status = dead }}</ref> Further collections were published including two for children, with many poems written specifically for that audience, and 2013 saw a selection of her poems translated into Norwegian. In 2005 her ''Prague Winter'' was published, a short account in prose and poetry of the events leading to Mayer's departure from Prague, and the people she left behind. On BBC radio she has featured in episodes of ''Poetry Now'' (1987) and ''Time for Verse'' (1990), when Carol Ann Duffy presented poems written and read by Mayer.<ref name=genome>{{cite web|title=Poetry Now, BBC Radio 3, 3 December 1987|url=http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/4c28474a68884f3f84ee7361bb7609ec|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171022200833/http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/4c28474a68884f3f84ee7361bb7609ec|url-status=dead|archive-date=22 October 2017|publisher=BBC Genome|accessdate=26 August 2015}}</ref><ref name=listings>{{cite web|title=Time For Verse, 19901230|url=http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/t/ti/time_for_verse.html|website=RadioListings|accessdate=26 August 2015}}</ref>

Mayer's most powerful poems speak of loss and longing, and express a deep sadness. The poet Elaine Feinstein for example observed in a 1996 review that "most readers ... will have paused over that poignant poem, 'Make Believe{{'"}}, in which Mayer imagines her father alive again.<ref name=feinstein>{{cite journal |last = Feinstein |first = Elaine |date =Spring 1996 |title = Sparkling mildew and doubt |journal = Jewish Quarterly |publisher = Jewish Literary Trust Ltd |volume = 43 |issue = 1 |page = 73}}</ref> There is a wistfulness, too, when she writes about the countryside (of both her native and adoptive lands). These poems rarely fall into the trap of self-pity, though Mayer can veer in that direction when writing about the minor disappointments of life. In the poems "My Aunt Selfpity" and "Selfpity Again" she first identifies, then renounces, her dependence on that negative emotion to inspire her, though she also fears that without it her poems would be "bland and blank".<ref name=heartache />{{rp|34}} The majority of Mayer's poems however are sharp and entertaining observations of familiar human foibles, domestic life and growing old grudgingly. Her wry sense of humour is never far away, and in poems such as "The Poetry Reading" and "Drip Drip or Not Bloody Likely" she is quite happy to take aim at the poetry scene and fellow poets.

===Style and reception===

In some poems, such as "Poetry Doesn't Move",<ref name=heartache />{{rp|23}} Mayer doubts her talent, and she is sometimes inclined to agree with her father who once told her despairingly: "Nothing will ever become of you."<ref name="prague" />{{rp|44}} Critical reaction, however, has been far more positive:

{{Quote box | title = | quote =One of the most tactful namers of the Holocaust ... but her poems of everyday disenchantment are deepened by a powerful bitterness. She is funny but never a stand-up comedian. Like Stevie Smith she writes children's rhymes for grown-ups. | source = Peter Porter<ref name=porter>{{cite news |last= Porter |first= Peter |date= 15 March 1981 |title= The Muse in the North East |newspaper= The Observer |location= London |page = 33}}</ref> | align = left | salign=right | width = 95% | border = | fontsize = 100% | bgcolor = }}

{{Quote box | title = | quote = These poems are fun to read and evoke memories of the bedtime stories of childhood, deliciously balanced between cosiness and fear. ... Some poems are bawdy, some bizzare; all seize their meaning confidently, without inhibition. ... She has the gift of debunking seriousness and poetic preciousness. There is sadness too ... | source = Maureen Watson<ref name=watson>{{cite journal |last = Watson |first = Maureen |date = February 1989 |title = Review |journal = IRON |publisher = IRON Press |issue = 57 |page = 66}}</ref> | align = right | salign=right | width = 95% | border = | fontsize = 100% | bgcolor = }}

{{Quote box | title = | quote = Reading Mayer frequently feels like reading William Blake's ''Songs of Experience'' (1794). Take, for example, "Children with Candles" (''Bernini's Cat'', p.90): ... Here, as in Blake's poems, the vulnerability of innocence is juxtaposed with brutal experience. Blake's romantic faith in social amelioration has, however, been superseded by Mayer's post-Holocaust apprehension that innocence is likely to be repaid with destruction. | source = Peter Lawson<ref name=lawson /> | align = left | salign=right | width = 95% | border = | fontsize = 100% | bgcolor = }}

{{Quote box | title = | quote = The sadness of her European uprooting haunts all her poems; yet ... she speaks of a bitterness and loneliness that has bodied itself in very local forms. The tradition she works best in is altogether English, that is to say, often whimsical or playing with fairytale metaphor, sometimes using nursery rhyme and rhythms, sometimes, as in "The Lumpy and Oafish Girl", declaring her debt to Stevie Smith, a poet with whom she has more than once been appropriately compared. | source = Elaine Feinstein<ref name=feinstein /> | align = right | salign=right | width = 95% | border = | fontsize = 100% | bgcolor = }}

{{Quote box | title = | quote = Gerda Mayer's poems of return, like all her writings, seem simple and plainly done. There are no great flourishes or turns of style, and her poems may look lightly or casually written. But they have a powerful, ironic, pouncing effect, which is hard to describe but easy to feel. ... This seems to me poetry of unmistakable high quality; measured and sustained. | source = A. C. Jacobs<ref name=jacobs>{{cite journal |last = Jacobs |first = A. C. |date = Autumn 1989 |title = Refugees Turned English Poets |journal = The Jewish Quarterly |publisher = Jewish Literary Trust Ltd |volume = 36 |issue = 3 |page = 64 }}</ref> | align = left | salign=right | width = 95% | border = | fontsize = 100% | bgcolor = }}

==Works==

===Collections=== * 1970: ''Oddments'', (self-published) * 1972: ''Gerda Mayer's Library Folder'' (illustrated by Deirdre Farrell), All In (Nina Steane) * 1973: ''Poet Tree Centaur: A Walthamstow Group Anthology'' (edited by Gerda Mayer), Oddments * 1975: ''Treble Poets 2'' (Florence Elon, Daniel Halpern, Gerda Mayer), Chatto & Windus * 1980: ''Monkey on the Analyst's Couch'', Ceolfrith Press (a Poetry Book Society recommendation) * 1985: ''March Postman'', Priapus Press * 1988: ''A Heartache of Grass'', Peterloo Poets * 1995: ''Time Watching'', Hearing Eye * 1999: ''Bernini's Cat: New and Selected Poems'', IRON Press * 2003: ''Hop Pickers' Holiday'', The Happy Dragons Press * 2013: ''Alle Blad Har Mist Sitt Tre'' (All the Leaves have Lost their Trees), Nordsjoforlaget (Norwegian translation by Odveig Klyve)

===Collections for children=== * 1978: ''The Knockabout Show'', Chatto & Windus * 1984: ''The Candy-Floss Tree'' (Norman Nicholson, Gerda Mayer, Frank Flynn), Oxford University Press

===Autobiography=== * 2005: ''Prague Winter'', Hearing Eye

== References == {{Reflist}}

==Further reading== * Mayer, Gerda ''Prague Winter'', Hearing Eye, 2005 * Mayer, Gerda "Flight to England" ''Poetry Review '' 88.4, The Poetry Society, Winter 1998/99 * Chadwick, William ''The Rescue of the Prague Refugees 1938–39'', Matador, 2010

== External links == * [http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record9658.html?id=25605 ''Poetry Magazines'' article including the poem "Fragment"] * [https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/30/reviews/970330.30childrt.html ''New York Times'' article including the poem "Children with Candles"] * [http://www.peterloopoets.com/html/stocklist_145.html ''Heartache of Grass'' publisher's page including the poem "Poetry Doesn’t Move"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304133652/http://www.peterloopoets.com/html/stocklist_145.html |date=4 March 2016 }} * [https://web.archive.org/web/20150815185024/http://mypoetrycafe.com/ ''My Poetry Cafe'' blog including the poem "Shallow Poem"] * [http://paulbommerarchive.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/owl-by-gerda-mayer.html Mayer's poem "Owl" illustrated by Paul Bommer] * [http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn42451 Oral history interview with Gerda Mayer in December 1989 (recorded for the book ''The Uprooted'' by Dorit B. Whiteman)] * [http://www.nicholaswinton.com/WintonsList/images/list22a.gif Entry for Gerda Mayer (née Stein) on Nicholas Winton's list] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160317051630/http://nicholaswinton.com/WintonsList/images/list22a.gif |date=17 March 2016 }} * [https://www.geo.brown.edu/BrownNASADataCenter/StoatleyRough/ Stoatley Rough School Historical Trust] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160131203531/http://www.geo.brown.edu/BrownNASADataCenter/StoatleyRough/ |date=31 January 2016 }}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mayer, Gerda}} Category:1927 births Category:2021 deaths Category:Writers from Karlovy Vary Category:Jewish British poets Category:20th-century English poets Category:Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London Category:Kindertransport refugees Category:21st-century English poets Category:Alumni of Bedford College, London Category:Czechoslovak Jews Category:Czechoslovak emigrants to England Category:Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom Category:20th-century English women poets Category:21st-century English women poets