Valerie Guttsman
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Valerie Guttsman (née Lichtigová;[1] 3 June 1918 – 29 September 2009) O.B.E. was a Slovak-born British social worker, councillor and Lord Mayor of Norwich.
Valerie Lichtigová was born on 3 June 1918 in the village of Hatalov in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia), into a Jewish family of four daughters. Her father, Herman Lichtig (d. 1940), was a travelling salesman and a member of the social democratic party of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, the DSAP. Her mother, Zephia (née Stern), had received a higher education.[2] They moved to Prešov while Valerie was still a baby. Educated first at a Protestant secondary school, she applied to study medicine in Prague, later transferring to chemistry,[3] albeit for a single semester. Lichtigová worked for a Zionist organisation.[2]
Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia, five young Jewish men who had escaped Germany helped Valerie to secure the papers needed to leave for England. She left in April 1939. Both of her parents and two of her sisters, pediatrician Ella (b. 1909) and Olga Lichtigová (b. 1914), were murdered over the subsequent years under the Nazi regime.[3] Her surviving sister, the teacher Adela Licht (b. 1912), emigrated to Palestine in 1938.[2]
Valerie worked first in Glasgow, and subsequently on a farm near the village of Dunlop, East Ayrshire. While there, she met Wilhelm Leo Guttsman, who she married on 11 July 1942. The couple moved to London, where Wilhelm was studying at Birkbeck College.[3]
The couple became naturalised British citizens in 1948, with Valerie having previously been stateless. Their daughter, Janet Helen, was born in 1958.[2]