Hella Pick

Hella Pick CBE
Pick in 1972, with journalist Moshe Ali
Born	Hella Henrietta Pick (1929-04-24)24 April 1929 Vienna, Austria
Died	4 April 2024(2024-04-04) (aged 94) London, England
Nationality	Austrian British (from 1948)
Occupation	Journalist

Hella Henrietta Pick CBE (24 April 1929 – 4 April 2024) was an Austrian-born British journalist.

Hella Pick was born in Vienna, Austria, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her parents divorced when she was three years old and she was brought up by her mother. Following Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, and a visit from the Gestapo, Pick's mother decided to leave Austria. Pick was put on a Kindertransport and arrived in Britain in March 1939. Her mother obtained a visa and joined her three months later.^[1]

Pick attended school in the Lake District and learned English. Feeling awkward about her identity, for a while she refused to speak German at all, even with her mother. In 1948, Pick became a British citizen and she no longer felt herself to be a refugee.

Pick studied at the London School of Economics. She applied for a job at the United Nations, but was not accepted.^[2] In 1960, she became the UN correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, where she was tutored by its chief US correspondent Alistair Cooke.^[3] At the time there were very few women correspondents, and women were disadvantaged and not treated as equals; for example, at ambassadorial dinners the women withdrew after the meal as was long the custom in the English-speaking world, while the men—including Pick's colleagues and competitors—discussed events over port and cigars.^[2] She also wrote for the New Statesman.^[4] She was honoured with a CBE in 2000 for her work as a journalist and writer. In Germany she became known for her appearance on the TV shows Internationales Frühschoppen and Presseclub.

Pick was the Arts & Culture Programme Director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent think-tank based in London.^[5] She had dual British and Austrian citizenship, and regularly visited Austria, her "home away from home".

The Guardian News & Media Archive contains an oral history of her time on the paper in the 1960s and 1970s^[6] and a written memoir.^[7] Invisible Walls, an account of her life and career in journalism, was published in 2021.^[8]

Pick died in London on 4 April 2024, at the age of 94.^[9][10]

• Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996
• Guilty Victim – Austria from the Holocaust to Haider, I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2000
• Invisible Walls, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021

• Imperial War Museum interview, February 2001