A Holocaust survivor who went on to become a children's mental health pioneer has died aged 100.
Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg came to England in 1939 aged 16 with just a suitcase and a cello, and trained as an infant nurse.
She went on to become a consultant and the first ever female vice-chairman of mental health unit the Tavistock Clinic before her death on December 23.
Psychologist Susanna Abse said on X the day after her death: "Sad to see that Isca Wittenberg died last night - she made such a major contribution not only to the understanding of infancy but also of organisations."
Isca was the youngest of three sisters who was born in Frankfurt in 1923. She attended a Jewish Primary School, where an English teacher taught her the language, enabling the young girl to help her mother get papers for the family to flee to the UK.
Well before the war, Hitler was gaining power and Isca told the Ham&High that she would be spat at as she walked to and from school.
Her father Rabbi Georg Salzberger was the rabbi of Frankfurt's Westend Synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938 when Nazis torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses.
When her father was incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp, Isca's mother contacted his friends abroad who were able to get him a job in Los Angeles, which in turn enabled Isca's mother to go to the Gestapo and ask for his release.
The family fled to the UK at Easter in 1939 courtesy of the British consulate in Frankfurt, when Isca was 16. She had just a suitcase and was permitted to take her cello.
With help from a charity that was to become the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), she was sent to train as an infant nurse in Yorkshire, where she said "the worst thing was we were not allowed to pick up the babies".
From there she went to university and after graduating started work at the Tavistock Clinic in Belsize Park, where she was one of the first people to undertake child psychotherapy training after the Second World War.
She remained there for 25 years as a child and adolescent psychotherapist before becoming a consultant until she was forced to retire at 65.
Tragedy befell the family when her older sister Lore died from cancer aged 44, leaving two sons, Raphael, then eight, and Jonathan, five.
Following her sister's wishes, she married her brother-in-law, something she said was "not unusual in Jewish culture" and who she described as "a very gentle person".
Balancing her job with children, she would have dark dreams not uncommon to many other working mothers.
Describing one, she said: "A surgeon was opening me up and saw so many bad things inside me. There was nothing they could do for me except sew me up again. There was something about me that didn't believe I was good enough to look after my sister's children."
She wrote three books, and in September 2022 the second edition of her last, Experiencing Endings and Beginnings From Birth to Old Age, was published with a new chapter about life in your 90s.
At 97, missing her beloved cello, which she could no longer play, she began taking piano lessons.
"What you lose you mustn't rest on that, you don't stay talking and thinking about that, you must think about what you can do," she said.
AJR chief executive Michael Newman said: “We were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Isca Wittenberg.
"Isca was a treasured member of the AJR who had an eminent career as a psychotherapist.
"The AJR had the honour of capturing her testimony in the AJR Refugee Voices archive to mark the occasion of her 100th birthday."
Isca is survived by her two sons, five grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
To learn more about her life visit visit https://www.ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk/RefugeeVoices/isca-wittenberg
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