Eva Marianne Diamond (née Bobasch)

Eva Marianne Diamond (née Bobasch) was born in Prague on 24 May 1926 and died in London on 31 January 2009. In the spring and summer of 1939, before war broke out, three trainloads of Jewish children—the Kindertransport—were able to escape from Nazi German-occupied Prague and come to safety in Britain thanks to the concerted efforts of several organisations. Eva was one of these children. She was 13 at the time. Subsequently, she went to Emslie boarding school for the daughters of clergymen and later she studied medicine at Edinburgh University. This was a remarkable achievement for a refugee arriving without speaking a word of English; people will be unaware of how difficult and unusual it was then for a woman to qualify as a doctor in 1949. On 19 March 1948, Eva swore her oath of allegiance to the United Kingdom. On 27 November 1955 Eva Bobasch married Aubrey Diamond.

Eva and I first met at Shenley Hospital, near Radlett, in the late 1970s. This was an internationally known hospital for its innovative approach in psychiatry. Built in 1934, it was designed on a villa system in beautiful parkland, where patients were housed in small homely units. I have very vivid memories of Eva sitting in doctors’ meetings. She was a very special person. Patients, staff, and colleagues always treated her with fondness and respect. She often had a smile in her face and was regarded as a competent doctor, full of empathy and consideration for her patients. She also worked for a period at Northwick Park Hospital. Eventually, she moved to work as a child, adolescent, and family psychiatrist in two different clinics: one in Maidstone (Kent) and the other one in Brighton.

As a child of the Holocaust, Eva tried all her life to deal with the emotional scars left by her plight. Her mother died in Auschwitz, and during her adolescence she had no contact with her father, who survived the Holocaust and sought refuge in the United Kingdom. Eva had psychotherapy, first with Martin Miller (a well known psychoanalyst) and later with Ruth Barnett (herself a child of the Kindertransport). Eventually she trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy but chose to work full time in general adult, child, and adolescent psychiatry in the NHS. Her modesty was a positive aspect of her personality but sometimes played against herself, particularly in the context of a very demanding and competitive professional milieu. In the 1990s she joined the International Attachment Network, an organisation concerned with the development of attachment theory (which centres on the evidence based notion that childhood and adolescent experiences in the family, particularly with parents, play a fundamental part in personality development).

Eva was predeceased by her husband, Aubrey, a professor of law, in 2006. She is survived by two children and four grandchildren.