Arthur Jack Wright News Today

She searched Magdeburg for her relatives but found them ‘all dead; they had asphyxiated in the firestorm and were swollen up like balloons…’

Gertrude Wright, who has died 18 days short of her 100th birthday, lived an adventurous life. She was born in the German city of Magdeburg, and survived the massive Allied bombing of early 1945; witnessed American forces searching for the inventor of the V2 rocket; fled from the advancing Russians; and ended up as a translator in Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters in Lüneburg shortly after the German surrender, where she met her future British husband.