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AUSTRIAN émigré Jeanette Elmont, who has died aged 93, was intensely proud of her British passport – she would never forget how she and her two sisters had managed to get to the safety of England in 1939, and how she had left a family behind who were murdered in Nazi death camps.

Jeanette, who set up and ran the Regent Bookshop in Parkway with her son Peter, was born in Austria in 1917, the daughter of middle-class parents living in Vienna, considered one of the vanguards of European culture and civilisation. 
 

It was all to change in the 1930s. As Austria followed Germany’s lead, Jeanette and her sisters Sonja and Edith were in real danger as young Jewish women. She recalled the awful events of Kristallnacht – watching Nazis ransack her synagogue – and the daily persecution because of her religious background. 

Her parents managed to get the youngest daughter Sonja out on the Kindertransport, while Jeanette and Edith were given UK visas to work as domestic helps. Her first job was in a large house in the 

Bishops Avenue – but having come from a wealthy Austrian family, she could not even boil an egg as she had never had to learn to cook. Luckily, her new employers were aware of what she had fled and she soon picked up the skills required. 
 

Her escape from Austria was once mentioned in Camden Town-based author Alan Bennett’s best-selling diaries: he was a regular customer in her bookshop, and recalled seeing her son Peter photocopying some documents for her.

“April 7, 1999: I call at the Regent Bookshop in Parkway,” he writes.

“I find Peter the proprietor’s mother there with a bundle of papers she has brought along to photocopy. She is from Vienna, which she left in 1939 at the age of 22. Her parents had to find someone in England to employ her as a domestic. Her passport is stamped with a large red J and the letters she wrote after the war, ­trying to find out what happened to her ­parents... I came away thinking about the ­supposed shame stamped on her passport and the grudging visa that saved her life.”

She married fellow Viennese Joe Bergman in 1947 – they had met during the war at the Hammersmith Palais – and Peter was born in 1948. Joe died suddenly in the early 1960s. 

Her second husband, Jack, had also lost his partner early. The pair had known each other from their youth in ­Austria – he was also an émigré – and they married in the mid-1960s. 

Jack owned a book wholesale business in a warehouse in Parkway and Peter was looking for a different career. The three of them ­decided they should start selling books from the shopfront of the warehouse. Soon the Regent became a success and overtook the wholesale side of the business. 

Peter recalls Camden Town being a working-class district, and hippies giving Parkway a particular hue when the bookshop opened. It was soon a success, with regular customers making firm friends with Jeanette: Beryl Bainbridge would drop by less to peruse stock than for a gossip.

Jeanette was a ­bibliophile herself, and had a real soft spot for ­romantic fiction. She was also a keen card player, enjoying games of Canasta. 

Jeanette passed away on Christmas Day at the Royal Free and is ­survived by her husband Jack, son Peter and granddaughters Lucy and Josie.