November 11, 2013 • 21 mins
There are many amazing, heroic stories of people who risked everything to protect Jews and other people at risk before and during the holocaust. A few turned to particularly ingenious, unexpected or daring plans to save people.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast
on Trac B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we're
going to talk about a collection. We don't do this often.
We don't always stick to one thing. We're talking about
(00:23):
a collection of people. Today, there are so many amazing
and heroic stories of people who risk their own lives
and the lives of their families and friends to protect
Jews and other people who were at risk before and
during the Holocaust. Yad Vism honors people with the title
of Righteous among the nations on behalf of Israel, and
(00:45):
these are non Jews who risked their lives to save
Jews during the Holocaust and els of January one, which
was the most recent day I could find, twenty four thousand,
eight hundred eleven people had been a in this title.
And some of these people are quite well known today.
People like Oscar Schindler, who we know about because of
(01:06):
the film Schindler's List, Uh, you know, had deep pockets
and were well connected and they used their money in
their bureaucracy to protect people. Schindler, for example, is credited
with saving one thousand, two hundred Jews. And there were
also diplomats who used their roles in their clout to
illegally secure visas and passports for people. A couple of
examples are Louis Martin's de Susa Dantas from Brazil and
(01:30):
are Stee de Susa Mendez from Portugal, and they were
both working from France when they did this. And then
there are the people who sheltered individual people and families,
and one of the most famous being meet Geez, who
is one of the people who helped shelter and Frank
and her family, and who also found and saved Anne's diary,
which of course became a really important document. In the
(01:52):
town of new Land, Netherlands, every household sheltered at least
one Jew, and that was so that no one in
the community would be able to betray anyone else, like
they kind of took the approach of they were all
in it together. To betray anyone else in the community
was to betray oneself. A few rescuers, some of them
who have also been named righteous among the Nations, turned
(02:13):
to really just surprisingly ingenious or unexpected or daring plans
to save other people and for a number of reasons.
There's not a lot of biographical or scholarly information for
a lot of them, at least not enough to be
able to vote to devote one whole episode to just
one of them. But these stories are so incredible and
they reveal so much about the links that some people
(02:36):
will go to to protect other human beings that we
didn't want to overlook them. So we've gathered a few
into one episode today, uh, And we're going to start
with one that requires a little bit of a grain
of salt, because this story has become a little bit
inflated through the years and retellings. Charles Coward was a
British sergeant major held at a pow camp here Auschwitz Monoe,
(02:59):
also called Auschwitz three, and his experience was later made
into a book called The Password is Courage, which in
turn was made into a film. So you can see
how facts might get a little uh altered, a nebulous
along the way. In those retailers, there was the passage
of time and the fact that there was there was
the dramatization element involved, and some of that story really
(03:22):
has come under some scrutiny over the years. So what
we are sticking to is the most conservative version for
the part for which he was named as Righteous among
the Nations on February six, nine five, And that's the
most substantiated of the greater part of his story. And
this was a rescue through body swapping. So Charles and
(03:44):
the other POWs would get aid packages from the International
Red Cross, which would include such valuable items as chocolate
and cigarettes. He hoarded these and he convinced the other
podve used to part with there's also, and then he
used them as currency. He would trade them with a
German who was responsible for disposing of bodies from the
(04:04):
neighboring construction site. And the bodies are actually what Charles
was after. He claimed they were part of a practical joke,
but he was really using them as stand ins for
escaping Jews. So the Jews would be marched from the
camp to a synthetic rubber works where they were worked
to exhaustion, and sometimes they would die there or on
(04:27):
route back to the camp as a result of being
so overworked and malnourished and poorly treated. So with the
help of sympathetic guards and the other POWs, Charles would
have two or three bodies staged along the the route
that they were marching to get to and from the
rubber works, and then a matching number of Jewish prisoners
who Charles had identified would slip away during the march back.
(04:51):
Jews were counted coming and going to prevent just such
an escape, but the body of anyone who died along
the way had to be returned to Auschwitz and counted
as oh, and the bodies would then be tallied along
with the Jewish prisoner, so no one would be accounted
as missing. So this was really an ingenious little math
plot to make sure that the total number added up
(05:12):
at the end. Uh The exact number of people that
were saved using this little body swap is a little
bit unclear at this point, um, and Charles himself is
not around any longer to discuss about it. He died
in nineteen seventy six. And then the next time we're
going to talk about is Dr Eugene Lezowski. Yes, he
(05:33):
was a doctor and a soldier in the Polish Army,
and he faked an outbreak of epidemic Typhus and roswadow
in southeast Poland to save Jews and the Polish people
who were living there. He had been sent there to
work for the Polish Red Cross after Germany invaded Poland
in nine His friend and medical colleague Stanislaw Matuluis, discovered
(05:55):
that if he injected someone with killed typhus bacteria, that
person would then test positive to the disease without actually
being infected. Dr Lezowski ran with this knowledge repeating the
process on other people in Roswadow. If Jewish people were
discovered to have typhus, they would have been just killed
as a disease control measure. So what he did was
(06:16):
he injected the non Jews who were living in the area,
and then he sent there supposedly contaminated blood to German
labs to be tested, and he carefully metered out the
number of infections these fox infections to mimic what would
be a very natural and organic start of a typhus epidemic.
(06:37):
German officials, fearing the disease, wound up quarantining the entire area,
and it was home to about eight thousand people, so
he's credited with saving the Jews who lived there from
concentration camps and everyone else from being sent into forced labor.
In addition to orchestrating this outbreak, he also provided medical
care to the Jews who were living in the Roswadal
(06:57):
ghetto under the cover of night, which is something that
he would have been punished for doing if he had
ever been caught. Uh and Dr Lazowski immigrated to Chicago
after the war and he ended up living in Eugene, Oregon,
where he died on December sixteenth of two thousand six.
We have another medical intervention as that is our next story.
(07:19):
This is Ernest Tree or More and he was an
anentusiologist living in Denmark. At the time. The Danish resistance
was smuggling Jews under the false bottoms of fishing boats.
So what they would do is they would row far
enough away from land that they wouldn't be seen, and
then they would transfer their human cargo to Swedish ships
who would then take them the rest of the way
to Sweden. And then the Gestapo started using dogs to
(07:42):
try to sniff out stowaway and they had gotten wind
of what was going on and started bringing the dogs
to try to put stop to it. Working with a
pharmacist named Olaf Houbner, Dr Mork came up with this
mixture of cocaine and dried rabbits blood that would rob
the dogs of their ability to smell all They basically
acted like a local anesthetic on the dog's noses and tongues,
(08:04):
and because of the rabbit blood, they would eagerly lick
it all up and sniff it. So they worked out
the kinks using Olifs cocker spaniel as a test subject,
which fine a little charming. I'm imagining this cocker spaniel
just being uh, sniffle, sniff around, temporarily robbed of its
sense of smell, and then to come back to perfect
the uh the process. It also suggests this as they
(08:28):
were doing it on a pet, it was not harmful
to the dogs, so I always love that uh. And
then they would sprinkle this powder that they had developed
onto the decks of the boats, so the Gestapo's dogs
would come aboard, and they'd sniff and lick at the
powder eagerly, and they would temporarily have their senses deadn't uh,
And it would conceal then that there was anyone hidden
on the boat. They were useless to sniff out the
(08:49):
bodies at that point. So this allowed the resistance to
keep doing what it had been doing uh and and
carry on with getting people out of the area without
so much fear of discovery. Dr Mark died on January
and now back to our topic at hand. Yes, the
next person on our list is Irene Good up Dike.
(09:11):
She was then just Irene Good and she hid twelve
Jews at a villa where she was working as a housekeeper.
The trick here is that the villa actually belonged to
German Major Eduard Rugemer. She was only seventeen years old
at the start of World War Two and she was
studying nursing when Germany invaded Poland. She fled the invasion,
but she was captured by Russian soldiers who raped her.
(09:34):
She wound up hospitalized after the attack, and once she recovered,
she was put to work in a factory, and when
she felt ill, Major Rugemer took pity on her and
moved her into a job working at a club for
German soldiers, and there she was the supervisor of twelve
Jews who were working in the laundry service. Major Rugimer
later made her the housekeeper at his own villa, and
(09:57):
after hearing that the camp where the Jews were living
was going to be liquidated, Irene found places to hide
them at the villa. Some of them lived in a
cellar under the gazebo, and some lived in a laundry room,
and some of the women that she was hiding would
occasionally help her with the cleaning while Major Ruginer was away,
and eight months into this whole charade, he returned home
(10:18):
early one day and discovered them. This would have been
inexcusable for an officer to learn that his home had
been used to shelter Jews, and it would have caused
irreparable harm to his career if he had confessed to it,
but Irene further insured his silence by becoming his mistress.
So in addition to keeping these twelve people safe, she
(10:38):
also helped smuggle other Jews into the forest so that
they could make an escape, and she smuggled food into
the ghetto for them as well. She really like she
was doing a lot of different things to help the cause.
In nineteen forty four, Irene and the twelve people she'd
been hiding escaped into the forest themselves, and they hid
there until Russia invaded Poland. In eight she immigrated to States,
(11:00):
and she wrote and published a memoir called In My Hands,
Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer. She was honored as one
of the Righteous among the Nations on July eighth of
nine two. She died in two thousand three at the
age of eighty five. And this last person we're going
to talk about is one that we have gotten several
requests to talk about after a blog post that has
(11:22):
filtered around the Internet lately, and that's Irena Sundler, who
rescued about twenty five hundred children from the Warsaw Ghetto
using suitcases, trunks, facts, and piles of garbage to hide them.
She was born in Warsaw in nineteen ten and her
father was a doctor. She later said that when she
was seven, her father had told her, if you see
(11:44):
someone drowning, you must try to save him, even if
you cannot swim, and it was this attitude that led
her into a life of service, including her work as
a social worker. Before the start of the war, when
the Germans began moving Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, she
started by smuggling food and medicine into the area. She
would forge papers using Polish names so she could secure
(12:05):
food and medical aid, and then she would distribute it
among the Jews. When the ghetto was locked down, she
got a nurse's uniform and a permit to inspect sanitary conditions,
which let her move in and out of the area
more freely. In two Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began
to be removed to the Treblinka extermination camp, and while
some of the other camps during the Holocaust housed prisoners
(12:27):
who were forced into labor, the main purpose of Trablinka
was really just execution. Jews and other people that Mattie
wanted to exterminate would be brought in and told they
were there to be resettled, but then they would be
led directly into gas chambers and killed. At this point,
Arena began to work with Zagoda, the Council for Aid
to Jews, which had been formed by the Polish government
(12:48):
in exile, which at that point was operating from London.
She used the code the code named Joe Lanta. Zagoda
provided Arena with money and forged documents, and sometimes they
would also learn which buildings in the ghetto were being
emptied the next day, and Arena would go to those first.
She would encourage Jewish parents to let her take their
children away so that she could place them with Christian
(13:10):
families or take them to a convent or to the
family of Merry orphanage. In Warsaw, parents were naturally very
reluctant to part with their children. Many of them wanted
to know for sure that if they gave up their children,
their children would survive, but there really wasn't any guarantee
that they would even make it out of the ghetto
without being caught. What was much more certain was that
(13:33):
if they were taken to Triblanca, they would die. And
there were also matters of faith to consider. These children
would need to learn Christian stories and prayers to be
able to maintain their disguise and blend in in Christian families,
and parents were actually worried that they would be drawn
away from their existing culture and beliefs, so a lot
of parents really believed the sort of charade that Treblinka
(13:56):
was actually a resettlement camp. Arena really had to work
to convey into them that they were being sent there
to die, and that their children's only hope of survival
was to be moved elsewhere. One piece of reassurance that
Arena was able to give these families is that she
would keep up with the real names of their children
so that later on, families could potentially be reunited. She
(14:16):
wrote the children's real names and new names on pieces
of paper, and she would seal them into jars and bottles,
and then she buried them under an apple tree that
belonged to her friend Janina Grabowska. She used all kinds
of tactics to smuggle children out of the ghetto once
parents had agreed to let her do it. Children who
were very sick or who could convincingly look very sick,
(14:39):
could just be taken out in an ambulance, or if
they couldn't really pass for being ill, they could just
hide under the stretchers that were being used to transport
other children. Babies were given sedating drugs to keep them quiet,
and they were sometimes smuggled out in suitcases and hidden
among cargo in carts and trucks. Children also left the
(15:00):
get and garbage trucks produced sacks, trunks, basically anything that
a child could fit into and could be taken carried
away in right. Unfortunately, Arena was discovered for all of
these activities and she was arrested on October twenty nine.
She was imprisoned, she was tortured, and she was sentenced
(15:21):
to execution. Her own method of escape was a little
like what her own rescue work had been. The go
to bribe a guard who kept her name on the
list of executed prisoners that he instead released her. She
was given false identification papers, and she stayed in hiding
for the rest of the war. The damage to her
legs from the torture and beatings that she received in
(15:42):
prison affected her ability to walk for the rest of
her life. After the war, true to her words, she
dug up the jars and started trying to reunite children
with their families, but unfortunately, almost all of the children's
families had in fact died in Treblinka. She was named
one of the Righteous among the Nations. On October ninety five,
in students at a Kansas high school wrote Life in
(16:05):
a Jar to publicize Arena's life after they read about
her in an article in U S News and World Report.
In two thousand three, she was awarded the Jan Carski
Award for Valor and Compassion from the American Center of
Polish Culture. She wasn't healthy enough at that point to travel,
so one of the children she rescued accepted it on
her behalf, and Irena died in two thousand eight. There
(16:29):
are people who call her the female Schindler, but it
really seems to me just as accurate to call Schindler
the male Sendler based on the numbers of people each
of them saved. Yeah, he's just got the bigger billing culturally.
So having having had a giant motion picture made about
a person doesn't totally solidify them into the public consciousness. Yeah,
(16:53):
it could certainly still happen. Yeah, there are lots and
lots of other really amazing stories of of uh people who,
rather than being anywhere on the spectrum between complicit and
actively harming other people, uh, I really just did a
lot to try to save other people and to protect
(17:14):
other human beings during the Holocaust. You can read lots
and lots of them at the Righteous among the Nation's website,
which we will link to from our show notes. So, Tracy,
do you have a little bit of listener mail for him? Do?
This is from Eric, and Eric says, Hello Holly and Tracy.
First of all, I want to thank you for this podcast.
I can't tell you how many long runs it has
(17:35):
gotten me through. I just listened to your show about
New England vampires and I thought I might add a
bit of information. I grew up in Exeter, Rhode Island,
home of the Lenap Mercy Brown vampire legend. Her grave
can still be seen at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery just
off Route one O two. If you visit today, or
even look for a picture of a stone online, you'll
(17:55):
see a strange black band of metal around its base.
For a while, my father worked as a volunteer caretaker
for the cemetery, where much of our family is buried,
and in addition to keeping the grounds looking tidy, he
occasionally had to deal with vandalism. One day, I came
home from school to discover that Mercy Brown's headstone was
sitting in our shed. Some kids had knocked it over,
(18:17):
so my father took it upon himself to fix it good.
Never one for half measures, he welded the metal band
and attached to support fart, bracing these against an extra
block of concrete. Whenever I hear the story of Mercy Brown,
I think about my dad, the unsung hero of keeping
her great sites dirty if strange. Looking for people to
come and see. I thought you might like the inside scoop.
(18:39):
Thanks again, they would need like the inside scoop. Thank
you so much, Eric, and I also so we get
a lot of people who tell us that they listened
to our podcast while running. Yeah, I always find that
the most immensely flattering thing, because when I run, I
have to have music on, and then also Zombies Run
has to be on. And then also preferably there's a
TV in front me on the treadmill that has a
(19:01):
TV show I'm actually interested in, Like, I have to
have all that stimulus happening at the same time, or
else I get bored and quit. And so the people
who are find the podcast enough to keep them running.
Thank you for telling us. So I know, I feel
like we should run a metronome so we stay on
some sort of paste. That would be terrible. We can
see we could try that one time and see if
(19:22):
anyone notices I too have to have minimum have to
have music. Yeah, I have to just have as as
much assaulting my senses as possible, or else I'm super
bored and just like I'm just gonna get off here now.
So you would like to write to us about this
or any other topic, you can. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
(19:44):
Facebook dot com, slash history class stuff and on Twitter
at missed in History. Our tumbler is missed in History
dot tumbler dot com and we have a pinboard on Pinterest.
If you would like to learn a little more about
some of what we've talked about today, you can come
to our website. Search the word disguises and you will
find the article ten insane disguises that actually worked, and
(20:05):
that includes a page on the whole rabbits blooding cocaine
scheme that we talked about today. You can do all
that and a lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com.
(20:34):
This episode of stuff you missed in History Classes brought
to you by Linda dot com. You can learn it
at Linda dot com, an online learning company with more
than seventy seven thousand video tutorials that teach software, creative
and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five a month
and provides unlimited seven access to top quality video courses
taught by expert instructors with real world experience. Listeners of
(20:54):
Stuff you missed in History class can trial in the
dot com free for seven days by visiting linda dot com.
Slash history, stuff,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast
on Trac B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we're
going to talk about a collection. We don't do this often.
We don't always stick to one thing. We're talking about
(00:23):
a collection of people. Today, there are so many amazing
and heroic stories of people who risk their own lives
and the lives of their families and friends to protect
Jews and other people who were at risk before and
during the Holocaust. Yad Vism honors people with the title
of Righteous among the nations on behalf of Israel, and
(00:45):
these are non Jews who risked their lives to save
Jews during the Holocaust and els of January one, which
was the most recent day I could find, twenty four thousand,
eight hundred eleven people had been a in this title.
And some of these people are quite well known today.
People like Oscar Schindler, who we know about because of
(01:06):
the film Schindler's List, Uh, you know, had deep pockets
and were well connected and they used their money in
their bureaucracy to protect people. Schindler, for example, is credited
with saving one thousand, two hundred Jews. And there were
also diplomats who used their roles in their clout to
illegally secure visas and passports for people. A couple of
examples are Louis Martin's de Susa Dantas from Brazil and
(01:30):
are Stee de Susa Mendez from Portugal, and they were
both working from France when they did this. And then
there are the people who sheltered individual people and families,
and one of the most famous being meet Geez, who
is one of the people who helped shelter and Frank
and her family, and who also found and saved Anne's diary,
which of course became a really important document. In the
(01:52):
town of new Land, Netherlands, every household sheltered at least
one Jew, and that was so that no one in
the community would be able to betray anyone else, like
they kind of took the approach of they were all
in it together. To betray anyone else in the community
was to betray oneself. A few rescuers, some of them
who have also been named righteous among the Nations, turned
(02:13):
to really just surprisingly ingenious or unexpected or daring plans
to save other people and for a number of reasons.
There's not a lot of biographical or scholarly information for
a lot of them, at least not enough to be
able to vote to devote one whole episode to just
one of them. But these stories are so incredible and
they reveal so much about the links that some people
(02:36):
will go to to protect other human beings that we
didn't want to overlook them. So we've gathered a few
into one episode today, uh, And we're going to start
with one that requires a little bit of a grain
of salt, because this story has become a little bit
inflated through the years and retellings. Charles Coward was a
British sergeant major held at a pow camp here Auschwitz Monoe,
(02:59):
also called Auschwitz three, and his experience was later made
into a book called The Password is Courage, which in
turn was made into a film. So you can see
how facts might get a little uh altered, a nebulous
along the way. In those retailers, there was the passage
of time and the fact that there was there was
the dramatization element involved, and some of that story really
(03:22):
has come under some scrutiny over the years. So what
we are sticking to is the most conservative version for
the part for which he was named as Righteous among
the Nations on February six, nine five, And that's the
most substantiated of the greater part of his story. And
this was a rescue through body swapping. So Charles and
(03:44):
the other POWs would get aid packages from the International
Red Cross, which would include such valuable items as chocolate
and cigarettes. He hoarded these and he convinced the other
podve used to part with there's also, and then he
used them as currency. He would trade them with a
German who was responsible for disposing of bodies from the
(04:04):
neighboring construction site. And the bodies are actually what Charles
was after. He claimed they were part of a practical joke,
but he was really using them as stand ins for
escaping Jews. So the Jews would be marched from the
camp to a synthetic rubber works where they were worked
to exhaustion, and sometimes they would die there or on
(04:27):
route back to the camp as a result of being
so overworked and malnourished and poorly treated. So with the
help of sympathetic guards and the other POWs, Charles would
have two or three bodies staged along the the route
that they were marching to get to and from the
rubber works, and then a matching number of Jewish prisoners
who Charles had identified would slip away during the march back.
(04:51):
Jews were counted coming and going to prevent just such
an escape, but the body of anyone who died along
the way had to be returned to Auschwitz and counted
as oh, and the bodies would then be tallied along
with the Jewish prisoner, so no one would be accounted
as missing. So this was really an ingenious little math
plot to make sure that the total number added up
(05:12):
at the end. Uh The exact number of people that
were saved using this little body swap is a little
bit unclear at this point, um, and Charles himself is
not around any longer to discuss about it. He died
in nineteen seventy six. And then the next time we're
going to talk about is Dr Eugene Lezowski. Yes, he
(05:33):
was a doctor and a soldier in the Polish Army,
and he faked an outbreak of epidemic Typhus and roswadow
in southeast Poland to save Jews and the Polish people
who were living there. He had been sent there to
work for the Polish Red Cross after Germany invaded Poland
in nine His friend and medical colleague Stanislaw Matuluis, discovered
(05:55):
that if he injected someone with killed typhus bacteria, that
person would then test positive to the disease without actually
being infected. Dr Lezowski ran with this knowledge repeating the
process on other people in Roswadow. If Jewish people were
discovered to have typhus, they would have been just killed
as a disease control measure. So what he did was
(06:16):
he injected the non Jews who were living in the area,
and then he sent there supposedly contaminated blood to German
labs to be tested, and he carefully metered out the
number of infections these fox infections to mimic what would
be a very natural and organic start of a typhus epidemic.
(06:37):
German officials, fearing the disease, wound up quarantining the entire area,
and it was home to about eight thousand people, so
he's credited with saving the Jews who lived there from
concentration camps and everyone else from being sent into forced labor.
In addition to orchestrating this outbreak, he also provided medical
care to the Jews who were living in the Roswadal
(06:57):
ghetto under the cover of night, which is something that
he would have been punished for doing if he had
ever been caught. Uh and Dr Lazowski immigrated to Chicago
after the war and he ended up living in Eugene, Oregon,
where he died on December sixteenth of two thousand six.
We have another medical intervention as that is our next story.
(07:19):
This is Ernest Tree or More and he was an
anentusiologist living in Denmark. At the time. The Danish resistance
was smuggling Jews under the false bottoms of fishing boats.
So what they would do is they would row far
enough away from land that they wouldn't be seen, and
then they would transfer their human cargo to Swedish ships
who would then take them the rest of the way
to Sweden. And then the Gestapo started using dogs to
(07:42):
try to sniff out stowaway and they had gotten wind
of what was going on and started bringing the dogs
to try to put stop to it. Working with a
pharmacist named Olaf Houbner, Dr Mork came up with this
mixture of cocaine and dried rabbits blood that would rob
the dogs of their ability to smell all They basically
acted like a local anesthetic on the dog's noses and tongues,
(08:04):
and because of the rabbit blood, they would eagerly lick
it all up and sniff it. So they worked out
the kinks using Olifs cocker spaniel as a test subject,
which fine a little charming. I'm imagining this cocker spaniel
just being uh, sniffle, sniff around, temporarily robbed of its
sense of smell, and then to come back to perfect
the uh the process. It also suggests this as they
(08:28):
were doing it on a pet, it was not harmful
to the dogs, so I always love that uh. And
then they would sprinkle this powder that they had developed
onto the decks of the boats, so the Gestapo's dogs
would come aboard, and they'd sniff and lick at the
powder eagerly, and they would temporarily have their senses deadn't uh,
And it would conceal then that there was anyone hidden
on the boat. They were useless to sniff out the
(08:49):
bodies at that point. So this allowed the resistance to
keep doing what it had been doing uh and and
carry on with getting people out of the area without
so much fear of discovery. Dr Mark died on January
and now back to our topic at hand. Yes, the
next person on our list is Irene Good up Dike.
(09:11):
She was then just Irene Good and she hid twelve
Jews at a villa where she was working as a housekeeper.
The trick here is that the villa actually belonged to
German Major Eduard Rugemer. She was only seventeen years old
at the start of World War Two and she was
studying nursing when Germany invaded Poland. She fled the invasion,
but she was captured by Russian soldiers who raped her.
(09:34):
She wound up hospitalized after the attack, and once she recovered,
she was put to work in a factory, and when
she felt ill, Major Rugemer took pity on her and
moved her into a job working at a club for
German soldiers, and there she was the supervisor of twelve
Jews who were working in the laundry service. Major Rugimer
later made her the housekeeper at his own villa, and
(09:57):
after hearing that the camp where the Jews were living
was going to be liquidated, Irene found places to hide
them at the villa. Some of them lived in a
cellar under the gazebo, and some lived in a laundry room,
and some of the women that she was hiding would
occasionally help her with the cleaning while Major Ruginer was away,
and eight months into this whole charade, he returned home
(10:18):
early one day and discovered them. This would have been
inexcusable for an officer to learn that his home had
been used to shelter Jews, and it would have caused
irreparable harm to his career if he had confessed to it,
but Irene further insured his silence by becoming his mistress.
So in addition to keeping these twelve people safe, she
(10:38):
also helped smuggle other Jews into the forest so that
they could make an escape, and she smuggled food into
the ghetto for them as well. She really like she
was doing a lot of different things to help the cause.
In nineteen forty four, Irene and the twelve people she'd
been hiding escaped into the forest themselves, and they hid
there until Russia invaded Poland. In eight she immigrated to States,
(11:00):
and she wrote and published a memoir called In My Hands,
Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer. She was honored as one
of the Righteous among the Nations on July eighth of
nine two. She died in two thousand three at the
age of eighty five. And this last person we're going
to talk about is one that we have gotten several
requests to talk about after a blog post that has
(11:22):
filtered around the Internet lately, and that's Irena Sundler, who
rescued about twenty five hundred children from the Warsaw Ghetto
using suitcases, trunks, facts, and piles of garbage to hide them.
She was born in Warsaw in nineteen ten and her
father was a doctor. She later said that when she
was seven, her father had told her, if you see
(11:44):
someone drowning, you must try to save him, even if
you cannot swim, and it was this attitude that led
her into a life of service, including her work as
a social worker. Before the start of the war, when
the Germans began moving Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, she
started by smuggling food and medicine into the area. She
would forge papers using Polish names so she could secure
(12:05):
food and medical aid, and then she would distribute it
among the Jews. When the ghetto was locked down, she
got a nurse's uniform and a permit to inspect sanitary conditions,
which let her move in and out of the area
more freely. In two Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began
to be removed to the Treblinka extermination camp, and while
some of the other camps during the Holocaust housed prisoners
(12:27):
who were forced into labor, the main purpose of Trablinka
was really just execution. Jews and other people that Mattie
wanted to exterminate would be brought in and told they
were there to be resettled, but then they would be
led directly into gas chambers and killed. At this point,
Arena began to work with Zagoda, the Council for Aid
to Jews, which had been formed by the Polish government
(12:48):
in exile, which at that point was operating from London.
She used the code the code named Joe Lanta. Zagoda
provided Arena with money and forged documents, and sometimes they
would also learn which buildings in the ghetto were being
emptied the next day, and Arena would go to those first.
She would encourage Jewish parents to let her take their
children away so that she could place them with Christian
(13:10):
families or take them to a convent or to the
family of Merry orphanage. In Warsaw, parents were naturally very
reluctant to part with their children. Many of them wanted
to know for sure that if they gave up their children,
their children would survive, but there really wasn't any guarantee
that they would even make it out of the ghetto
without being caught. What was much more certain was that
(13:33):
if they were taken to Triblanca, they would die. And
there were also matters of faith to consider. These children
would need to learn Christian stories and prayers to be
able to maintain their disguise and blend in in Christian families,
and parents were actually worried that they would be drawn
away from their existing culture and beliefs, so a lot
of parents really believed the sort of charade that Treblinka
(13:56):
was actually a resettlement camp. Arena really had to work
to convey into them that they were being sent there
to die, and that their children's only hope of survival
was to be moved elsewhere. One piece of reassurance that
Arena was able to give these families is that she
would keep up with the real names of their children
so that later on, families could potentially be reunited. She
(14:16):
wrote the children's real names and new names on pieces
of paper, and she would seal them into jars and bottles,
and then she buried them under an apple tree that
belonged to her friend Janina Grabowska. She used all kinds
of tactics to smuggle children out of the ghetto once
parents had agreed to let her do it. Children who
were very sick or who could convincingly look very sick,
(14:39):
could just be taken out in an ambulance, or if
they couldn't really pass for being ill, they could just
hide under the stretchers that were being used to transport
other children. Babies were given sedating drugs to keep them quiet,
and they were sometimes smuggled out in suitcases and hidden
among cargo in carts and trucks. Children also left the
(15:00):
get and garbage trucks produced sacks, trunks, basically anything that
a child could fit into and could be taken carried
away in right. Unfortunately, Arena was discovered for all of
these activities and she was arrested on October twenty nine.
She was imprisoned, she was tortured, and she was sentenced
(15:21):
to execution. Her own method of escape was a little
like what her own rescue work had been. The go
to bribe a guard who kept her name on the
list of executed prisoners that he instead released her. She
was given false identification papers, and she stayed in hiding
for the rest of the war. The damage to her
legs from the torture and beatings that she received in
(15:42):
prison affected her ability to walk for the rest of
her life. After the war, true to her words, she
dug up the jars and started trying to reunite children
with their families, but unfortunately, almost all of the children's
families had in fact died in Treblinka. She was named
one of the Righteous among the Nations. On October ninety five,
in students at a Kansas high school wrote Life in
(16:05):
a Jar to publicize Arena's life after they read about
her in an article in U S News and World Report.
In two thousand three, she was awarded the Jan Carski
Award for Valor and Compassion from the American Center of
Polish Culture. She wasn't healthy enough at that point to travel,
so one of the children she rescued accepted it on
her behalf, and Irena died in two thousand eight. There
(16:29):
are people who call her the female Schindler, but it
really seems to me just as accurate to call Schindler
the male Sendler based on the numbers of people each
of them saved. Yeah, he's just got the bigger billing culturally.
So having having had a giant motion picture made about
a person doesn't totally solidify them into the public consciousness. Yeah,
(16:53):
it could certainly still happen. Yeah, there are lots and
lots of other really amazing stories of of uh people who,
rather than being anywhere on the spectrum between complicit and
actively harming other people, uh, I really just did a
lot to try to save other people and to protect
(17:14):
other human beings during the Holocaust. You can read lots
and lots of them at the Righteous among the Nation's website,
which we will link to from our show notes. So, Tracy,
do you have a little bit of listener mail for him? Do?
This is from Eric, and Eric says, Hello Holly and Tracy.
First of all, I want to thank you for this podcast.
I can't tell you how many long runs it has
(17:35):
gotten me through. I just listened to your show about
New England vampires and I thought I might add a
bit of information. I grew up in Exeter, Rhode Island,
home of the Lenap Mercy Brown vampire legend. Her grave
can still be seen at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery just
off Route one O two. If you visit today, or
even look for a picture of a stone online, you'll
(17:55):
see a strange black band of metal around its base.
For a while, my father worked as a volunteer caretaker
for the cemetery, where much of our family is buried,
and in addition to keeping the grounds looking tidy, he
occasionally had to deal with vandalism. One day, I came
home from school to discover that Mercy Brown's headstone was
sitting in our shed. Some kids had knocked it over,
(18:17):
so my father took it upon himself to fix it good.
Never one for half measures, he welded the metal band
and attached to support fart, bracing these against an extra
block of concrete. Whenever I hear the story of Mercy Brown,
I think about my dad, the unsung hero of keeping
her great sites dirty if strange. Looking for people to
come and see. I thought you might like the inside scoop.
(18:39):
Thanks again, they would need like the inside scoop. Thank
you so much, Eric, and I also so we get
a lot of people who tell us that they listened
to our podcast while running. Yeah, I always find that
the most immensely flattering thing, because when I run, I
have to have music on, and then also Zombies Run
has to be on. And then also preferably there's a
TV in front me on the treadmill that has a
(19:01):
TV show I'm actually interested in, Like, I have to
have all that stimulus happening at the same time, or
else I get bored and quit. And so the people
who are find the podcast enough to keep them running.
Thank you for telling us. So I know, I feel
like we should run a metronome so we stay on
some sort of paste. That would be terrible. We can
see we could try that one time and see if
(19:22):
anyone notices I too have to have minimum have to
have music. Yeah, I have to just have as as
much assaulting my senses as possible, or else I'm super
bored and just like I'm just gonna get off here now.
So you would like to write to us about this
or any other topic, you can. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
(19:44):
Facebook dot com, slash history class stuff and on Twitter
at missed in History. Our tumbler is missed in History
dot tumbler dot com and we have a pinboard on Pinterest.
If you would like to learn a little more about
some of what we've talked about today, you can come
to our website. Search the word disguises and you will
find the article ten insane disguises that actually worked, and
(20:05):
that includes a page on the whole rabbits blooding cocaine
scheme that we talked about today. You can do all
that and a lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com.
(20:34):
This episode of stuff you missed in History Classes brought
to you by Linda dot com. You can learn it
at Linda dot com, an online learning company with more
than seventy seven thousand video tutorials that teach software, creative
and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five a month
and provides unlimited seven access to top quality video courses
taught by expert instructors with real world experience. Listeners of
(20:54):
Stuff you missed in History class can trial in the
dot com free for seven days by visiting linda dot com.
Slash history, stuff,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.