Exile

As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives.

Leo Fuks is a born performer. So when, in 1936, a vaudeville impresario shows up to recruit him, 10-year-old Leo is more than happy to join his troupe, and his parents reluctantly agree. As Leo, now known as Ja...

As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives.

Known for her candid talk and blunt advice about sex, Dr. Ruth Westheimer is the world’s most renowned psychosexual therapist. But beneath her joyful demeanor is a chaotic story about her youth—a girl named Kar...

As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives.

In Nazi-occupied Austria, a young man named Kurt Kleinmann comes up with a plan to escape: write to Americans - strangers - who share his last name and ask for help to get a visa. Just as he begins to lose hope...

As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives.

At the height of his fame, a shirtless, barefooted Albert Einstein escapes the bustle of Berlin for a simpler life. The best thinkers of the time gather at his beloved summer house in Caputh to laze by the wate...

As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives.

A young, Jewish librarian in New York named Florence Mendheim risks her life to spy on the growing Nazi movement in America. She passes herself off as a Nazi sympathizer, documenting the movement’s nefarious ac...

At the dawn of the 1930s, Germany is a physics powerhouse, where great minds like Albert Einstein and Max Planck have revolutionized the scientific landscape. But a talented young physicist named Trude Goldhaber struggles to make her voice heard in a male-dominated field. Trude perseveres, despite the pressures of antisemitism and misogyny all around her. Forced to work in the shadow of her scientist husband, she contributes to res...

For Karl Adler, there is nothing more powerful than music. While recovering from an injury sustained as a soldier in World War I, Karl pursues his goal of changing the way music is taught in Germany. And for a while, he’s successful – until a former student (and member of Hitler’s Brownshirts) falsely reports him for sexual harassment. Forced to start over, Karl devotes himself to creating a new cultural association for German Jews...

The Simson family business has been manufacturing everything from firearms to vehicles for decades. But when the Nazis take over, they’re not happy to learn that a Jewish family is supplying weapons to the German army. After a new law forces the Simsons to relinquish their company to the Nazis, the family flees to the United States. Fifty years later, a Simson descendent makes his way back to Germany – and finds out what became of ...

Hilde Mosse comes from one of the wealthiest families in Berlin and stands to inherit an enormous fortune. But she longs for something more meaningful than the luxurious lifestyle her family provides. So Hilde decides to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. As the Nazis take power in Germany and the Mosse family is forced to flee, Dr. Hilde Mosse lands in New York having nearly lost everything.. She finds her calling treating the...

Jacob Jacobson dedicates his life to archiving the history of Jews in Germany. For years, nobody pays much attention—until the Nazis take power. Suddenly, Jacobson’s meticulous research is being used to destroy the people whose history he wanted to preserve. Unwittingly, Jacobson has also become an invaluable asset to the Nazis. Can he protect himself without betraying his community? 

One of the most extensive collections in the LB...

Carola’s dream is to be a dancer. In 1935, she moves from Germany to Paris to pursue a career on stage. But as a young, Jewish performer, Carola struggles with a lack of fulfilling work, dwindling funds, and a rising tide of antisemitism. Carola’s strong will carries her through the perils of Nazi-occupied France, losing the love of her life, and the long journey to America – where she finds a new passion that becomes her greatest ...

For years, Emma Haas and Helene Krämer have been the dedicated stewards of the Neu Isenburg Home, a sanctuary for orphaned Jewish children and vulnerable women. When the devastating events of Kristallnacht leave the home in ruins, Emma and Helene must find a way to protect the people in their care—and to escape the looming Nazi threat themselves.

Learn more at www.lbi.org/isenburg.

Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute,...

Robert Bachrach is a buttoned-up doctor and dedicated researcher. Leo Hochner is a bon-vivant and art connoisseur who breeds small dogs. Both bachelors, they are part of a close network of friends from Vienna who are scattered across the globe after the Nazis take power in Austria. When Robert takes his life in New York after a humiliating arrest under New York’s anti-gay laws, he directs his final words to Leo, who was still trapp...

To Samson Schames, art is everything. When fleeing the Nazis lands him in an English internment camp for enemy aliens, he doesn’t let the squalid conditions curb his creativity—in fact, he thrives. Using the debris of destruction as material for his work, Samson cultivates an artistic vision that captures the horrors of war unlike any other. 

Learn more at www.lbi.org/schames.

Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, New Y...

In 1943, 13-year-old Zuzana Justman and her family are sent to Theresienstadt, a transit camp and ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia. While the Nazis claim Theresienstadt was a model ghetto with a thriving cultural life, Zuzana and her family face starvation, illness, and fear of the mysterious transports that take her loved ones away, never to return. 

Learn more at www.lbi.org/justman.

Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Instit...

Leo Fuks is a born performer. So when, in 1936, a vaudeville impresario shows up to recruit him, 10-year-old Leo is more than happy to join his troupe, and his parents reluctantly agree. As Leo, now known as Jackie Gerlich, travels the world and dips his toes into Hollywood, his family is left behind to grapple with the terror of rising antisemitism in Vienna. After years without contact, Leo’s mother is shocked to see her son danc...

Exiled from her comfortable life in Vienna and left to fend for herself on the Kindertransport, Lily Renee Wilhelm has no idea what her future holds. She ends up in New York and, on a whim, applies to a comic book illustration job. She endures rampant sexism in the boys’ club atmosphere of the comics industry, but soon makes a name for herself as the illustrator of Senorita Rio, a comic series about a swashbuckling spy with a glamo...

In the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1500s, there was a campaign to burn all Jewish books. A legal scholar named Johannes Reuchlin wrote a pamphlet called Augenspiegel that convinced the powers-that-be that these texts had historical and scholarly value. Historian and author Erika Rummel joins Mark to tell this remarkable tale, which features everything from political power grabs to bribery to a Middle Ages version of a flame war.

You may have heard of the transit camp Theresienstadt as a place of hope and resilience throughout the Holocaust. But the music, art, and recipes found in the Czech ghetto  after the war only tell one part of the story. Today, historian Anna Hájková, author of The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, joins Mark to discuss the complexities of life at Theresienstadt, including class structure, the barter system, and ...