You're Dead to Me - Introducing History's Secret Heroes Series 2

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Helena Bonham Carter shines a light on extraordinary stories from World War Two. Join her for tales of deception, resistance and courage in History's Secret Heroes Series 2.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app that makes using different currencies easy. With WISE, you can send and spend money worldwide at the real-time mid-market exchange rate. There are no hidden fees either. See exactly what you'll pay upfront every time. And in Canada, you can save up to three times when you send, spend, and withdraw currencies all in one account.

Join 16 million customers already saving with WISE. To learn how WISE could work for you, download the app or visit wis.com. Hello, it's Helena Bonham Carter. I'm just letting you know that my podcast for BBC Radio 4, History's Secret Heroes, is back with a second series. These are 10 new stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception, and unbelievable courage.

For the next 10 minutes, you'll hear part of the extraordinary story of Ida and Louise Cook, two opera-loving sisters from England who helped dozens of Jewish people escape Nazi Germany. Ida and Louise Cook were born three years apart and grew up in a solid Church of England family, first in Sunderland, then in North umberland. I don't think I'd ever met two sisters who were so close that when one spoke, the other finished the sentence. Manny Mekler is an opera singer who became close to the Cook sisters in their later years.

Ida was a more aggressive one, stronger one, a very strong face and personality, where Louise was a wee bit softer and she would always sit there and sort of lick her lips. Ida would speak and Louise would correct her. They just became their best companions on everything. After the girls left school, the family moved to London. They just became their best companions on everything. After the girls left school, the family moved to London. Ida and Louise found work in the civil service. They carry themselves as very plain, very no-nonsense British women.

Isabel Vincent wrote Overture of Hope, a biography of the Cook sisters. They lived with their parents their whole life. They came of age at a time of so-called surplus women in England. The First World War resulted in the death of something like 750,000 men. And there weren't enough men to marry, but also there was never a sense that they missed that. You know, I don't wanna stereotype them as sort of dowdy,

but that was the first impression I had. So they were very antithesis of glamorous. In 1923, Louise was at work at the Board of Education when she saw a sign advertising a lecture on opera. She wandered in. And she was transformed after the hours she spent listening to, among other operas, one of the most beautiful arias from Madame Butterfly.

She came home and told her parents and told Ida that we must buy a gramophone. Ida and Louise developed a consuming passion for opera. They would buy cheap tickets and stand high up in the gallery in their sturdy shoes and home-made dresses, swept away by musical fantasies. Drama, love, everybody's in love with somebody else, and one person dies because he gets killed

because the soprano doesn't want to go with him. And if it's done well and it's sung well, it's riveting. You live a whole life within two or three hours. The queue for the cheap seats soon became a community. And they met all of these people, they're fellow opera fans, and became lifelong friends with these people. But they also would see the opera stars coming in through the stage door and Ida collected

not only autographs but photographs of them. And then that's where the friendships were made with these like huge stars of the opera world. We used to stand at the stage door and say, wonderful performance tonight, which is what you do, of course, you're an opera fan. The Cook sisters saved up their lunch budgets for a year to pay for a trip to New York. There they would hear their idol, Italian soprano, Amelita Galli-Corci, sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Later they would travel to Florence and Verona. For two unmarried middle-class

sisters in the 1920s they were already living rather adventurous lives, but the whole map of Europe was soon to change. Europe was soon to change. The 21st of March 1933, Berlin. At the end of a day of celebration of the founding of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler took his seat in the State Opera House. A performance of Wagner's opera, Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg, was about to begin. Hitler just recognized the power of the music to sort of transform and used it for propaganda purposes.

He told opera conductors what they could perform and what they couldn't perform. You couldn't have operas by Jewish composers after 1933. You couldn't have operas by Jewish composers. After 1933, you couldn't have Jewish conductors. One conductor whose career benefited from the new vacancies was Clemens Krauss. An Austrian, Krauss was charismatic, talented and ruthlessly ambitious. He had no qualms about conducting concerts for Hitler's birthday. When he was asked to conduct these propaganda exercises, there he was. When he was asked to go to Poland and do recitals for Hans Frank, butcher of Poland who ran Auschwitz and would end up killing millions of people, he had no problem with it.

Krauss and his wife, the Romanian soprano Vajorica Urciulac, were often seen in Krakow at Hans Frank's parties. You know, did they know what was going on? To some extent, I think they must have known. But for him, that was a way to get what he wanted. Krauss maintained that it was all about the music. He and his wife performed at London's Royal Opera House in the spring of 1934.

Waiting for them at the stage door, autographed books and camera in hand, were Ida and Louise Cook. At this time, the Cooks had no interest in politics or world affairs. They knew only of Krause's talent. Ida, she sort of shyly went up to him and asked if she could take their photograph. And the first photograph she took,

she was so nervous, was out of focus. But she came back a few days later and got up the courage to ask them again. The sisters promised to present Krause with a copy of the photograph at the Salzburg Festival that summer. Salzburg Festival is one of the biggest festivals in the world. It's very elite and it had amazing conductors and performers and artists

and it's right in the heart of Austria, right 11 kilometers over where Hitler was born. In the summer of 1934, Ida and Louise traveled by train through the German countryside, looking forward to the glorious music that awaited them. In their luggage, the photo of Krauss and Ussulak was safely wrapped. As they neared the Austrian border, a German family prepared to leave their carriage. The patriarch of the family says to them, you know what, you would do well not to cross that border. It's too dangerous to cross that border.

Days earlier, on the 25th of July, a group of Nazi supporters had stormed a government building in Vienna and fired two shots into the chest of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolphus. This attempted coup was crushed by the military, but Dolfus had died of his injuries. And Ida and Louise are completely oblivious to what's gone on. They're just so single-minded about going to the Salzburg Festival that they don't care about anything because it's a chance for them to see Clemens Krauss and his wife again and to go to the opera.

Undeterred, the Cook sisters continued on to Salzburg. There, they met Ursulaq again. She encouraged them to follow her to Amsterdam, where she would be singing the finale to Salome. The sisters scraped together their remaining money to travel on to the Netherlands. After that concert, Ursulaq took the two women by the arms and told them there was someone she wanted them to meet. They introduced us to the official lecturer, a lady called Mithja Meier-Lisman. Mithja Meier-Lisman was a German musicologist. And they said, this is a great friend of ours, she's coming to London later in the year,

will you look after her for us? Meier-Lisman was grand, distinguished, and seemed more than capable of looking after herself. Even so, the sisters were eager to endear themselves to Ursuluk, so they agreed to show her around London. We took her to Westminster Abbey and she looked around and said, is this Protestant or Catholic? So we told her.

We took her to St Paul's and she said, is this Protestant or Catholic? So I thought, well maybe I'd better ask which she is before we get any further. And so under the dome of St Paul's, I remember, I said, which are you, Protestant or Catholic? And she said, I? Didn't you know I'm a Jewess? I took a look, laughed, and said, no, it hadn't occurred to her that Mithya Maya Lisman might be Jewish. We were so dumb then that we did not know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt am Main in Germany already had the seeds of tragedy in it. Back in London, Ida Cooke had left the Civil Service to work as a fiction editor. Soon she began to write herself.

Her first novel, which she described as a light romance, was published in 1935 under the pen name Mary Burchill. She soon followed it with another and another and another. So we really didn't change our standard of living and still made our own clothes. We still travelled third class, we were third then. But then I began to have extra money and fortunately before we could change our style of living we came to what was the great drama of our lives. Ida Cook was earning up to 1,000 pounds a year, a very substantial income. She and Louise traveled to Frankfurt to visit their friend Mithya Mayalisman.

Approaching the Mayalism house, they passed a shop. The German word, Jüder, Jew, was daubed over the window in paint. An armed SS officer stood at the door, forbidding people to enter. Inside the Mayer Lisman home, the family sat around the dinner table, alongside Vajarika Ussulak and Clemens Krauss. They're all having a meal, and people start talking about what their lives have become. One of the relatives who goes on a business trip and comes back into Germany is stripped search on the way back and humiliated. Another person recounts the death of a friend of theirs in hospital because they couldn't

find a Jewish nurse to look after them. And Aydin and Louise said, what do you mean? They couldn't believe what they were hearing. I mean, it got so bad that Louise started to cry. The Maya Lismans had already lost their livelihoods. Under anti-Jewish laws, Mitya's husband had been forced to sell his business. Aiden Luiz asked why the Mayan Lismans couldn't simply leave.

They replied that Jewish people who left Germany were charged ruinous taxes by the Nazi regime, and it was virtually impossible for them to smuggle out money or possessions. Moreover, other safe countries routinely denied Jewish refugees visas or work permits, especially if they were poor. Unless they had a lot of money stashed abroad and good connections, most Jews had no way to get out. That's when they both realized

that they really needed to do something to help these people. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, subscribe to History's Secret Heroes on BBC Sounds. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app that makes using different currencies easy. With WISE, you can send and spend money worldwide at the real-time mid-market exchange rate. There are no hidden fees either. See exactly what you'll pay upfront every time. And in Canada, you can save up to three times when you send, spend, and withdraw currencies all in one account. Join 16 million customers already saving with WISE.

To learn how WISE could work for you, download the app or visit wise.com.