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