History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: The Extraordinary Cook Sisters

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Episodes will be released on Mondays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now before anyone else.

First, on BBC Sounds.

The 20th of June, 1981.

In a BBC radio studio, presenter Sue McGregor was recording an interview with Ida Cook, chair of the Romantic Novelists Association.

I have a very clever editress who says that in almost every woman's life, there was a period of her life when someone made her feel marvellous.

And if she reads a good romantic story, she remembers that, and it's a wonderful feeling.

Cook had written over 100 romance novels.

All were bestsellers for her publisher, Mills and Boone.

In particular, the Warringer saga about a charismatic opera conductor.

I wonder if you think there might be a connection between your obvious love of what you do, this sort of work, and your love of opera, because they're both, in a sense, fantasy worlds, aren't they?

It's tremendous romance, you see.

Terrific romance.

You see, when people say, oh,

happy endings, they don't really happen.

Of course they happen.

I mean, any fool can be a pessimist.

Most of them are.

There's enormous strength strength in being an optimist.

Yet Ida Cook wasn't in the studio to discuss her fiction.

The story she had to tell was even more remarkable.

It was about what her and her sister Louise had done in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Did you ever feel that the fiction that you were writing and the life that you were living intertwined in a strange sort of way?

People think it was madly dangerous.

It wasn't.

It was rather dangerous.

In the 1930s, when the Nazis had begun their brutal persecutions of Jewish people, Ida and Louise Cook had risked their lives to help refugees escape Germany.

It was extraordinary because

we came of this very respectable civil service family and yet we were involved in the most extraordinary adventures.

Using their love of classical music as cover, these sisters were able to mingle with Nazi high society in the opera houses of Europe.

At the same time, they were secretly meeting the resistance and rescuing Jews from right under Hitler's nose.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

The Extraordinary Cook Sisters by

Ida and Louise Cook were born three years apart and grew up in a solid Church of England family, first in Sunderland, then in Northumberland.

I don't think I'd ever met two sisters

who were so close that when one spoke, the other finished the sentence.

Manny Meckler 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 like 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.

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 want to 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 homemade dresses, swept away by musical fantasies.

Drama, love,

every, you know, everybody's in love with somebody else, you know, 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 remedy.

You live a whole life within two or three hours.

The cue for the cheap seats soon became a community.

And they met all of these people, their 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 Galle Corchi, 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.

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 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 sort of 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 Vaorika Ursulak, 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 he was, 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, autograph 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 Krauss'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 Krauss 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, performers, and artists.

And it's right in the heart of Austria, right 11 kilometers of 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 Ursulak 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 Dollfuss.

This attempted coup was crushed by the military, but Dollfuss 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 Ursulak again.

She encouraged them to follow her to Amsterdam, where she'd be singing the finale to Salome.

The sisters scraped together the remaining money to travel on to the Netherlands.

After that concert, Ursulak 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 Mitya Maya Lissmann.

Mitya Meyer Lissmann 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?

Maya Lissman was grand, distinguished, and seemed more than capable of looking after herself.

Even so, the sisters were eager to endear themselves to Ursula, so they agreed to show her around London.

We took her to Westminster Abbey and she looked round 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 to her, which are you, Protestant or Catholic?

And she said, I?

Didn't you know I'm a Jewess?

Ida Cook laughed and said, no, it hadn't occurred to her that Mitya Meyer 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 Cook 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 Birchall.

She soon followed it with another and another

and another.

So we really

didn't change our standard of living.

Still made our own clothes, we still travelled third class, we was 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 a year, a very substantial income.

She and Louise travelled to Frankfurt to visit their friend Mitya Meyer Lisman.

Approaching the Meyer Lisman house, they passed a shop.

The German word Juda, Jew, was daubed over the window in paint.

An armed SS officer stood at the door, forbidding people to enter.

Inside the Meyer Lisman home, the family sat around the dinner table alongside Vaorika 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 couldn't find a Jewish nurse to look after them.

And Ida 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.

Ida and Louise asked why the Maya 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.

June 1937, Cologne Station.

The Cook sisters were returning from one of their European opera weekends, preparing to cross the border into the Netherlands.

But anyone who knew them would notice that they looked very different.

They wore Marks and Spencer's jumpers over Woolworth's dresses and sensible shoes.

Yet they had accessorized these with glittering diamond brooches and rings, gold pendants and bracelets, lavish strings of pearls and and a Swiss watch each.

Luxurious furs draped around their shoulders completed the outfits.

As a group of SS officers waited outside their train carriage, Ida and Louise tried to remain calm, hoping their disguise would work.

The dresses were so cheap that obviously the jewelry had to be fake, and in fact, it wasn't fake.

The cooks were wearing the life-savings of Jewish people.

Money, property, possessions, converted to jewelry and other portable assets.

They were smuggling these out of Germany for Jews who would otherwise lose them to the Nazis.

The plan was to take them back to London and use them to help their owners meet the financial requirement for emigration.

If they were ever questioned by border guards about why they were wearing and carrying so many jewels, Ida would say, well, we just resorted to our nervous British Spinster Act and said, well, we cannot leave all of these jewels in London because we don't have anybody we really trust.

We have to bring everything with us when we go to the opera.

We were rather good at that because if you are basically honest, which we were, and would never have dreamed of smuggling for ourselves, it's extraordinary how innocent you can look if you're carrying someone else's good.

The Cook sisters soon developed a plan for their German expeditions.

Each would begin with them writing a letter to Clemens Krauss, who is by then director of the Munich Opera House.

And we would tell him that we were coming again in two months' time, must have two nights covered.

He'd tell us what he'd put on at the Opera House that night and give us all the details.

So this was as if any of the German officials asked you why you kept coming backwards and forwards, you'd have a cover story.

We were just starry-eyed opera fans coming for a special performance about which we knew everything.

This was extremely dangerous.

All communications in Germany were monitored and censored by the Nazi party.

The sisters would fly to Germany on a Friday evening.

They carried large suitcases, which were mostly empty.

Clemens Krauss told them to stay at the more expensive hotels because it would allow them to hide in plain sight.

Like these are the hotels where the Nazi hierarchy would stay.

So it was in order to reduce any kind of suspicion.

Hiding in plain sight wasn't always easy.

One morning, over breakfast, Louise Cook noticed a man leering at her.

And they see von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, and he gave Louise the glad eye.

Because Louise was, you know, when you look at her in those early pictures, I mean, she is very Aryan looking, you know, very tall and very blonde.

In the daytime, the Cook sisters worked with the resistance to meet potential refugees in safe houses.

And in the evenings, dressed in jewels and furs, the sisters would take a seat at the opera, surrounded by high-ranking Nazis.

Conducting would be Clemens Kraus and on stage his wife Vayorika Ursulak.

None of the Nazis knew that this quartet was conspiring to spirit Jewish people and their possessions out of the country.

On Sunday, the sisters would leave Germany by train.

Their large suitcases were by then fully stuffed with the possessions that represented hope and a future for refugees.

The 11th of March 1938, German tanks rolled over the Austrian border to annex the country.

The Gestapo and Austrian Nazis looted Jewish businesses.

Jews were picked up off the streets and forced to work scrubbing lavatories, with crowds jeering them.

Tens of thousands of Jews were now desperate to leave, but to get out, they would have to surrender all their property, their stocks, homes, land, savings and vehicles, and they would need a visa.

With Ida Cook's literary earnings, the sisters had bought a flat in Dolphin Square in Pimnico, central London.

They still lived at home with their parents, but would use the flat in the evenings to host parties for opera stars.

By day though, it became the center of operations for another secret venture.

And Jews all over Austria and Germany would write to the British consulates letters addressed just to Ida and Louise in order to seek their help because their fame spread in the underground.

From Dolphin Square, Ida and Louise talked to every civil service contact they had to find ways of getting families out of Germany.

Ida spent her time going office to office in London, from going to the Jewish relief people to, you know, getting them on a list to get one of these visas.

So she had to use the husband of a childhood friend who was working at 10 Downing Street to call the home office.

First of all, you not only had to get them the right papers to get them out, you had to get them the right papers to get in somewhere else.

Because,

particularly as things became worse, no country can afford to take on its economy thousands of penniless people who can't be allowed to work.

Eventually, they learned of a scheme that would allow Jewish refugees to enter Britain if they were industrialists, noted academics, established artists, or students.

Meyer Leesman's daughter, Elsie, was their first refugee, and they got her out on like a cookery visa.

Like she was going to be a student studying studying to be a chef something that she had no idea she ever wanted to do because she was like her mother she was a pianist and so they got her out on that and then they got the rest of the family out on domestic visas and they got Meyer-Leesman out.

They eventually got her out on a teaching visa so she ended up being a teacher at a finishing school in London.

Soon, the flat in Dolphin Square had several people living in it, including Elsie Meyer-Leesman.

But the Cook sisters were beginning to run out of money.

To save more people, they had to raise more.

So in a sense, you had to find them sponsors in this country.

This most of all.

In the case of a child, if it was adopted, you could get it out.

In the case of a woman, you could sometimes get her out on a domestic permit.

In the case of a man between 18 and 16, much more difficult.

You could only get him out.

provided he had documentary proof he was going on to another country.

But this must have involved, for you and your sister, heartbreaking decisions of who to take and even perhaps sometimes of having to split families out.

Yes, this was one of the most the most difficult things.

In November 1938, Ida and Louise awoke to the terrible news of Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass.

Across Germany, hundreds of synagogues had been wrecked.

Thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed.

Tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and thrown into concentration camps.

Ida had conversations with her mother when she just felt utter despair at not being able to help people.

And Ida's mother, again, in that very practical British way, if I may, her mother said, Well, just find another way to help.

Just

find another way into it.

Like, don't give up.

The 3rd of September, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany.

The borders slammed shut.

Though the sisters could not get any more refugees out of Germany, they were able to do something for those they had already helped escape.

During the war, up to 15 Jewish refugees shared the flat at Dolphin Square.

Louise was sent to Wales by her office.

Ida stayed in London, where she ran an air raid shelter.

When the Allies won the war and the Nazi regime fell, Clemens Krauss had to undergo a denazification trial in Austria.

Though he had never been a member of the Nazi party, he had been close to the hierarchy and enjoyed positions and favours gifted by leading Nazis.

He was banned from conducting for two years.

Writing of Krauss in her memoir, Ida Kooke says, I knew that to speak in praise of any artist who occupied a high position in Hitler's Germany is to tread on very delicate ground.

But in that homeliest of phrases, one must speak as one finds.

Louise and I would never have started our refugee work without the encouragement of those two, and we could never have maintained it without their help.

Ida and Louise sort of ceremoniously give the couple a key to the Dolphin Square flat after they hear that you know, they don't really have their home anymore and they say it's yours anytime you need it.

So that kind of cemented, you know, their very deep friendship.

Ida and Louise Cook had completed 29 of what they called their cases, raising guarantees for individuals or families to escape Nazi Germany.

It was an incredible achievement.

For them though, it wasn't enough.

There would be telegrams arriving for them at their home from desperate people and they would agonize about it and, you know, be in tears about it and and not be able to do anything because suddenly they couldn't leave England anymore.

The 28th of July 1964, Ida and Louise Cook, then aged 59 and 63, were honoured as righteous among the nations by Yad Rashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust.

The sisters continued to support the Jewish musicians they'd helped to save.

Years later, they met Manny Meckler.

They had come to a performance of mine and they came backstage and they started to talk and they started to ask me about my background and my family and all that.

And I told her, because my father lost his whole family in the Holocaust.

My mother lost her family in the Holocaust and ran away from Germany in 1938.

So we spoke about it and they started to tell me what they did.

And I was

flabbergasted.

I was just, I could not believe that I was in the midst of these two women who had done so much to help a population that was being annihilated.

I was shocked.

I sort of like sat there with my mouth open and tears in my eye.

Scores of people had reason to be grateful to Ida and Louise Cook.

Speaking about what they had done more than four decades later, though, Ida Cook was grateful to them.

You've talked quite a lot about happy endings and how important they are.

Has it been a happy life?

It was a wonderful life, my dear.

When I look back, I think, oh, you lucky woman, it was marvellous.

I never had a husband.

I never had a car.

I never had a television set.

I never even had a washing machine, but it's been a marvellous life.

Ida Cook, thank you very much indeed.

Coming up on this series of History's Secret Heroes, Thrill Seeker Christine Granville gathers intelligence for the British.

What she was offering to do was to ski in over the high Carpathian mountains in minus 40 degrees.

And a young circus performer from a traveling family in France breaks out of an internment camp and dedicates himself to bringing the Nazis down.

Of course it was dangerous, but danger was his friend.

Helping people was in his blood.

Next time, in Sierra Leone, Johnny Smythe joins the Royal Air Force.

As the navigator of a Stirling bomber, he faces a series of terrifying flights over Germany.

They only flew at night, because the RAF bombed at night.

They had to navigate at night and they would be given locations to find.

And it was very dangerous.

And these men were young.

You know, some of them were still teenagers and some of them in their early 20s.

A lot of responsibility on these young shoulders.

Flying high with Johnny Smythe.

From BBC Radio 4.

Life can be unexpected.

It was big.

This was not a wind.

This was not a storm.

This was a tsunami.

But when confronted with change, humans are remarkably resilient.

I knew in that moment as I fell to the ground that I would recover more.

I'm Dr.

Sean Williams, psychologist and presenter of Life Changing, the program that speaks to people whose worlds have been flipped upside down and transformed in a moment.

If I had to live my life again, would I ever want to go through what I went through?

There's a very simple answer to that.

I would go through it again.

Subscribe to Life Changing on BBC Sounds.

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