Jenny Haddon reports

Following the review in a previous edition of Romance Matters of Ida Cook’s remarkable book, Safe Passage, we are proud to bring you an update about our remarkable late president.

Mary Burchell, under her real name, Ida Cook, along with her sister Louise, received a posthumous Hero of the Holocaust Award from the Prime Minister on 9 March for their work in rescuing Jews from Nazi Germany. 

Great opera fans, they got involved through what Ida called ‘an amateur gesture of goodwill to friends,’ in 1934. It escalated as they saw how great was the need.  When they had exhausted their own resources, Ida started fund raising, and finding guarantors for applicant refugees. She dealt with visas and tussled with bureaucrats, saying wryly, ‘You never know what you can do until you refuse to take no for an answer.’

Her autobiography, Safe Passage, does not disguise the heartbreak. Ida learned to dread the sound of a motorbike because it brought telegrams like ‘Georg not at home. Helpless. Gerda.’ Gerda’s husband Jerzy had been arrested. Or Professor Cossmann, ‘who refused to have any strenuous efforts made on his behalf,’ dying in Theresienstadt, ‘an example of moral courage and great fortitude’.

But sometimes the worst did not happen. In Frankfurt one night, remembering the golden 1920s, Ida thinks, ‘Now I am sitting here in the semi-darkness, hoping that no one will guess that someone lives here, wondering if we shall be able to save this wonderful old man from the concentration camp.’  He was Carl Mayer-Lismann and they did.