Nh/OS/6ocn: Nazi flees

this afternoon (thursday 30th), 2.55-2.59pm and 5.12-5.15pm on bbc world service radio, and 6.24-6.26pm on bbc radio 4

newshour (presented by james menendez), bbc os (presented by james reynolds), and six o’clock news, include …

“Police in northern Germany have arrested a 96-year-old woman who failed to turn up earlier today for her trial on charges of complicity in the murders of more than eleven thousand people during the Second World War.

Irmgard Furchner worked as a secretary at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp.”

including contributions from …

• journalist peter burghardt 

• journalist christopher schuetze 

• bbc reporter jenny hill 

(see also https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/nazi-death-camp-worker-96-on-the-run-after-not-showing-up-in-court/ and https://www.timesofisrael.com/former-nazi-death-camp-secretary-96-skips-trial-opening-is-declared-fugitive/)

P4t: Belovski 30/9/2021

this morning (thursday 30th), 9.18-9.21am, on bbc radio 2

pause for thought by rabbi dr harvey belovski

“What does the next day look like?”

P4t: Schonfield 30/9/2021

this morning (thursday 30th), on bbc radio 2

pause for thought by amos schonfield 

“I have been lucky enough to be welcomed.”

Wagner and the BBC

every afternoon this week (monday 27th to friday 1st), 12.00-1.00pm, on bbc radio 3   

richard wagner (1813-1883) (5 episodes, presented by donald macleod) (in the composer of the week series)

In the whole 5 hours about Wagner’s life and music, there does not appear to be any mention of his anti-semitism, nor his writings against Jewish composers and music.

(Compare the recent BBC Radio 4 programme Wagner and Faith, in which, except for two paragraphs of introduction,  none of the people interviewed mention Wagner’s anti-semitism at all: the ‘great complexity’ is ignored: https://happysjewishtvguide.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/wagner-and-faith/).

(if you missed them, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00101sl)

Eva Hnizdo

this morning (wednesday 29th), 9.30-9.45am, on bbc radio 4  (repeated 8.45pm, and 5.45am sunday, and with extended repeat online)

leaving your homeland (presented by olly mann) (in the four thought series)

“Eva Hnizdo reflects on the impulses which drive people to emigrate – or not, drawing on her Czech Jewish family’s experience of the Holocaust and her own as a political asylum seeker.

‘Whenever members of my family thought about emigrating but didn’t actually leave, they made a mistake, sometimes paying for it with their lives.

In my case, some might say I made a mistake not to stay. Was it worth the struggle?’”

including interview with …

• eva hnizdo, author of why didn’t they leave? 

Nd/Nh/Twt: Babi Yar 80

this morning (tuesday 29th), 6.19-6.24am (repeated 2.51pm and 9.42pm on newshour, and 10.21pm on the world tonight on bbc radio 4), on bbc world service radio

newsday (presented by clare mcdonnell) includes …

“This week marks eighty years since one of the worst massacres of the Second World War took place in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the ravine of Babyn Yar in the space of just two days.

It was part of a sustained German attempt to kill Jews across Eastern Europe, with historians estimating that more than two million were shot dead and buried in mass graves.”

including contributions from …

• bbc reporter jonah fisher 

• holocaust historian andrei rukes 

• maksym rokmaniko, centre for spatial technologies 

(see also video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8LsLWtRLcw)

WH: Babi Yar 70

29th september 2011, 9.50-10.00am, on bbc world service radio 

babi yar (presented by david stern) (in the witness history series) 

“On 29 September 1941, the organised massacre of Ukrainian Jews began.

In the capital Kiev, most of them were taken to a place called Babi Yar, and shot.”

including interviews with …

• raisa maistrenko, who escaped the shooting as a three-year-old girl 

• rabbi alexander dukhovny, whose mother survived outside the city

Konrad Eisig’s diary

this afternoon (monday 27th), 4.02-4.30pm (repeated 11.30am 23rd november), on bbc radio 4 

history on the edge (presented by anita anand, with diary extracts read by gunnar cauthery) 

“It’s 1940 and, amid the chaos of the Second World War, a 19-year-old refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Konrad Eisig, finds himself caught up in a British policy which, just when he thought he was safe, sends him on a hazardous sea journey to Australia in conditions little better than those of the slave ships of a century-and-a-half before.

With the help of Eisig’s first-hand testimony from the astonishing diary he left behind, Anita is on an investigation to unravel his story and understand how this apparently cruel train of events came about, and what it was really like for those who lived it.

She uncovers an extraordinary personal story from the margins of British history which challenges our perspective of the past we thought we knew. At a crucial moment in the rethinking of whose histories we should be telling, History on the Edge challenges some of the conventional assumptions about our past.”

including contributions from …

• bbc reporter nick ross, son of refugee hans rosenbluth 

• aditi anand, migration museum, lewisham 

• laura walker, british library

• claudia cotton, refugee, niece of konrad eisig 

• dr rachel pistol 

• dr seumas spark 

P4t: Chait 26/9/2021

yesterday morning (sunday 26th), on bbc radio 2

pause for thought by rabbi alby chait 

“Promise something today.”

Nd/Today: Scroll returns

this morning (monday 27th), 6.51-6.55am on bbc world service radio, and 7.06-7.07am on bbc radio 4 

newsday (presented by clare mcdonnell) and today (presented by nick robinson) include …

“Later today, there’ll be a ceremony at Charles University to mark the return to Prague of one of the Torah scrolls looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.”

including contributions from …

• rabbi david maxa, ec chaim synagogue 

• bbc reporter rob cameron