Richard Hurowitz, IN THE GARDEN OF THE RIGHTEOUS: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust
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[1:03]Richard Hurwitz is the author of In the Garden of the Righteous, the heroes who risked
[1:07]their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
[1:10]Richard is a writer, investor, and the publisher of the Octavian Report, The Magazine
[1:14]of Ideas.
[1:15]He is the chief executive officer of Octavian and Company LLC, an investment firm.
[1:19]Richard's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street
[1:22]Journal, The Times of London, The LA Times, Time, The Daily Beast, The Boston Globe,
[1:27]USA Today, CNBC, The Weekly Standard History today, and The Jerusalem Post.
[1:31]His book on Holocaust Rescuers was published by Harper Collins.
[1:35]Previously, Richard was the founder and chief investment officer of Octavian Advisors
[1:39]and international special situations and distressed investment fund, which managed approximately
[1:44]$1.4 billion, and which was sold to TPG, the private equity firm.
[1:49]The fund was named one of the top large global hedge funds by Bloomberg and successfully
[1:53]invested in over 50 countries on five continents.
[1:56]Prior to founding Octavian, Richard was a partner in Housey on Asset Management, a multi-billion
[2:01]dollar hedge fund.
[2:02]He previously served as a member of the Board of Directors of E.I. Tower Spa, The Italian
[2:07]Broadcast Hours Company, Head N.V., The Austrian Sporting Goods Business, and of Octavian
[2:12]Maritime, a cargo ship in concern where he was chairman.
[2:15]He also served as a senior advisor to TPG six street partners.
[2:19]Richard serves on the governing board of the Yale University Art Gallery and as a member
[2:22]of the Bretton Woods Committee, and a life member on the Council of Foreign Relations.
[2:26]He was a co-founder and president of the Renew Democracy Initiative, an organization dedicated
[2:31]to defending the world democracy.
[2:33]He received his BA in History from Yale University, graduating in three years, Magna Cum Laude,
[2:38]and with distinction, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta.
[2:43]He earned a JD from Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fisk Stone
[2:47]Scholar, and the editor-in-chief of the Columbia VLA Journal of Law and the Arts.
[2:52]Welcome, Richard.
[2:53]Thank you for coming on Momstone Time to Read Books to discuss in the Garden of the
[2:56]Righteous, the heroes who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
[3:01]Thank you for coming me.
[3:02]I was just saying this is such a really important time to be discussing this book.
[3:07]I think a lot of people are thinking about what are their friends doing?
[3:11]What would they do, like blah, blah, blah?
[3:13]So I don't know, it's incredibly timely.
[3:16]Why don't you tell us nurse what your book is about?
[3:18]Sure, so the book tells 10 stories of people during World War II, all non-Jewish people.
[3:25]I'm sorry, there are 10 stories.
[3:27]Some of them are group rescue, so there's more than 10 individuals.
[3:30]But it's people, non-Jews who rescued Jews from and others from the Nazis,
[3:35]and many of them have been recognized as righteous among the nations.
[3:38]Even though a lot of them, one, I opened the book with the story of Aristidesusus,
[3:42]Mendez, who saved 30,000 people.
[3:44]He's the largest single rescue in the Holocaust by an individual.
[3:49]Most of them are completely unknown.
[3:51]Most rescuers are unknown, other than Oscar Schindler and Robert Wallenberg and maybe the
[3:57]Danes.
[3:59]It's an undercover area, but it's basically 10 stories of righteous rescuers,
[4:04]and then I try to talk a little bit about why this happened and what drove people to do it,
[4:09]and what drove most people not to do it.
[4:12]Well, you write in such a visual way, all the scenes, like you open with the leaflets
[4:18]sort of fluttering down from a high staircase and not good result after that.
[4:24]How did you also explain in the book, but tell listeners where this interest came from
[4:30]for you, particularly your Holocaust Museum experience and all that?
[4:33]Yeah, so I first got interested in rescue when the Holocaust Museum opened in Washington,
[4:39]and I was in college, so don't Google the date, because I didn't find out how old I am,
[4:44]but I went down with my family.
[4:46]We're not Holocaust survivors, so we've been here for a long time, but like a lot of Jews,
[4:51]we went down to see the museum and anybody who's been there knows it's a very, very tough
[4:57]experience, and as I've talked about the book, actually, even with a lot of people who are not
[5:00]Jewish in general audiences, everyone has that experience, and people remember this pile of shoes
[5:06]that is they are that many of them are children sizes, so it's a very, you know, I think intentionally,
[5:11]you know, tough, tough experience, and at the end there was an exhibit about rescuers, and there
[5:17]was one group called the White Rose, who were young, mostly medical students, although the two main
[5:24]drivers were a medical student as younger sister, who was actually a college student,
[5:27]this is Hans and Sophie Scholl, who are now household names in Germany, but at the time,
[5:33]they were, they were just medicals, they were just students, and I gravitated also to a picture
[5:38]of one of their comrades, who I remember still, it's on the cover of my book as a, was a young guy
[5:43]with a pipe, and they were all around my age at the time, and their story was that they basically
[5:48]tried to fall in an uprising against the Nazis, and they did that in part by circulating leaflets
[5:54]all over the University of University of Munich, and then other universities, and they talked
[5:59]about how this is, you know, not our Germany, and they actually, the guy that I saw the picture of,
[6:04]he wrote the second leaflet, which is one of the first documents to actually mention the Holocaust,
[6:09]and he said there's already been 300,000 Jews killed, you know, be still manner, and so they did
[6:14]this for about a year, and then as you mentioned, they were distributing leaflets at the University
[6:19]of Munich, and Sophie, the young girl had a bunch of extra in her, in her pocket book, and kind
[6:26]of like threw them down this atrium, and the maintenance man who was an art at Nazi saw them
[6:31]lock the door, the Gestapo came, they were put on summary trial and executed within days,
[6:36]and she said at the trial actually something like everybody believes what we believe they're just
[6:42]afraid to say it, and that of course was entirely not true, right? And so, but I think people
[6:50]liked it, maybe think that, and there's more schools named for the sholes, and I think in Germany,
[6:54]now than anybody else, they're not well known outside, and then I almost wrote my thesis on this
[7:00]in college, but I didn't know German, so I wrote on Alexander Great, and but I always remember the
[7:05]story, and then on the 75th anniversary of their execution, I wrote an op-ed, it was like a history
[7:11]piece for the New York Times, and it went completely viral, I mean it was shared tens of thousands
[7:16]of times, and was trended to the top of their articles, and it was, I looked at a lot of the
[7:24]commentary, and it was remarkably, because this was shared all over the internet, and there's a lot
[7:29]of dark stuff, I written about finance, and I get antisemitism, but there was not one Nazi
[7:35]comment, which was pretty remarkable. It was came out right around the time of the Parkland shooting,
[7:40]so a lot of people were throwing a parallel with child activists, and so I started writing a series
[7:46]of these for the journal and the Times and the Daily Beast and the LA Times, and I had the same
[7:50]reaction every time, like they would go, you know, I had one that went to number two on Reddit
[7:55]about the King of Morocco, and again, never anything negative or Nazi, you know, even on the internet,
[8:02]and that's been true since the book came out the only time I've received anything was when the
[8:05]head of the ADL tweeted about the book, and he just automatically gets stuff, but there's something
[8:10]about these stories that I think people find really inspirational, and really, you know, which has,
[8:16]you know, been lacking, and, you know, these are some of the most heroic people, I think, in the
[8:20]history of the world, and they're very unknown for a variety of reasons, but, you know, partly because
[8:25]we tend to focus on on evil more than good. So that was the... So then, you know, I decided to turn
[8:32]them into this book, and, you know, kind of, you know, partly to think about what we can learn from
[8:37]this, but partly just as a tribute to them because, you know, they've never gotten their due, and I
[8:43]think we, you know, people who are Jewish in particular, but I think anybody who's a person of good
[8:48]will, we kind of owe it to them to know their stories, and it's sort of a, you know, a historical
[8:54]injustice that everyone knows who, like, himler and gurring are, but nobody knows who, like,
[8:57]our CDs just was amended, even though he's, like, there are hundreds of thousands of people
[9:01]alive today because of him. Well, that was, like, the most striking part of Schindler's List was
[9:07]all the people who were alive because of the people that he saved. Remember that when, like,
[9:10]all of them came out at the end? And I've had this experience, which is really powerful,
[9:15]where we're not only will I people email me and say, I'm alive because of this person, but
[9:21]I've had so many people that I know, like friends or acquaintances who will email me and tell me that
[9:27]I had no idea, you know, so it's just, you know, when they say one, you know, the famous line,
[9:32]one, you save one life, you save the world. I mean, that's part of what it is, right? It's like,
[9:36]every generation, there's more and more people who are alive. So I think there's probably,
[9:41]there could be, like, a million people alive just from the 10 stories in my book today.
[9:45]Wow. And as you point out in the book, there are many more people who tried, but then ultimately
[9:51]weren't successful. Yep. Yep. Just, they're just stories should be told as well.
[9:55]Yep. And many of them we don't know and we'll never, we'll never know. So we'll be a
[10:00]I think it's like, you know, 27,000 people
[10:02]have been recognized as righteous.
[10:04]So it sounds like a lot, but it was super rare.
[10:08]And, you know, if you fill up Madison Square Garden
[10:11]with a representative population of Europe
[10:13]at the time, you have one person who was a righteous.
[10:16]So it's remarkable.
[10:17]So what, when you analyzed all of the righteous,
[10:21]what differentiated them from people who were not heroes?
[10:25]Why these people?
[10:26]Was it something temperamental?
[10:28]Was it, what was it, or do you not know?
[10:31]Well, I have theory, which I've talked about,
[10:34]and I will tell you right now.
[10:36]I mean, let me put aside group rescue
[10:38]because that's like a different thing
[10:39]at the places like Denmark or Albania
[10:41]where you had almost 100% survival rate.
[10:43]But in terms of the, so after the war,
[10:47]there was a lot of interest in the evil
[10:49]and you had the milligram experiments
[10:51]and the Stanford experiments.
[10:53]And you had a lot of interest also in bystanders
[10:55]and very little interest in rescue.
[10:58]And what they call altruism.
[10:59]There was one study done by Freudians
[11:01]who were also Holocaust survivors.
[11:03]And they, the only correlation they could find
[11:07]was that how you were punished as a child
[11:10]correlated whether you were punished in a like crazy,
[11:13]you know, manner versus like a loving manner.
[11:16]But so that's not a very satisfactory answer,
[11:18]but this is what I concluded and I'll circle back to that
[11:21]and it's very relevant for your audience
[11:22]and your podcast.
[11:24]So I think, first of all, one thing I noticed is that
[11:28]there are patterns.
[11:29]So, you know, people, for example, who are in like
[11:32]creative professions or international professions
[11:36]that brought them in contact with other people
[11:38]and peers in other countries or other religions,
[11:40]they, they tend to be more rescuers.
[11:42]You know, people who were for sure like religion
[11:46]actually car, so one thing that didn't correlate it all
[11:48]by the way was education, which I think we're seeing today
[11:51]on campuses.
[11:52]So everybody at the Von C conference had a PhD,
[11:54]but religion was probably the single biggest motivator.
[11:58]It didn't have to be, I mean, I have Protestants,
[12:01]Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Muslims in my book,
[12:04]but it was people who were interested in religion
[12:06]not because of, you know, hierarchical or displays of piety
[12:11]and much more about like people who really internalized,
[12:14]you know, love thy neighbor by self, you know,
[12:17]the parable of the good Samaritan probably saved more Jews
[12:19]than anything else during a Holocaust.
[12:21]But I think ultimately the one thing I found,
[12:25]and this is I think really relevant to your podcast
[12:29]is early childhood and childhood.
[12:33]And every, I'd say almost every rescue I looked at,
[12:36]not just the ones in the book,
[12:37]but I looked at like probably thousands of them at this point,
[12:39]had somebody in their life, usually one or both parents,
[12:43]like including the shoals in their case,
[12:45]it was the father who did a couple of things.
[12:48]One is they, one is the, I got probably more obvious
[12:51]the other, the first is that they taught them, you know,
[12:55]like you shouldn't be bigoted
[12:59]and you should respect other people and expose them
[13:02]to other people and kind of had this message
[13:05]that we're all, you know, kind of one,
[13:07]one family of humanity.
[13:09]The other thing they did is most of the rescuers
[13:11]actually came out of loving homes.
[13:13]I'm sorry, they also told me to get to act.
[13:15]There's a woman in my book,
[13:16]I ran a Sandler who saved a 2,500 Jewish children in the war,
[13:21]so I got on her father told her,
[13:22]if you see someone drowning, you have to save them.
[13:24]And he died when she was younger,
[13:26]catching typhus from Jews, he was treating poor Jews,
[13:30]he was a doctor.
[13:31]But the other thing is that a lot of them grew up
[13:33]in very loving homes where their interests were valued,
[13:38]where they were valued, and that's really important
[13:41]for creating self-esteem,
[13:43]because if you think about being a rescuer,
[13:44]it's always a little crazy.
[13:45]I mean, everybody around you is doing something different
[13:47]and you're also, in many cases, risking your life
[13:50]or your family's life.
[13:52]And so you really have to have a lot of self-confidence,
[13:55]not only that your moral compass is the correct one,
[14:00]but also that you can take action and make a difference.
[14:03]So I think more than anything else,
[14:06]everything comes back to your early childhood
[14:08]and the home you grew up in and the values
[14:10]and the way you were treated.
[14:12]And actually, when you look at group rescue,
[14:13]I think it's the same thing.
[14:14]It's a lot of it is, can you create an environment
[14:18]where the majority of people stand up for what's right
[14:22]and say this isn't our values?
[14:24]And so that's why I like this anti-bullying campaign
[14:27]that people make fun of, I think is actually quite important.
[14:30]And so again, a lot of that starts in schools
[14:33]and it starts with children.
[14:35]So that was my conclusion from just from fact pattern recognition
[14:41]and just having gone through so many of these stories,
[14:43]again, it's kind of belief in something higher
[14:45]than yourself exposure to others and tolerance
[14:48]and then really like how you were brought up
[14:51]and treated as a child.
[14:52]Wow.
[14:53]Which one of the characters is the one
[14:55]that you just like can't stop thinking about?
[14:58]Like, which one do you either identify with
[15:01]or just think is the most amazing
[15:02]or just you have a personal connection to in some way?
[15:06]Well, it's like asking you which is your favorite.
[15:08]So the diplomat, I mean.
[15:11]That would be my next question.
[15:12]Which is your favorite job?
[15:14]Yeah, yeah, yeah, equal.
[15:15]I think the, well, our CDs just was amended
[15:18]as who I mentioned who was this Portuguese diplomat
[15:20]who saved 30,000 people.
[15:22]The Christian Science Monitor,
[15:24]because again, the book has gone way beyond the Jewish audience,
[15:27]picked him as the call them the breakout star of the book.
[15:29]His is an amazing, sorry, I opened the book
[15:31]with his rescue of the people who wrote Curtis George
[15:34]because he saved a lot of very famous people
[15:36]as well as very non-famous people.
[15:38]But I think to me, like the one that I'm most fascinated
[15:40]with probably as Geno Bartoli,
[15:42]who was a Italian cyclist.
[15:45]And he was probably the most famous athlete,
[15:47]certainly in Italy and maybe in Europe at the time.
[15:49]And he won the Tour de France in 1938,
[15:52]was a anti-fascist, just a very devout Catholic.
[15:55]And which was really the only other sort of power center
[15:58]in Italy at the time.
[15:59]But was sort of, he didn't dedicate his victory
[16:02]to Mussolini unlike the football team and the Olympians.
[16:06]And so he was on the kind of on the outs.
[16:07]But he was this very famous celebrity.
[16:09]And then he did a couple of things.
[16:11]He hid a family of Jews in his basement.
[16:14]And he hid a family of another Jew and a Romani
[16:18]in a bicycle shop during the war.
[16:20]And then maybe even more like sort of interesting
[16:24]is that because he was this champion cyclist,
[16:26]he was like one of the few people in Italy
[16:29]that had not only the ability to bike
[16:32]like hundreds of miles a day, but also the excuse.
[16:34]So he would be out biking.
[16:36]And in his bicycle, he was recruited as a career
[16:39]or something called the Assisi Underground,
[16:40]which was run by the church in the north.
[16:42]Because after 1943 when we invaded,
[16:45]Italy was partitioned around Rome.
[16:48]And ironically, that's when the Germans came in
[16:50]because the Italians really didn't round up Jews anywhere.
[16:52]They thought it was kind of crazy what the Germans were doing.
[16:55]But the Germans when they came in,
[16:56]then the Italian Jews were in mortal peril.
[16:59]And a lot of them were hidden actually in convents
[17:01]and monasteries and even in the cloisters.
[17:03]And Assisi was where I don't think any Jew had ever lived
[17:07]was a center for this because they would hide them there
[17:10]and then either smuggle them south
[17:12]or they would just stay until the liberation.
[17:14]And people needed false identity papers.
[17:17]That was critical.
[17:17]And so Bartley was recruited by the Archbishop of Florence
[17:21]who was his priest because he was like a celebrity.
[17:23]So of course his priest is the Archbishop.
[17:25]And he was biking all over bringing false identity papers.
[17:29]And they would stop him.
[17:30]And because he was so famous, it would,
[17:32]he'd say don't touch my bike
[17:34]because it's perfectly calibrated.
[17:35]And people don't touch Bartley's bike.
[17:37]And then there's another scene
[17:39]where he showed up at a train station
[17:41]and caused this huge stir
[17:42]because it would be like if LeBron James showed up
[17:44]and then in the background,
[17:46]the partisans moved Jews from one train to the other.
[17:49]So he was this hero and then he never really told anybody.
[17:51]I mean, there were rumors after the war said
[17:54]I want to be remembered as a cyclist.
[17:55]He confided in his son who after he died ultimately wrote a book
[17:58]and then this family came out from that he had hidden.
[18:03]He has this wonderful line of,
[18:04]because I've seen footage of his 80th birthday party
[18:07]where people asked him about this.
[18:09]And he would always say, I want to talk about it.
[18:11]It takes away from him and he shouldn't do good
[18:13]for doing good, not to take credit.
[18:15]And then he said, there's some medals
[18:17]that you win in this life for cycling
[18:19]and they go in a museum.
[18:20]And then he said, there are other medals you get
[18:22]in the next life and they're pinned to your soul.
[18:25]And that was how, and that is a very common,
[18:28]almost universal, spookily universal refrain from rescuers
[18:32]as they all say, I didn't do anything special.
[18:35]I did what anybody normal person would do.
[18:37]I just did the decent thing.
[18:39]And a lot of it is like very sincere
[18:41]and it goes to your question about like their personality
[18:44]and why they were so rare.
[18:45]So, you know, and then he went back in 1948
[18:47]and won the Tour de France again.
[18:48]I think he's one of the oldest people to ever win it.
[18:51]And he again, he was this national hero in Italy
[18:55]and he lived to like, you know, into his 80s, you know,
[18:58]athlete who changed smoked and it becomes a coffee a day,
[19:03]but never, you know, in like a beloved figure,
[19:05]but never, never, you know, did this.
[19:08]And a few years ago, they actually had the Jiro the Talia
[19:11]for the first time in outside of Europe.
[19:13]The first three stages were in Israel
[19:14]and he was made an honorary citizen of Israel.
[19:17]So he was just, I find that story so fascinating
[19:20]because again, he was this like such a famous celebrity athlete
[19:24]who then just never told anybody
[19:25]and certainly had a platform if you wanted to have used it.
[19:28]Wow, it's inspiring to know that these people exist.
[19:31]I know you gave some statistic about how it's like,
[19:34]I don't know, one half of one 100th of one percent.
[19:37]Like it's hardly anybody, but still it is immensely inspiring
[19:41]to know that people are good,
[19:43]that there's such good people out there.
[19:45]And you hope that those actions are replicated
[19:49]and the craziness of the current environment.
[19:51]You just have to help.
[19:53]Yeah, I mean, for sure there are some people doing that.
[19:56]I just met actually, I don't know, you can get.
[20:00]you know, if you've ever seen a movie, Hotel Rwanda.
[20:02]So this was a guy who was the manager of the hotel in Rwanda
[20:07]and he saved 1,600 people by hiding them, you know,
[20:11]and I just met him.
[20:12]And when I spoke to him,
[20:13]it was like talking to somebody out of the book.
[20:15]I mean, I asked him why you did it.
[20:16]How you did it?
[20:17]And it was like exactly the same stories.
[20:20]I think these people still exist today.
[20:23]And you don't have to be, I think you don't,
[20:24]like the other thing I learned is, you know,
[20:27]the criteria to be called a righteous among the nation
[20:29]is really very high and you have to risk your life.
[20:31]And you have to, you know, I was testimony,
[20:34]but there are many things people like Prima Lavey
[20:36]wrote about a guy when he was interned
[20:38]who a laborer named Lorenzo and he would bring him soup every day.
[20:41]And he said that, you know, this man kept him alive
[20:44]because he felt like somebody cared.
[20:46]And so I think like the, like not everybody is going to be
[20:49]a rescue or I mean, you know, when you say like, OK, in Poland,
[20:52]like if they caught you rescuing, they would kill you
[20:56]and your family, like, I mean,
[20:58]I can tell you right now, I wouldn't have done that.
[21:00]There's no way.
[21:00]I mean, you know, there's a spectrum.
[21:02]So I think we have to be careful to judge,
[21:04]but like, you know, these small gestures make a difference also
[21:08]and they don't give you, you know, the righteous
[21:10]among the nations for bringing somebody soup.
[21:11]But when you look at the testimony of people who survived,
[21:15]a lot of these gestures letting somebody stay in your house
[21:17]for the night, sometimes just smiling at somebody,
[21:19]knowing that they were on the run.
[21:21]And that that's very important.
[21:22]And there was a rescuer in Holland who said, you know,
[21:25]we were the tip of the spear.
[21:26]He was one of the guys on the front lines,
[21:27]and he said, well, we will allow us to do it.
[21:28]And this is true.
[21:29]Like one reason why the further East you went,
[21:31]the worse it got, because the worst, the anti-Semitism was,
[21:34]he said, everybody around us was sort of quietly sympathetic
[21:36]and look the other way, whereas in other countries,
[21:39]people ran to turn in Jews for very small amounts of money
[21:42]or for spite.
[21:43]So I do think, you know, like, not everybody
[21:45]has to be a rescuer to make a difference.
[21:47]And the other thing is I actually had the really fascinating
[21:50]experience of interviewing a lot of the children
[21:52]of the rescuers, and it was kind of a mixed bag.
[21:55]I mean, I had like, you know, Hiram Bingham,
[21:58]who was a diplomat, his kids view him as a saint.
[22:00]But Varian Fry, who was this kind of partner,
[22:03]that they called it in the crime of saving humans
[22:04]that between the two of them, they saved most
[22:06]of the intelligentsia of Europe.
[22:07]I mean, all of the surrealists, and Marc Chagal,
[22:09]and all the German writers.
[22:10]And Varian Fry's son thinks he was like a horrendous father.
[22:15]And, you know, even I interviewed, there's a town in the Protestant town
[22:20]where the parent, the pastor in his wife
[22:23]were very famous figures in the nonviolent movement.
[22:25]And I interviewed their daughter who was 95.
[22:27]I mean, she was amazing.
[22:28]She's told me like, the carpet in my parents' living room
[22:31]was this color, not this color, you know, and so.
[22:33]But she said, you know, and her parents were like these,
[22:36]you know, very famous, they knew Martin Luther King
[22:38]and Gandhi, she said, well, you know,
[22:39]like they were amazing parents,
[22:40]she said, but you know, they didn't come to my piano
[22:43]recital, but you know, like I know why they did
[22:46]and because they had more important,
[22:47]but she's still bothered when she was not so like,
[22:49]I mean, humanize these people, you know,
[22:52]when you talk to the relative because they weren't like,
[22:54]most of them were not scenes.
[22:55]They weren't like people who set out to go save the world.
[22:57]They were people who found themselves in really difficult
[23:00]decisions, you know, like situations and ended up making decisions
[23:04]that most people didn't make, but they were that.
[23:07]So to me, like I find that actually really inspiring
[23:09]because they were not, you know, they're like everybody else.
[23:12]They're flawed and they're, and yet they were
[23:16]extraordinarily heroic and inspiring.
[23:18]And what do you think the secret is to making history
[23:20]really come alive?
[23:21]Because I feel like there's so many accounts
[23:24]of Holocaust stories or stories of survival or whatever.
[23:27]And obviously there's something innately interesting in them,
[23:30]but I feel like you do a particularly good job
[23:32]of the vibrancy with which you describe everything.
[23:35]So tell me a little bit about that,
[23:37]even from a writing perspective.
[23:39]Oh, thank you.
[23:40]Thank you.
[23:41]That's very nice.
[23:41]And the comments on a writing are the most meaningful to me
[23:45]because usually with a nonfiction book,
[23:48]people look at the, you know, the substance of it,
[23:49]but I mean, look, first I tried to pick stories
[23:52]that I thought were really interesting.
[23:54]We're, first of all, gave a cross section of what happened,
[23:57]but also we're sort of, you know,
[23:58]cinematic in some way.
[24:00]So like the bar to Lee story or there's another story
[24:02]that takes place in a circus.
[24:03]And, you know, you have this a wonderful Danish story
[24:06]or you have King Charles's grandmother
[24:08]who nobody knows saved a family of Jews.
[24:10]So the stories themselves are interesting.
[24:12]And I tried to give as much kind of context and background,
[24:17]you know, to what was going on at the time.
[24:19]And obviously it's one of the most dramatic moments
[24:22]in human history.
[24:23]So World War II and, you know, so it's some ways
[24:26]it's kind of easy to write about that
[24:27]and make it, make it punchy.
[24:28]So that, you know, I, but I did put a lot of, you know,
[24:31]I'm really grateful to my editor who took a hatchet
[24:34]to a lot of the, because I, there's a lot of material.
[24:37]I mean, there's a whole story of varying fries fascinating
[24:40]because you have all these famous people
[24:41]who, I mean, he single-handedly moved the center
[24:44]of the art world from Paris and New York, right?
[24:46]I'm pretty much.
[24:47]So that was, but I did, you know, I did want it to be,
[24:51]it's a, you know, it's not meant to be an academic.
[24:52]We have a thousand footnotes, but it's meant to be,
[24:55]you know, a general interest, you know, read
[24:58]and people have, I'm really gratified.
[25:00]People have been having, like, I don't know if they really liked
[25:03]reading it, just as a, as a group of stories.
[25:07]So, you know, the other thing about like Raski,
[25:09]which I, you know, Holocaust is really tough, right?
[25:13]I mean, and I was on the radio in Arizona,
[25:15]and the guy said to me, can you tell our listeners
[25:17]like what the Holocaust was?
[25:19]So there are people, yeah, I mean, he didn't mean it,
[25:22]you know, he knew what it was, but like, you know,
[25:24]but also like with children, right?
[25:26]I mean, it's really hard, like, even middle schoolers,
[25:28]you know, you read night and this is like a hard way to get in.
[25:33]And I think this, like I have a friend who did a documentary
[25:35]on Lisha and Bong, which is one of my chapters,
[25:37]town and France, they're rescued a lot of children.
[25:39]And he said that the rescuers are in some way
[25:42]like a banister you can hold on to,
[25:45]to start thinking about the Holocaust.
[25:46]So I think for a lot of people, like, it's really hard
[25:49]when you get into, forget the academic kind of language,
[25:53]but even just like a really intense story of the Heights,
[25:56]so horrific what happened.
[25:58]People just turn off.
[25:59]I mean, we're seeing that a little bit now
[26:00]with like the barbarity that happened on October 7th
[26:05]and like what act, like a lot of people like,
[26:06]just they can't even look at it, you know?
[26:09]And so, you know, when you start by looking at sort of these,
[26:12]you know, lights and the glimmers of light
[26:15]in a very dark moment, it's a way of starting to talk about it.
[26:18]And then you say, okay, well, why were they rescuing people?
[26:20]Well, because something really bad was happening, right?
[26:22]Or, you know, it also kind of is a way of countering
[26:26]that Holocaust denial because like these people,
[26:28]there would be no rescuers if there wasn't a Holocaust.
[26:30]But I did spend, thank you for asking.
[26:32]I did spend a lot of time trying to make the stories come alive
[26:36]and these people come alive and talk about what, you know,
[26:39]their backgrounds and what motivated them
[26:41]and what else there was beyond just this moment
[26:45]when they rescued, when they did their rescue, you know,
[26:48]which some cases was over years,
[26:49]but in some cases was like a week in their life.
[26:52]And they had a lot more to them than that.
[26:54]And then sort of looking at the arc of what happened
[26:56]to them after the war, which case,
[26:58]with many of them had very sad, sad endings
[27:01]because of what they did.
[27:03]They were in some ways punished.
[27:04]So I hope people, I hope people like it,
[27:06]I scour the Amazon.
[27:08]And then said, so we're, you know, four and a half,
[27:11]this is out of five, it's good.
[27:12]So, oh my goodness, it's funny, very relatable.
[27:17]Anyway, Richard, thank you so much.
[27:19]Thank you for talking about your book.
[27:20]Thank you for all the research and highlighting
[27:22]these inspirational stories and reminding people
[27:25]that sometimes handing someone a bowl of soup
[27:28]can change their life.
[27:29]And all these little things add up
[27:30]and it's worth doing.
[27:31]So, thank you.
[27:33]Thank you for having me.
[27:34]I really appreciate it.
[27:35]I'm glad you.
[27:37]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[27:39]Don't have time to read books.
[27:41]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[27:43]at Zebi Owens and at Moms.
[27:45]Don't have time to read books.
[27:46]Also, sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[27:49]and sign up for my virtual book club
[27:50]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[27:53]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[27:54]in fact, Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[27:57]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:59]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.