Celebrating Women Who Resisted for Holocaust Memorial Day

SussexWorld

Chichester-based novelist and historian Kate Mosse celebrates Women Who Resisted in a very special show for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Transcript

00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspaper. Always a

00:06 fabulous pleasure to speak to Kate Moss. Now Kate, you are preparing a really special,

00:11 really significant, really resonant evening show, two shows in one day, on Women Who Resisted

00:18 for Holocaust Memorial Day. It's in the Minerva, isn't it, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Saturday

00:23 January 27th. What are you trying to put across in the show?

00:28 What I'm going to be doing in the show is called Women Who Resisted, and the theme of

00:32 this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. So what I'm doing in

00:38 the show is bringing to the stage a range of extraordinary women, some Jewish women,

00:44 some not Jewish women, who in their different countries from Britain, France, Lithuania,

00:50 Belarus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Japan, all over the world, women who stood

00:57 firm against the murderous ideology of the Nazi party during the Second World War. Some

01:03 of them suffered greatly, some of them died for their courage in order to save others,

01:10 and then there are other stories where the women survived and have lived the rest of

01:15 their lives, making sure that it's never forgotten.

01:19 So as you say, it's important to have the light and the dark.

01:22 The light and the dark, because I want people to leave the theatre feeling astonished at

01:28 these women's extraordinary bravery, asking ourselves the question if we would have had

01:33 it in us to stand so firm, even if we knew something was so wrong and so evil, but also

01:39 to come out feeling that every single one of us can make a difference, that our actions

01:43 and our voices count, because most of these women before the war started were just normal

01:49 people like me or you, going about their everyday business, and then suddenly the real world

01:55 was taken away from them.

01:56 And Tam, I was really struck looking at the Festival Theatre summary on the website that

02:00 among the women you include is the remarkable, astonishingly brave Sophie Scholl, and it's

02:06 a story that's always fascinated me.

02:08 Sophie Scholl, who was a young German girl, she came from a strongly Christian household,

02:16 and absolutely her family believed that what the Nazis were doing, not the Germans, the

02:22 Nazis were doing, was wrong and evil, and with her brothers and friends set up an organisation

02:27 called the White Rose, which put out pamphlets and argued against what the Nazi party was

02:33 doing and the way that people were believing them and following them, you know, the path

02:38 to dictatorship, if you like.

02:40 And for various tragic reasons she was caught with her brothers and she was executed before

02:48 her 21st birthday.

02:49 And the astonishing thing was that the supposed crime, the trial and the execution were all

02:55 within days, weren't they?

02:58 Yes, absolutely.

02:59 It was, you know, that's one of the hallmarks, is it was for women and for girls who resisted,

03:05 the Nazis had an extremely repressive view of what a woman's role was, and so when girls

03:11 and women were caught standing up against them, they were often treated even more harshly

03:17 because they were transgressing twice.

03:19 One they're standing against their own government, so called, but secondly they're also transgressing

03:23 against what the idea of a perfect woman was supposed to be and a perfect girl was supposed

03:28 to be.

03:29 So Sophie Scholl was extraordinary.

03:31 There are many amazing women, the women that are often known as the ghetto girls, the women

03:36 who ran the underground Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghettos and other parts of Poland.

03:42 There's the extraordinary Irish, Oskar Schindler, as she's often known, Mary Elms, who saved

03:48 many Jewish children from the concentration camps of France, right down in the southwest

03:55 with the collaborationist government with the Nazis.

03:58 But the key thing is to bust the myth that Jewish women were not part of the resistance.

04:05 Often the only stories told about women and resistance in the Second World War are the

04:09 SOE women, and they were incredibly brave and they were sent in from Britain into occupied

04:15 France and Germany and other parts of Europe.

04:19 But there was a very, there are many women in the Jewish resistance, Jewish women, who

04:23 fought tooth and nail against this too, and they are quite often written out of the story.

04:29 So one of my aims with the show is to say that Jewish women were there at the forefront

04:33 of resistance, but somehow their stories are not always told.

04:37 That's it, Kate, it sounds an absolutely fascinating, powerful show.

04:42 Good luck with everything.

04:43 Lovely to speak to you.

04:44 Thank you.

04:45 Lovely to be here, Phil.

04:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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