Written by: Dr. Carol Rittner, RSM
Ida and Louise Cook were sisters, both born in England, who developed a passionate interest in opera when they moved to London to start their first jobs. They came to know some of the greatest opera singers of the 20th century as well as the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss. By 1938-39, their love of opera would help them rescue 29 people from the terrors of the Nazi regime.
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“Those who took risks were by and large, ordinary people. The comment is not made demeaningly, but as a source of encouragement… We need to reflect on the fact that there may be more potential for disinterested action [in all of us] on behalf of others than we usually assume.”
Robert McAfee Brown, Protestant theologian, in The Courage to Care
In her memoir, We Followed Our Stars, Ida describes how their rescue work started in 1934 when Clemens Krauss’s wife asked them to help a friend leave Germany. From this gesture of goodwill, there began a pattern of regular, serious efforts to help people – mainly Jews – escape from Nazi Germany and Austria. The sisters were determined to do all they could to help, “moved by a sense of furious revolt against the brutality and injustice of it all”.
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“The circumstance that distinguished rescuers from non-rescuers was that although the opportunity appeared to be similar, the rescuers were asked for help. At best, opportunity to help may have facilitated rescue but did not, by any means, determine it.”
Sam Oliner, Holocaust survivor hidden as a child in Poland, Do Unto Others
They travelled regularly to the continent. When their frequent journeys began to arouse suspicion, Krauss, then head of the Munich opera, came to their rescue. He would give them full details of performances at the opera: the programme, who was singing, and so on. The sisters pretended to be eccentric opera enthusiasts who would travel any distance to hear their favourite singer.
Under cover of these trips, Ida and Louise met the people who were trying to escape. Louise learnt German so that she could interview them. Ida by then had become a successful romantic novelist (writing for Mills and Boon under the pseudonym Mary Burchell) and her earnings helped finance the whole operation. The sisters also brought back jewellery and valuables, enabling them to give the financial guarantees needed to bring the refugees to England. Their subterfuges even extended to bringing back fur coats to help finance the escapes. They would take expensive clothes labels begged from friends, pick up the furs, stitch in the new labels and travel back wearing ‘English’ coats.
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“Some will help because they see other people’s pain and empathize; others will help because they are concerned with how people in history will remember them. Still, some feel there is no escape from duty and that doing nothing will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
Sam Oliner, Do Unto Others
In London, they rented a flat to shelter the Jewish refugees and Ida travelled all over England, lecturing to raise funds. As Ida wrote, “Until you refuse to recognise defeat, you never learn how much an individual can do.”
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“The sisters Cook put into their rescue work all their warmth of heart and devotion, and a rare perseverance, ready to sacrifice their personal safety, time and energy and endure all the heart-breaking involved in this kind of work.”
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In We Followed Our Stars, Ida Cook wrote:
“From now on until the day war broke out, we lived with an ever-deepening sense of responsibility to do the little bit we could to alleviate the growing horror and misery which we had, by a curious combination of circumstances, come to understand.”
“I make no claim to clearer perception than other people. We just happened to be lucky enough to see the problem in terms of our personal friends.”
“What we did try to do was concentrate on whole families. Part of a richly happy family ourselves, we knew that it was poor comfort to be rescued oneself if a beloved mother or father or brother or sister still lingered in danger and the shadow of death…”
Ida Cook, We Followed Our Stars by Ida Cook. William Morrow & Company, New York, 1950.
Milena Jesenska & Margarete Buber-Neumann