Episode 267: Alice Paul, Part One
SHOWNOTES UNDER CONSTRUCTION, come back in a little bit for more photos and some details from the episode!
Time Travel With The History Chicks
The Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Suffs is hitting the road for a national tour! We saw it last fall in New York and LOOOVED it, but relevant to this episode, Alice Paul is the main character and the show focuses on her life and work. If the touring company is in your neighborhood, we strongly recommend you try to see it. (This isn’t sponsored, we just really loved the musical.) SUFFS TOUR DATES
Media recommendations will be on the shownotes for Part Two.
End song: We’re Dynamite by Craig Reever (featuring Willow) used by permission of Epidemic Sound
Episode 266: Paris Field Trip Travelogue, 2025
In April, 55 of of us descended upon Paris for a History Chicks Field Trip! It was nine days of history, exploring, learning, wonder, and friendship. And champagne. And cheese. We’ve compiled the stories of those experiences from some of our fellow travelers into this episode.
read more…Episode 265: Miep Gies, Part Two
We left Miep right after she decided, with zero hesitation, that she would do whatever was necessary to keep the people in the attic safe as they hid from the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population.
For the next several years Miep would risk her life daily to fulfill that promise, and her Miep’s story is quite documented. One of the most important things she did was to collect from the annex and keep safe the writing collection of a 15-year-old Anne Frank until after the war. We know how she, Jan, and the other four helpers–Bep Voskuijl, Victor Kugler, Johan Klieman, and Johan Voskuijl– kept the Frank and Van Pel’s families, and Fritz Pfeffer safe for two years in the attic. In the slightly wider world, we know how the Nazi government captured, transported to concentration camps in other countries, tortured, and slaughtered millions of mostly Jewish people but also resisters, Black, Roma, and gay people… including all the former inhabitants of the secret annex with the lone exception of Otto Frank.
The time that Miep spent caring for those in hiding was not pleasant in Amsterdam, there was severe food shortages and more and more control by the Nazi military until, in 1945, the war ended and the rebuilding began. Otto Frank returned to Amsterda and moved in with Miep and Jan for the next seven years. He edited, published, defended, protected, and made sure that his daughter Anne’s legacy, her diary, was read and understood by as many people as possible throughout the world so that atrocities like this may never happen again.
Miep did what she could to support him until he passed away in 1980, then she took up his work until her death at 100 in 2010.
Miep said this of her work during the war: “My story is a story of very ordinary people during extraordinary times, times the like of which I hope with all my heart will never come again. It is for all of us ordinary people, all over the world, to see to it that they do not.”
Time Travel With The History Chicks
Perhaps more than any other subject, this is not an exhaustive list of materials on Miep, Anne, the Holocaust, WWII…it’s simply the ones that we used and can recommend.
Books!
Kids books:
Web!
There is a lot of resources on the websites of the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, and the Frank Family Center in Frankfurt, Germany.
Final Solution explained from the US Holocaust Museum
Information on the young man who stayed with Miep and Jan, from James Madison University.
Life in Amsterdam during Nazi occupation from Defining Moments Canada (it was the Canadians who liberated Amsterdam.)
Carnation Day protest against the Nazi occupiers from Traces of War.
There were many investigations aimed at revealing the person who betrayed those hiding in the attic, the first one was only a year after the war ended. Here’s an article on one from Anne Frank House website.
Moving Pictures!
Episode 264: Miep Gies, Part One
Hermine Santrouschitz was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungry on February 15, 1909. Her earliest memories are of the start of what would become World War 1. As the war ravaged her country, it was a tough life in the city as food and work became scarce for her family. That situation became dangerous as malnourishment and tuberculosis hit young Hermine so much, that the only way to save her life was to send her to a foster family outside of Austria.
read more…Episode 263: A conversation with Anne Sebba: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz
To leave you with a bit of lagniappe for Women’s History Month, we broke our usual format to sit down for a talk with Anne Sebba, author of the new book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival. Anne tells us about some of the women in the orchestra, her process of learning about these women, organizing their stories into this book, and about other biographies she’s written in the past, about the past.
If you live in the UK or Australia, you’re in luck, this book is available now. The rest of us have to either wait or become resourceful to get our hands on a copy. But that doesn’t make the conversation Susan and Anne had about the remarkable survivors of the only all women’s orchestra in any Nazi prison camp any less interesting. Anne tells us the history of the orchestra, introduces us to Alma Rosé, an imprisoned celebrity violinist who became the orchestra’s main conductor, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, then a teenage cellist and, most recently, the last surviving member or the orchestra, and the extraordinary Hilde Grünbaum Zimche who recently passed away in 2024 at 100.
Anne, the author of numerous biographies, also tells us about her process for writing the books that we, non-fiction readers, gobble up (hint: it’s a lot longer than it takes us to read them.) To read more about Anne’s work, visit this, her website.
Other things we discussed:
The Shoah Foundation, formed after Schindeler’s List movie, whose mission is to “collect, preserve, and share survivor testimonies in order to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and to build a future for all that rejects antisemitism, hatred, dehumanization, and genocide.”
This book and movie it’s based on:
End music: Way, Way Back by Lvly with Megan Gifford, used with permission from Epidemic Sound