4 days ago
‘As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it's my duty to keep these stories alive'
In 1942, a German-born Jew named Henry Wermuth attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Aware the Führer would be travelling by train past the Polish town of Bochnia, he sneaked out at night from the nearby Nazi labour camp where he had been working and piled logs and rocks onto the railway track. Yet the train ran without incident and Wermuth, whose involvement was never discovered, assumed German soldiers had found the obstruction and cleared the track. The war continued, eventually taking with it the lives of Wermuth's mother, father and sister, an outcome that Wermuth had hoped he might have been able to avert. Years later, he was awarded a medal by the German government in recognition of his bravery.
That story, told by Wermuth's daughter Ilana Metzger, features alongside several more like it on the actress Louisa Clein's new podcast, Objects of the Holocaust, co-hosted with the historian Prof Tim Cole, which aims to celebrate positive stories of Holocaust survival through individual objects across generations.
One guest, the director Michael Attenborough, chooses a brochure from a production of A Chorus Line that his father Richard Attenborough had been directing in New York on the day Michael met, for the first time, the two Kindertransport girls his father's family had taken in during the war.
Another, the Venezuelan author Ariana Neumann, discusses the ring that led her to the story of a non-Jewish woman, Zdeňka, who had smuggled in provisions to Neumann's Jewish grandparents in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Before finding the ring among her father's possessions, Neumann hadn't even known her grandparents were Jewish. 'For many second- or third-generation survivors, their family history is full of silences,' says Clein.
She herself has a particular fondness for one of the objects: a Chanukah candle fashioned out of a sardine tin by a survivor while he was being marched to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp towards the end of the war – chosen by his daughter. 'Objects can be a way of filling in the gaps.'
Clein, who is best known for playing Maya Stepney in Emmerdale, has an object of her own: a framed certificate from President Eisenhower that she saw hanging on the kitchen wall of her grandmother's house in Amsterdam whenever she went to visit. Her grandmother had been a member of the resistance during the war, and the certificate acknowledges her role in helping American servicemen shot down in Holland return home to the US. Clein's own mother, Channa, had been sent to live with a non-Jewish couple in the countryside, while her grandfather eked out the war hiding in the attics of people willing to give him shelter.
'It was particularly tough for him because he was an architect who had studied under Le Corbusier and therefore loved light and open space,' says Clein, who grew up in Dorset. 'When the war was over and the family was reunited, he built a house for the man who had helped him the most. It was the most beautiful light-filled house: the pure embodiment of gratitude and hope. In a way, that's another object.'
Clein had the idea for the podcast some time before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, when about 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 more taken as hostages, sparking a conflict that, now deep into its second year, is thought also to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians.
She is keen for the podcast to remain separate from conversations about the war. 'It's important one doesn't conflate the Holocaust with 21st-century debates about Israel,' she says. 'It's about a very specific time in history. I wouldn't want those conversations to discredit these stories and the bravery and the tragedies of those lives.'
At the same time, the events of October 7 and all that has followed are impossible to ignore. Like many diaspora Jews, Clein regards the anti-Semitism that has emerged in its wake as part of a long, historic continuum. 'In 2022, a year before Hamas invaded, I worked on a play at the Royal Court, Jews. In Their Own Words, which discussed anti-Semitism in its different forms,' she says. 'There's the medieval period, the slurs about money, then it became about Holocaust denial and what that meant, and now it's about Israel. But it's always the same hate. And since October 7 that anti-Semitism has become legitimised.'
She deplores the casual way in which the Israeli invasion of Gaza can be discussed, especially through the use of particular slogans on the pro-Palestine marches. 'People feel emotional, and words such as genocide and Nazi are very emotive words. But it's also sloppy. Much of it is driven by a knee-jerk reaction against the horror, but also by a lack of knowledge. My mum [who moved to England in the 1970s] got caught up in it during one of these marches in London and she was scared. That ignited a fire in me. I thought, how dare you? She is in her 80s and she is scared. All these people have no idea. And it makes me very angry.'
Such sloppiness, she says, can have real-life consequences. 'You see it with Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, the two Israelis who were murdered in Washington by a man shouting 'free Palestine'. But that's not freeing Palestine, that's murdering two people. And you see images of the Dutch flag and the attacks on Israelis last year [when Israeli fans were assaulted following a football match in Amsterdam] and there is inevitably a panic.'
She herself has never felt personally threatened, and doesn't recognise the accusation of two-tier policing, whereby the police are perceived to be more heavy-handed towards protesters on the political Right than those on the Left. 'Whenever I've gone on anti-Semitism marches, there's always been strong protection from the police,' she says. 'But my children [she has three, aged 12, 11 and eight], who don't go to a Jewish school but who have a strong Jewish identity, have to check with themselves if they want to be openly Jewish outside their world. And I feel very sad about that.'
'People say, 'I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm just anti-Israel,'' she adds. 'Well, there's a discussion to be had there. I work in an industry where people are generally more to the Left. They would see themselves as people fighting on the side of good. But I've had private conversations with some of these people and told them, 'You have hundreds of thousands of followers on your social media and you are spreading lies.''
She refers by way of example to the claim made two weeks ago by Tom Fletcher, a UN humanitarian chief, that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours if Israel didn't immediately allow essential aid into the territory – a claim that has since been widely disputed. 'They make the post, but when it gets disproved, they don't post the apology, because the damage is done.'
I tell her that many Jewish people I know feel great anguish at what is happening in Gaza, and are extremely critical of the strategy being deployed by Netanyahu and his far-Right coalition government. Where does she stand on that? 'My identity as Jewish has been very much a choice I have made, because I wasn't brought up with a Jewish education,' she says. 'And I am steadfast in that identity. This might get me into trouble, but I am a proud Zionist. I fundamentally adore Israel. It's obviously unbelievably horrific what is happening out there. Nobody wants to see children suffering in Gaza. But on a simplistic level, if the surviving hostages are returned, along with the bodies of those who have been killed, the war would end. There was relative peace on October 6.'
Yet she also admits to feeling a mix of rage, sorrow and helplessness. 'I'm not an educator and I'm not a historian,' she says. 'But I am a storyteller. And what I can do is tell stories of our humanity. I want people to listen and think, wow, I didn't know that. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I feel it is my duty to keep those stories alive.'
