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Useless Mouths: Gwen Strauss on Untold Stories of Forbidden Love in the Holocaust
Season 5 Episode 3
It’s October 1940 and you are walking down a dusty lane when someone slips a scrap of paper into your hand. You hold it tightly in your palm, waiting until you’re round a corner and away from prying eyes. When you manage to find that moment and open the folded paper square, you read: “Milena from Prague requests a meeting.”
You are Margarete Buber-Neumann and you are a prisoner in Ravensbruck concentration camp. The note in your hand is from Milena Jesenska, a Czech legend who has just arrived in the camp after being swept up in the Holocaust. It is a note which heralds the beginnings of hope, of friendship – of love – in the midst of death.
Join Oswin and Carla as the Holocaust historian Gwen Strauss tells the life-affirming and heart-breaking tale of Grete and Milena as they try to find a reason to live among the ruins of the Holocaust. Theirs is a forgotten history, a hidden history of queer life and death and it should act as an inspiration to us all.
Published on 5 months ago