Pod Insights ABC Rewind Laja's Way Home part 1 About this episode In 1945, Laya Semler became the last Jew sent to a concentration camp from Wennigsen, Germany. Her non-Jewish husband Adolf chose slave labour rather than abandon her. They both survived. In 2022, the village of Wennigsen invited their Australian family back to commemorate Laya and Adolf’s bravery. Told by their great-grandchildren, Laya and Adolf’s story is testament to the power love has to bridge even the greatest differences. But it’s also the story of a town only just coming to terms with the truth of its past. A truth that, as Laya and Adolf’s descendants discover first-hand, not everyone in the town is ready to accept...
Joanna Kalowski at the opening of the new street in Wennigsen, Germany, named after her grandmother Laya Semler
Guests:
Joanna Kalowski - internationally recognised mediator and granddaughter of Laya and Adolf SemlerMichael Wittich - historian for the town of WennigsenFranz Blazek - former mayor of WennigsenSilke Stremlau - resident of WennigsenCredits:
Writers: Rick Kalowski and Michaela Kalowski
Presenters: Michaela Kalowski and Rick Kalowski
Producer: Claudia Taranto
Sound Engineer: Hamish Camilleri
Research assistance : Tadhg Kalowski
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:09 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm Kirsty Melville and welcome to the History Listen.
0:14 Speaker 01 Joanna Kalowski is from a Jewish family who left behind the loss and trauma of the Holocaust to build a successful life in Australia. But in 2022, Joanna returned to the family village in Germany with her adult children for a special commemoration. Joanna's grandmother, Lyia, turns out to have been the last Jew from that village to be sent to a Nazi concentration camp and survive.
0:43 Speaker 01 How Lyia survived has a lot to do with her husband, Joanna's non-Jewish grandfather, Adolf. This is that story. It's a Holocaust and a refugee story. But most of all, it's a love story of two people from different backgrounds who refuse to give up on each other, no matter the consequences.
1:16 Speaker 02 Hi.
1:17 Speaker 03 It's the 19th of June 2022.
1:19 Speaker 02 I'm filming you.
1:20 Speaker 03 We've just arrived in Veniksen, a small town an hour from Hannover in northern Germany.
1:25 Speaker 02 Oh, Mama.
1:28 Speaker 02 I am... Okay, I want to swear on camera in case we use this.
1:31 Speaker 03 It's hot and dry. Even at six at night, it's in the mid-30s, very warm by Australian standards, an apocalyptic heatwave by German ones.
1:43 Speaker 02 That's our mother, Joanna Kalowski. She's 75, but often taken for much younger. You'll hear her voice a lot, in English and in German. She's an internationally recognised mediator. She's previously served on Australia's National Native Title Tribunal. She's also a lot of fun.
2:01 Speaker 04 My father, when he came to Australia, got elocution lessons and spoke like this. And my brother and I took great joy in irritating him to the point where he'd lose his anglicised cool and he'd say, "Don't do this on the table."
2:19 Speaker 03 The street we're walking down, Bahnhofstraße, or Railway Station Street, leads directly from the quaint local train line. It's quiet, leafy, paved with cobblestones. But this isn't some European family get-together. Because in 1945, Bahnhofstraße had a different name: Adolf Hitlerstraße. Venickson, like every town in Germany, was a Nazi town.
2:44 Speaker 02 It's also where Lea Semler lived with her husband Adolf, before Lea, aged 56, was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Adolf, aged 50, was sent to a slave labour camp for refusing to abandon her.
2:58 Speaker 03 We're in Venickson because Lea and Adolf were our great-grandparents, our mother Joanna's grandparents. And because 77 years after the end of the Second World War, Venickson has decided to remember them. I'm Michaela Kolofsky.
3:12 Speaker 02 I'm her brother Rick Kolofsky.
3:14 Speaker 03 And this is part one of Lea's Way Home.
3:19 Speaker 02 So how did all this come about?
3:21 Speaker 05 Adolf und Lea Semler nach Venickson gekommen sind.
3:26 Speaker 02 That's historian Michael Vittish, explaining in a speech in German how he uncovered the story of Lea and Adolf Semler. He works for the town of Venickson. And it's he, more than anyone, who made our trip and this story possible. He's the last in a long line of people who've tried to prove Jews lived in Venickson before the war.
3:45 Speaker 03 It was 2019 when Michael Vittish first wrote to our mother Joanna.
3:49 Speaker 04 Out of the blue, I got an email from someone whose name I didn't recognise. And I was absolutely blown away and delighted.
3:59 Speaker 03 Vittish had accidentally found reference in old municipal records to Lea and Adolf Semler being in Venickson, surviving the war, and emigrating to Sydney.
4:07 Speaker 02 That led Vittish to the online records of Lea and Adolf's daughter, Rose Ball, Joanna's mother, our grandmother. Joanna had placed Rose's papers with the State Library of New South Wales.
4:19 Speaker 03 After he tracked down Joanna, and then another three years of Covid delay, plans were made for commemoration events in Venickson.
4:26 Speaker 02 How Lea and Adolf came to be chosen for this honour, how the town came to accept Jews had lived here, is another fascinating part of this story. But first, who was Lea Semler? We asked our mum to describe her. As often on this trip, she found it deeply emotional.
4:43 Speaker 04 I have very strong memories of how she looked.
4:49 Speaker 04 Apparently, when she first arrived in Australia, she looked terrible. But she very quickly gained quite a lot of weight. And she was quite solid.
5:02 Speaker 04 And she always wore lace-up shoes, made by Mr. Pocaw in Sydney, a very famous shoemaker to all the stars of the Eastern European community, Jewish and otherwise. And she wore an apron
5:19 Speaker 04 that didn't have a strap over the neck, but that had... was pinned, pinned to her dress.
5:27 Speaker 03 Leia was born in Shedbowietz, Poland, in December 1889.
5:31 Speaker 04 She grew up in an extraordinarily poor family and told me that she was sent to work for a non-Jewish family in the nearby town when she was five, to look after their smallest children. My grandmother's sisters, certainly one of them died in Auschwitz, and there's no reason to presume that the others didn't follow.
5:56 Speaker 02 Adolf Semler was not Leia's first husband.
5:59 Speaker 04 She'd been married before, in Poland, in a Jewish marriage. And when she and her Jewish husband arrived in Germany, he discovered that, under the existing laws, if they weren't married in a civil ceremony, they weren't married. And he took off to England and was effectively never seen again.
6:19 Speaker 02 Leia and her first husband had two children: Rose, Joanna's mother, our grandmother, in 1913, and a son Bernard, in 1914.
6:28 Speaker 04 Leia tracked her first husband down. By that time, he lived in Plymouth in England. And she asked him to bring Bernard and Rose to England, because she couldn't protect them. Bernard looked very Jewish, and he was being beaten up in the street. Leia was illiterate. She didn't go to school at all. And I've always thought it was remarkable that she managed to both track her first husband down and then arrange to have a letter sent to him in England.
7:06 Speaker 03 And his response?
7:07 Speaker 04 He would have been happy to have his son certainly come to him, but his present wife wouldn't like it.
7:14 Speaker 02 Life for Leia and her children was precarious.
7:17 Speaker 04 If you were a Jewish woman in Germany and only spoke Yiddish and being the woman head of a household without education.
7:29 Speaker 04 Leia described herself as "hamstun", which means "going hamstering". Now, what does that mean? Hamsters store food in their cheeks. And Irma would lay hands on a bit of butter and she would take it to the countryside and trade it with someone for a bit of meat. Then she would trade the meat for a big basket of vegetables. Then she'd sell the vegetables, keeping some, and trade them again. But basically, the children starved.
7:56 Speaker 03 But in December 1926, she marries Adolf Semler in Hannover. Can you tell us about Adolf?
8:06 Speaker 06 What a man.
8:10 Speaker 06 When I first wrote to Wittich, wrote back to Wittich, I said, "He was my hero".
8:19 Speaker 06 And that was before I knew how he had saved Irma.
8:26 Speaker 04 He was a man of very few words,
8:30 Speaker 04 a man of very, very limited education. He could actually sign his name, but he was functionally illiterate. He called me "die Prinzessin". Now, the reason I was a princess is that he discovered when I was five that I could read. And he assumed that only extraordinary, extraordinary people could read. So from then on, I was "die Prinzessin". I failed to tell him that all the other children in the class could also read.
9:02 Speaker 06 He was
9:05 Speaker 06 not demonstrative, but I knew how much he loved me.
9:12 Speaker 02 Adolf wasn't Jewish. He was born in 1895 in Vodzenech, probably then Ukraine. He served Germany in World War I. At some point between the wars, he converted to Judaism.
9:24 Speaker 03 I remember him being tall and grey, and I feel like he still had his little moustache.
9:30 Speaker 04 He did. A most unfortunate moustache, a little Adolf Hitler moustache, a little postage stamp between his nose and his top lip.
9:37 Speaker 02 That was the style, that was the German style.
9:39 Speaker 04 Very much so.
9:40 Speaker 02 Adolf's name was a perfectly common and acceptable name until that name was sullied by association with Hitler.
9:49 Speaker 04 Quite, yes. Reaching right back into the time of Barbarossa, Adolfus.
9:55 Speaker 03 Lyra and Adolf lived in Hannover for 17 years, but in late 1943, they moved the short distance to Weynigsen. The reason ironically, as it would turn out, was to escape the Allies, who were bombing Hannover.
10:08 Speaker 02 But while it's Weynigsen where they would experience the deeply traumatic events to be commemorated on this visit, most of our family seems never to have heard of Weynigsen. All we ever knew was that our family came from Hannover. Why don't you think they talked about Weynigsen?
10:22 Speaker 04 Look, speak to anyone from Cambodia or any of those killing fields, and they will tell you that they're not burdening their children with what happened to them. I didn't know until we went to Germany together.
10:36 Speaker 02 So you think they didn't talk about it because it was just too painful?
10:39 Speaker 04 Oh, I'm sure of it, yes.
10:43 Speaker 03 But we would get to know Weynigsen pretty well. In addition to the commemoration events, the town provided us a host of other remarkable experiences. To begin with, there was our accommodation. In 400-year-old monastic quarters, looking onto a beautiful, high-stone-walled former cloisters. And where every hour, the bells ring.
11:08 Speaker 02 Then, on our first full day in Weynigsen, there was a tour of the town and the first demonstration of something we'd see again and again among the people of Weynigsen. A deep-seated acceptance that to move on from the past, first you have to accept it happened, and that your own community, even your own families, played a part in it.
11:29 Speaker 07 Ich sammle nur Briefmarken mit Abbildungen von Lokomotiven.
11:33 Speaker 04 He only collects stamps? With pictures of trains.
11:38 Speaker 03 Yeah. Our guide was a former mayor of Venixen, Franz Blazek. He's been a key player in pushing the town to look into where the Jews lived here and to remember them. A former miner turned engineer, he's in his 80s and retired now, happily fixated on his stamp collection.
11:55 Speaker 07 And mein gutter Kumpel aus Australien, aus Geelong.
11:59 Speaker 03 As mayor, Herblasek was conservative. He says he's long done with politics. But when Joanna thought left-wing former German Chancellor Willy Brandt was from Venixen...
12:08 Speaker 07 Oh, Gott, das Villen!
12:10 Speaker 04 No, God forbid.
12:11 Speaker 07 Der kommt aus Lübeck. Aus Lübeck. Der war so unehelich ein Sohn einer Prostituierten.
12:17 Speaker 04 He was the illegitimate son of a prostitute.
12:21 Speaker 03 And we weren't so sure Herblasek was completely over politics.
12:26 Speaker 02 Venixen is a pretty but sleepy place. With 15,000 people, it's too big to be quaint, but too small to have much buzz.
12:33 Speaker 03 It does have its charms, though. It's got local white asparagus, long as a ruler and thicker than your fingers. It was just delicious. Forest berries of a variety, size, and sheer flavour unknown in Australia.
12:46 Speaker 02 But there were some oddities, too.
12:49 Speaker 00 Here's a line and you have to check a little bit how many minutes it's between girllets.
12:58 Speaker 02 That's a local scientist explaining how Venixen's grand town sundial works. It's inscribed with the names of the great scientists of history, including that of Werner von Braun, notorious architect of Nazi Germany's V2 rocket programme. The United States tried to scrub von Braun's record when it bought his services after the war. But there's no outrun in the past. Von Braun played a key role in some of the Nazi regime's worst abuses, some that occurred very near Venixen, as we would see for ourselves the next day.
13:30 Speaker 03 Herr Blazek auch uns durch den schönen heutigen Heidnitzs Heiligenstätte erzählt. Wir fragten, ob es irgendwelche Juden geblieben haben. Das war alles das Ermutigung, das er benötigte, um uns einen unglaublich französischen Vorgang über den Vergleich zu den Vergangenheit zu geben.
13:43 Speaker 07 Wir haben bis vor ungefähr 15 Jahren, 20 Jahre überhaupt nicht gewusst, dass hier jemals jemand jüdischen Glaubens gewohnt hat.
13:54 Speaker 04 Oh, richtig. Sie wussten gar nicht, bis 15 Jahre her, dass jemand Juden hier lebt.
13:59 Speaker 07 Wenn mich einer im alten Jahrtausend gefragt hätte: "Hast du etwas gegen Juden?" Würde ich Gegenfrage stellen: "Wer ist denn Jude? Ich erkenne die gar nicht."
14:10 Speaker 04 Er sagte, wenn ich irgendwann in meiner Leben gefragt hätte, ob ich gegen Juden war, hätte ich gesagt: "Wer sind die? Ich weiß gar nicht, wer sie sind." Weil er sagte, wir haben nicht nur versucht, die Menschen zu zerstören, weil sie ihre Religion waren, sondern wir haben alle ihre Erinnerungen zerstört. Also war es wie wenn sie nie geblieben wären.
14:28 Speaker 07 Heidnitz war ein Nazidorf.
14:32 Speaker 04 Es war ein Nazitor.
14:34 Speaker 07 Doch, einer. Einer von dem habe ich Post. Der war im KZ Theresienstadt. Der war Aufpasser dort. Wächter war der.
14:41 Speaker 04 Oh, richtig. Es war jemand, der hier lebt, der als Theresienstadt Guard war.
14:49 Speaker 07 Hinterher war der Gastwirt. Plötzlich ist er reich geworden.
14:53 Speaker 04 Und danach hatte er eine Bar oder einen Pub, und er wurde sehr komfortabel. Wirklich danach?
15:00 Speaker 07 Dass er bei der Hitlerjugend war.
15:03 Speaker 03 Fast jeder Kind war ein Mitglied der Hitlerjugend. Für den Sport, nicht die Politik. Aber dann nochmal, so war es auch der letzte Pope Benedikt XVI, als er ein Teenager war. Nach dem Krieg erklärte Herr Blazek, wie der deutsche Bildungssystem zuerst kämpfte, um den Vergleich zu der Vergangenheit des Landes zu verteidigen.
15:20 Speaker 07 Ich bin 50 bis 59 in der Schule gewesen.
15:24 Speaker 04 Er ging zur Schule zwischen 50 und 59.
15:26 Speaker 07 Und unsere Lehrerschaft hat...
15:30 Speaker 07 "In der Geschichte, im Geschichtsunterricht bei 1933 aufgehört."
15:48 Speaker 07 "Also in Amsterdam habe ich mal von einem Gastwirt zwei richtig derbe Ohrfeigen bekommen und er hat mich 'scheiß Nazi' genannt."
16:10 Speaker 07 "Ja, wir haben einen Mitglied, der ist 98 Jahre alt, der wohnt oben in den alten Wohnungen. Der war Soldat. Er war nicht bei der SS, die eben in Frankreich ganze Kischen angesteckt haben, wenn die Gläubigen drin waren, sondern er war bei der Einheit, die immer dann, wenn es brannte, nach vorne musste."
16:54 Speaker 07 "Ich bin immer so traurig und enttäuscht, dass man diese 30.000, 40.000 Klopte, den immer noch der Nazitum heilig ist, dass wir deswegen immer wieder im Ausland als Nazis bestimmt werden."
17:13 Speaker 04 "Nein, nein."
17:24 Speaker 03 Then, the afternoon of that first day in Veniksen, the moment arrived for perhaps the reason we had come. There was going to be a special ceremony for Lya and Adolf, the laying of the Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, inscribed with our great-grandparents' names and the details of their ordeal and liberation. Joanna explained to us what stumbling stones are.
17:45 Speaker 04 They're little blocks of brass in the footpath, recording the name of people who lived there, when they were born and when and where they died. It's now the largest diffuse museum in the world. There was an expression during the time of the Nazis that if anybody stumbled in the street, "You must be living here." And Günther Demning decided that his Stolpersteine were going to remind people of that shameful episode.
18:18 Speaker 03 The stumbling stones were to be laid in the pavement outside where Lya and Adolf lived in a tiny apartment back in 1945.
18:27 Speaker 02 Lya and Adolf's former home is now Number 15 Neustadtstraße, New Nation Street. It's a peaceful, middle-class area, 15 minutes' walk from the town centre. Just like Bahnhofstraße, Herr Blazek told us this street too had a different name in 1945, Hermann Göringstraße. This renaming of streets in honour of prominent Third Reich leaders was common in that period, we were told. And the local mayor at the time was, in Herr Blazek's words, "Ein edel Nazi, a devoted Nazi, eager to ally his Veniksen with the Hitler regime."
19:02 Speaker 03 Today, 15 Neustadtstraße is a big, elegant, single home. It's got high walls, it's white, it's fashionably spare. But in 1945, this was probably an old farmhouse with some tiny apartment spaces made available cheaply to help bring in extra income. That's where Lya and Adolf would have lived.
19:22 Speaker 02 We wondered what Lya would have made of all of this.
19:27 Speaker 04 I can't imagine. She was so modest.
19:35 Speaker 04 But she was always very ambitious for me. Years ago, somebody said to me, "Do you have messages from your childhood that helped to launch you in the world?"
19:49 Speaker 04 And I said, "Yes." My grandmother used to stand on the doorstep when I hesitated and she'd say, "Geishoi," and she'd say in Yiddish, "Get going." As if to say the world's waiting.
20:03 Speaker 03 Waiting for us were about 80 to 100 people, an unexpectedly high turnout. Neighbors, officials, well wishes from across Veniksen.
20:11 Speaker 06 Ja, guten Tag. Ich möchte Sie hier alle ganz herzlich willkommen heißen.
20:17 Speaker 02 One opportunity we never imagined was to meet the current owner of the house, businesswoman Zulka Stremlau.
20:23 Speaker 06 I'm living in this house, so I'm very happy that you're here. Welcome, hello. Life to be with you, Zulka. Last week, we just know that your grandfather and grandmother have lived there.
20:38 Speaker 02 Great-grandmother.
20:39 Speaker 06 Great-grandmother. So yeah, it's a pleasure for us that you're here and we can invite you and have this action now here. It's very good.
20:47 Speaker 03 Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. Zulka even invited us back for a private tour of the home where our great-grandparents had lived more than 75 years before.
21:00 Speaker 02 The ceremony began. The duo performed the Yiddish classic "Donna Donna."
21:15 Speaker 03 Das ist eine große Zahl, aber es ist immer noch eine kleine Zahl, wenn man an die Zahl der Opfer denkt. Das heißt, es gibt noch viele Stolpersteine, die verlegt werden. The young current mayor, Inge Klockman, who was to lay the stumbling stones with Joanna, paid tribute to their creator, Berlin artist Gunter Demnik. Since starting in Germany in 1992... Demnig's been responsible for laying over 90,000 stumbling stones in some 28 European countries, all of them commemorating victims of Nazi persecution. Not only Jews, but also gay people, Romani and the disabled. "A person is forgotten when their name is forgotten", Mayor Klockerman quoted Demnig. "To lay a stumbling stone is to hand the name of a victim back to the place where they
22:00 Speaker 03 lived." The mayor thanked us for being there, calling it "a wonderful sign of reconciliation".
22:07 Speaker 02 Historian Michael Wittich, who had devoted himself to tracking down every detail of Lyia and Adolf's lives in Veniksen, recited the terrible facts of their capture from here. In February 1945, Adolf was transported to the slave labour camp. No longer able to protect Lyia, she was arrested later the same month and transported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. It was a journey of four and a half days by cattle car train, in horrific conditions.
22:39 Speaker 03 Finally, Joanna spoke. By then, the wind had kicked up. She's a crier at the best of times, so much so on this occasion, she even read a page out of order and had to go back. But she did it, and in German.
22:54 Speaker 04 Meine Damen und Herren, I stand before you today the granddaughter of Lyia and Adolf Semler.
23:02 Speaker 06 Die Enkelin von Lyia und Adolf Semler.
23:04 Speaker 04 Full of pride and gratitude. Pride in being their descendant.
23:09 Speaker 06 Stolz, ihre Nachfrage.
23:11 Speaker 04 And grateful that you have acknowledged them and the simple and blameless lives they lived in Germany.
23:16 Speaker 06 Und tadelige Leben.
23:18 Speaker 04 Opa, man of courage that he was, refused over and over again to renounce her. Opa proudly told me that whenever the Gestapo came for her, he showed them his medals and asked if they were seriously going to take away the wife of a hero of World War One. One of the first things Herr Wittich asked me was whether I had the medals. So I sent the photo I look at every day on a table in my lounge room. Herr Wittich wrote back immediately saying, "He's wearing it." Und da war es, ein kleines silbernes Band mit einem Kreuz an jedem Ende, auf seinem Lappel, das ich nie gemerkt hatte.
24:00 Speaker 04 Er hatte als Hero der Felder erstklassig gelobt. Wir können nur annehmen, dass, wenn Gestapo ihn bestraft hat, sie es ihm genommen haben.
24:13 Speaker 04 Ich möchte denken, sie haben ein Moment Scham gefühlt.
24:18 Speaker 04 Opa war ein sinnvoller Mann, ein Planer, und sehr bestimmt. Er sagte, er sagte Oma: Wir werden das überleben, und wenn es zu Ende ist, treffen wir uns in Vennixen. Wir werden es überleben, und wenn es zu Ende ist, treffen wir uns in Vennixen.
24:36 Speaker 04 Meine Mutter wurde informiert, sie haben überlebt, und sie hat es geplant, dass sie Australien erreichen würden, auf dem Post-Waffen-Refugee-Programm. Wie viele andere Geflüchtete, beide meine Eltern arbeiteten. Also waren unsere Großeltern mehr als Eltern. Und wir liebten sie sehr.
24:53 Speaker 04 Sie sagten wenig darüber, was sie getan haben. Wie viele Juden, sie machten still, und wollten uns nicht mit den Horren beschäftigen, die sie durchgemacht haben. Ich habe jedoch ein paar Augenblicken erkannt.
25:06 Speaker 04 Teresienstadt, wo Leier geschickt wurde, war eine Stelle für Trains auf der Weg zu Auschwitz. Oma sagte, wenn ich alles den Nazis verglaube, kann ich sie nicht für die Kinder verglauben. Sie hatte kleine Kinder auf der Plattform von Trains gesehen, mit Kindern, die viele jüngeren waren, die Kinder. Ein kleiner, ein paar jünger als drei, die Kinder. Sie traten kleine Kinder ein.
25:31 Speaker 04 Und morgens waren sie weg.
25:35 Speaker 04 Unsere Familie ist nicht ein besonderes Familien, auf der Gegenseite. Es ist ein normales Familien. Leier und Adolf waren ein gemischtes Ehe, ein Testament für die Fähigkeit der Menschen, sich gegenseitig zu lieben, auf der supposed Gulf von Kultur und Religion. In meinem eigenen Wege. Ich habe versucht, meine Eltern's Optimism zu erhalten, dass es eine bessere Weise gibt, dass Menschen in Harmonie leben. Sie haben ihre Hände auf Hass und Rechtfertigung abzukriegen, und sie fokussieren sich auf das Gute.
26:07 Speaker 04 Anne Frank sagte:
26:10 Speaker 04 Ich glaube in das Gute der Menschen. So did my parents and my grandparents.
26:19 Speaker 04 And so do I.
26:26 Speaker 03 Our mum wasn't the only one crying now. The Stolpersteiner were laid. It had all been perfect.
26:33 Speaker 02 But across the road was a late middle-aged man. He looked like a hippie, but he carried a flag I didn't recognise. And now he was coming across the road to us. Was this going to be trouble?
26:45 Speaker 03 In fact, he was just coming to lay flowers on our great-grandparents' stumbling stones. His name was Hamud Rama. His flag was that of the VVN, a German anti-fascist political party founded by victims of the Nazi regime.
27:00 Speaker 02 I had misjudged this man just by his appearance. The irony was not lost on me.
27:07 Speaker 03 But our antenna were up for a reason. From the start, police had been holding back another older man from getting to us.
27:15 Speaker 02 He was carrying an antisemitic sign. He was in his 80s or 90s, old enough maybe to be one of those 30,000 to 40,000, Herr Blazek had warned us, still clinging to old Nazi beliefs. And then the old man broke through the police cordon.
27:33 Speaker 01 Next time on Liar's Way Home, Michaela and Rick learn the true motive of the old man lunging towards them. And they discover the enormous sacrifice their great-grandfather Adolf made when he refused to abandon Liar.
27:50 Speaker 01 Liar's Way Home is written and narrated by Michaela and Rick Kalowski and produced by Claudia Taranto. The sound engineer is Hamish Camilleri. I'm Kirsty Melville and I'll catch you next time here on The History Listen.
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