Ida and Louise Cook developed a following among the Jewish underground in the Third Reich, and their exploits as well as the stories of the 29 families they saved are chronicled in the new book, “O…
The small dinner party was assembled in haste at the partly destroyed gothic mansion on Frankfurter Strasse in the week after Kristallnacht.
As Adolf Hitler rose to power, Jews desperately tried to leave Germany and Austria, but visas were hard to come by, and many countries had shut their borders to Jewish refugees.Uniformed officers stand outside a Jewish-owned shop in Vienna after the widespread destruction and violence of Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938.For the Basch family, the dinner was of utmost importance — their chance to meet Ida Cook, a 34-year-old English woman who they hoped would be their savior.
“We built ourselves a reputation,” Louise Cook told two US reporters after the war. “The men in customs used to chuckle, ‘Here come those two English ladies. They are only poor office workers and they spend their money to come here to listen to German opera.’” Lisa Basch and her mother, Helene, put their last hopes in the Cooks. Oswald, his head freshly shaved, had recently been released from the Dachau concentration camp after a British business acquaintance was able to guarantee a visa for him in the United Kingdom. His two sons had already emigrated to the US, and a married daughter was in the process of leaving the country. But Lisa, then 26, and her mother were stuck in Germany with no prospects.
“For myself Miss Cook had approached a Member of Parliament to guarantee my years in England as she herself had guaranteed for too many already,” wrote Lisa, who left Germany in April 1939 and traveled to London via Paris where she stayed in the Cooks’ one-bedroom flat, which was crowded with 14 other Jewish refugees as the war began in the fall of 1939.
In addition to her harrowing escape from Germany, Lisa had lost the love of her life — a rabbi who had been shot by the Nazis in France, said Loren.
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