Afbeelding auteur

Sue Smethurst

Auteur van Behind Closed Doors

7 Werken 42 Leden 1 Geef een beoordeling

Werken van Sue Smethurst

Behind Closed Doors (2015) 14 exemplaren
Blood on the Rosary (2019) 9 exemplaren
The Freedom Circus (2020) 6 exemplaren
Spartacus and Me (2016) 4 exemplaren
Le ali della libertà (2021) 1 exemplaar
Behind closed doors (2016) — Author. — 1 exemplaar

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female

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There are many reasons why this memoir makes fascinating reading, but for Melbourne readers of a certain age, it will also bring back memories of 'the Golden Age of children's television'. This memoir is the story of Mindla and her husband Kubush a.k.a. Michael Horowitz, known to those of us who watched The Tarax Show in the 1960s, as Sloppo the Clown. The photo inserts in the book show him just as I remember him, but you can also see him target="_top">at this photo gallery, fifth row down on the RHS.

Written by Melbourne journalist Sue Smethurst, The Freedom Circus tells the story of her grandparents-in-law, and their astonishing escape from Poland during WW2. The couple met and fell in love in Warsaw, and they married despite Mindla's parents feeling dubious about the merits of a professional clown as a husband for their daughter. Kubush, however, was no ordinary clown: he performed to sellout crowds in the world-famous Circus Staniewski. It had a permanent home in Warsaw, but it also toured nationally.

And it so happened that Kubush was away on tour when Hitler invaded Poland. Mindla could not persuade her parents and family to flee with her, but knowing what she did of the occupiers, she set off with her small son Gad on a perilous journey with a people smuggler, to join Kubush in the eastern city of Bialystok. Bialystok was, at that time before the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was broken by Hitler, under Soviet rule because the two powers had partitioned Poland between them. But Kubush wasn't there: the circus had moved on, and Kubush was on his way back to Warsaw to be with his beloved wife and child. Mindla had no alternative but to journey on to her Uncle Aldo's house in Sokolka where she was sent by the Soviets to work in a tannery.

Eventually, under pressure for Polish refugees to choose between becoming Soviet citizens or returning home, Mindla left the relative safety of Sokolka and set off on another perilous journey back to Warsaw. She was not so lucky with the people smuggler this time, and, captured by the NKVD, she was imprisoned in the Bialystok prison under appalling conditions, the worst of which was that she was separated from little Gad.

Kubush, meanwhile, since the Circus Staniewski building had been bombed, had kept himself busy entertaining sick children in the Warsaw hospital. However, in April 1940 Lala Staniewksa, the entrepreneur who managed the circus, wangled a temporary reprieve from conscription into labour gangs for her performers by reviving the circus to entertain their German occupiers. This initiative probably saved the life of the clown Faivel Ditkowski who, as a dwarf, was at risk from the Nazi eugenics program. Hitler's demand that this Polish circus be replaced by a German one, however, coincided with the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, but Lala managed to get false papers for her staff and in a brilliant manoeuvre, arranged for their escape right under the noses of the Germans.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/31/the-freedom-circus-by-sue-smethurst/… (meer)
 
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anzlitlovers | Oct 31, 2020 |

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Statistieken

Werken
7
Leden
42
Populariteit
#357,757
Waardering
½ 3.7
Besprekingen
1
ISBNs
31
Talen
1