Safe Passage

November 3, 2008
Under the pseudonym Mary Burchell, UK novelist Cook (1904-1986) wrote more than 100 novels in addition to this enchanting memoir, first published in 1950 as We Followed Our Stars. This reprint of the updated 1976 version features a new foreword by scholar Anne Sebba, and the charming, harrowing tale of the Cook sisters, Ida and Louise, whose holiday from their suburban London home to the United States and Western Europe turns from a music lover's grand tour into an international mission to save Jews from the Nazis. Passionate music fans, the Cook sisters' first foray into the world brought them into contact not just with operatic luminaries but the harsh realities of a world on the brink. With ingenuity, boundless optimism and the will to risk their lives, the Cook sisters smuggle jewels to fund the release of Jews about to be shipped to concentration camps and set up networks of satellite families for displaced Jews in safe nations. Pocked with heart-stopping moments-close calls and reunited families rank high-this lovingly written true story shines a light through one of humanity's darkest chapters.

Starred review from November 15, 2008
The memoir of Ida Cook, author of 120 books over five decades, was first published overseas in 1950 and is now available for the first time in the U.S. Ida and her sister, Louise, created forged documents and traveled the country to raise money. They bought a London flat for refugees to live in, sewed their own clothes, and traveled third class, working to save as many people as possible from Hitlers death camps. Cook writes that opera shored up their belief that there was another world to which we would be able to return one day. She viewed the music as something that counterbalanced their unhappiness at the cruelty they were forced to witness.In the foreword, Anne Sebba writes that the real power of the book is the transformative nature of music, especially the high drama of operatic music. The two spinsters knew that in the presence of their prima donna heroines, they could assume different personae themselves. After World War II, the sisters settled back into the family home in London. In 1965 they were declared Righteous Among the Nations in recognition of their work in rescuing Jews from Germany and Austria during the Nazi regime.A testament to fortitude and courage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)