Tune in to Voice of Greece on Friday 27 October 2023 to listen to the 7th episode of the 14-part radio documentary series ”Silent Tracks: The people behind the Holocaust”, based Thomas Sideris’ book by the same title.
[with Greek Audio].
On this episode we follow a love story that begins in 1935 and is lost in the darkness of World War II.
It is the story of Rudolf Kaufmann and Ingeborg Magnusson.
He is Rudolf Kaufmann, is a German-Jewish man living in Königsberg, Germany, holding a PhD in Geology. In his thesis he studies trilobites, a fossilized mineral that took millions of years to form. Nazis, however, only took five years to exterminate at least 9 million people in the death camps.
She is Ingeborg Magnusson, who lives in Sweden. Inge has a strong aptitude for languages and works in Stockholm.
They meet during a wonderful summer in Bologna. It is June 1935, and Inge visits first Florence, then Rome, and finally Bologna. Rudolph is there, not on vacation, but because the Nazi regime has already dismissed him from the university where he worked. Thick darkness has begun to fall over Europe. But if Rudolph had not been in Bologna, even for this reason, he would never have met her in his life.
Rudolf and Inge met three times all in all. It started in Bologna, then he visited her in Stockholm and then Inge went to see him in Germany. But their abounding emotions and passion were channeled into the letters they exchanged. Long-winded letters that bear witness to a great, true love in the wrong era. Persecution and extermination has already begun.
What connects Rudolf to the notorious Nazi Jules Streicher? Will he make it out of Germany before he is led to the ghetto? Will Inge find a way to communicate with him after 1936?
Through this breathtaking love story, light is shed on the historical context of Nazi crime, the greatest crime ever committed against humanity.
Research, documentation, presentation: Thomas Sideris – journalist, Ph.D. in Social Geography
