Ida and Louise Cook

Ida and Louise Cook were unmarried sisters in their mid thirties who lived with their parents. One wrote romance novels for Mills and Boon (England’s Harlequin equivalent) and the other commuted from their sleepy London suburb to work as a secretary for the civil service. They wore home made clothes and shared a love of opera. They loved opera so much, they would go to Germany for the weekend just to see the opera there.

The Cook sisters were born in the early 1900s, and – in common with a lot of their generation in the wake of the deaths of so many young men during World War One – never married, living quietly at home with their parents in south London.. Their passion in life was opera, and they became ardent fans – in the words of their nephew John Cook, “opera groupies” – attending performances and waiting at stage doors in the hope of getting autographs. They also wrote to their favourite opera stars and in 1934 visited the Salzburg Festival, where they were befriended by the conductor and impresario Clemens Krauss.

It was his wife who suggested they “look after” a friend who was visiting London and she opened their eyes to the situation Jewish people living in Germany and Austria faced at the time. Speaking in a BBC radio interview in 1967, Ida Cook said: “I can’t emphasise sufficiently how we stumbled into this thing. “This friend opened our eyes into the appalling situation Jewish people in Germany found themselves in. They were without any rights as human beings at all. “There were restrictions on all aspects of life and although Jews were at this stage able to leave the country, they were unable to take money or possessions with them. Those wanting to come to Great Britain had to prove they had a job to go to or sufficient funds to live on – the latter presenting huge difficulties due to the money prohibition. Ida and Louise were able to help them get around this Catch-22 situation by smuggling their valuable goods across the border. The sisters would arrive in the country plainly dressed without coats, travelling home decked in jewellery and furs, which they pretended were their own.

In the 1930’s. No one paid attention to them crossing the border, a couple of dowdy women in their homemade clothes, nor on the return trip with their furs and jewels. What Ida and Louise were doing, in addition to going to their beloved opera, was collecting valuables from would be refugees to help them in their new lives. The sisters would find people who would vouch for the refugees, find people willing to home them, assemble papers for them, and even rented an apartment as a temporary space for refugees just arrived. The sisters used their own money for this, so the refugees could sell their valuables for money to help them settle in.

The women entered and left through different checkpoints, so the same guards wouldn’t be able to notice their sudden acquisition of too much jewellery, and created a lie about the valuables in their purses as ‘we can’t trust them in our apartment when we aren’t there!’

 They also persuaded people to vouch for refugees, by offering work or financial guarantees, to satisfy the British requirements for immigration. Soon the Cook name went around and they began getting “the most pitiable appeals” from people wanting to leave. At that point Ida – then earning £5 a week as a shorthand typist – wrote what she described as “a light romance” which was published by Mills and Boon. Over the course of the next 50 years, under the pen name of Mary Burchell, she wrote about 130 novels for the publisher and “the money just kept coming in”.During the late 1930s this funded the sisters’ trips to Germany and Austria.

They acted simple and foolish and were never caught.

When their frequent visits aroused suspicion, Krauss, who was then director of the Munich Opera House, stepped in. He arranged for performances – sometimes letting them choose which one – in the cities and on the days they requested. This allowed them to do their work amid what Ida later described as “some of the greatest operatic performances of the century”. They did eventually halt their visits over the border, after directly rescuing 29 people (mostly families), but they did not stop working. They continued to raise money and awareness, and to help refugees in England.

The sisters were honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, in 1964.

As a permanent reminder of the sisters’ heroism, Sunderland Council unveiled a blue plaque at the entrance of Croft Avenue, which was their childhood home. Joining local dignitaries for the ceremony, Tony Wortman, chairman of the Newcastle Reform Synagogue, said: “Ida and Louise Cook saved many Jews… many of whom are still living and now surrounded by their children and grandchildren. “For them, life has gone on but this would have not been so had it not been for their bravery and I am pleased to be invited to honour them on behalf of all those they saved.

Ida wrote a memoir that was republished as “Safe Passage” in 2008. In it she plays down their role, saying that what they offered wasn’t much. In exchange for saving lives, they only needed “some trouble, some eloquence, and some money.”