Episode 176: Vivien Sieber

Vivien Siber is an experienced lecturer, speaker, BBC radio host and in-demand public speaker. In this episode, Vivien discusses the Holocaust in depth, as she is the daughter and grand-daughter of survivors with unique testimonies from family and girls saved by the Kindertransport. In Kino and Kinder the story of a European Jewish family's struggle to survive in the face of Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust is brought into the spotlight.

Vivien Sieber, reveals the terrible story through the lives and writings of the survivors, illustrating the struggle with more than eighty evocative historic photographs throughout.

In 1915, Paula Ticho's family bought a cinema in Vienna. Run by Paula and her sister, Selma, two single Jewish women, the Palast Kino was a great success. As the Nazi Party rose to power in the 1930s antisemitism reared its ugly head and the wonderful cinema was forcibly taken over.

Threatened by Hitler's rise to power, Paula sent her younger son, Peter, to safety in England to join his half-brother, Erich, before fleeing herself—a penniless refugee. As the world entered a state of war, Paula found herself a position as a matron at hostels in Tynemouth and Windermere, caring for twenty-five Jewish girls who had been evacuated from Europe by the famed Kindertransport.

Sieber uses the girls' own descriptions of their lives and those around them to weave a heartrending tale.

From the insidious rise of antisemitism during their childhood in Europe to the distress of leaving their families, adjusting to hostel life, and the trauma of surviving when most of their family perished, the accounts in this profound retelling are all at once distressing, enriching, and evocative.

Combined with the myriad realities and experiences of the Tichos, a Jewish family fleeing from the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the eyewitness details about life in Vienna, Austria and Central Europe before World War Two and in post-war London, Sieber’s memoir/history of her own family provides the deepest, most powerful picture into what it was really like in those dark, deadly years.