No escape

‘They were Jews with guns! Understand that…’ declares Raymond Massey, chillingly, in the final scene of The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, first heard across America on Sunday, 12 December 1943. Notice that date: 1943. Not 1953, or even 1945. Just six months after the Jews who had been herded into the Polish capital by the Nazis lost their battle to escape certain death, American radio fans heard the rich and unmistakable voice of Massey (Oscar-winning star of a Hollywood biopic on the life of Abraham Lincoln), playing the role not just of a dead man, which was shocking enough, but of a Jewish dead man, a rabbi who had lost his life at Warsaw.

After hearing the drama there would have been no excuse for not knowing, and fully understanding, what was happening in Europe. ‘My name was Isaac Davidson,’ intones Massey, ‘and I lived in the Polish city of Lublin with my wife, Dvora, and Samuel, our son.