Kate Chisholm

Quiet courage

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times).

issue 14 November 2009

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times).

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point.

John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to others who had been imprisoned not for crimes committed but because of political hostilities and race hatred. We heard from Valdemar Ginsburg, a Lithuanian Jew who remembered the Sunday when his family, all 14 of them, spent the entire day arguing about whether or not they should leave their home before the Nazis arrived.

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