Trudy Gold
The Bernadotte Dynasty and the Jews
Summary
A close look at the extraordinary actions of Count Folke Bernadotte (1895–1948), a Swedish nobleman who negotiated the release of about 31,000 prisoners from German concentration camps.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
There are thousands of books on the Holocaust. What I said was this, when there’s lots of debate, I tend to go to the great Yehuda Bauer. He’s written a dozen books. His history of the Holocaust is the clearest to start with. That gives you the overview. And he’s a great thoughtful man. He was also the intellectual head of the ITF IHRA as Elie Wiesel was it’s president.
The Red Cross visited Theresienstadt in June ‘44. And the Germans did an incredible sleight of hand to try and prove it was a model concentration camp. I don’t know to what extent Bernadotte was involved. He’s president of the Swedish Red Cross. That needs a bit of looking at, I will have to investigate. That’s very important.
That is a brilliant question of the ifs and butts of history, which some historians love. If the Nasibiya family had come to the fore rather than the Husseini clan in the 1920’s, you might have had a different outcome. There are so many possibilities like this.