"We didn't know -- imagine! In these days we didn't know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany already had the seeds of tragedy in it."
"By the time the full horror of what was happening in Germany, and later in Austria, reached the newspapers, the whole thing had become almost too fantastic for the ordinary mind to take in. It took a war to make people understand what was happening in peacetime, and to tell the truth, very many never understood it."
"All that the ordinary man in the street thought about this was that "that man" was at it again and that Germany seemed likely to be a perpetual pain in the neck to those who wanted a quiet life. The Nuremberg Laws was a vague term to most people, very imperfectly understood -- except for the fact that they were something Hitler had thought up against the Jews. And, if the Jews were being put in their place in Germany, some people thought it was not a bad thing."
"On the terrible ninth and tenth of November, 1938, throughout Germany and Austria and the borders of Czecho-Slovakia -- now under German domination -- the order went forth that every male Jew between the ages of eighteen and sixty was to be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. And with very few exceptions, this came to pass, in circumstances of the most horrible brutality."
Safe Passage, Ida Cook : The Remarkable True Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis

The passages above are excerpted from a memoir originally published in 1950, republished in 1976 as We followed Our Stars, by Ida and Louse Cook, two British sisters whose parents raised them to be resolute and morally sympathetic adults. And their daughters did not disappoint their parents' expectations. Which were never spelled out to the girls, but which they had emulated from their parents' expressions and values, adopting them as their own.

Ida Cook eventually became a 'romance writer', a writer of what we call today, pulp romance fiction so popular among women as steamy romances. Neither sister ever married, so Ida's imagination filled in all the gaps in her and her sister's experience of intimate relationships between men and women. She was a writer born, however, and eventually began to earn quite a bit of money from her popularized stories, money she used for twin passions the sisters shared.

They shared a love of opera, and even as young and timid, but determined adults in their early twenties, set out to experience opera as it was mounted in Germany and in the United States, taking passage that they could barely afford to visit those countries, eventually becoming familiar to and friends with operatic stars, through the force of their personalities and obvious love and knowledge of that branch of musical performance.

This memoir was re-discovered and re-published in 2008. Oddly, but perhaps fittingly enough, by the very publishing house renowned for the publication of tawdry romance novels which had never lost their popularity with the reading public whose tastes veered in that direction. Serious readers of classic literature tend to shiver with distaste at the very name of the publishing house -- Harlequin. But this later re-publication of the sisters' World War II recollections has the Harlequin imprimatur.

And it turned out that their passionate attachment to opera opened the door for the two sisters to view what was happening in Germany to the persecuted Jewish community under the banner of the Third Reich.  Their operatic contacts in New York and then Germany introduced them in an intimate manner to the plight of German Jews and eventually the two sisters became integrally involved in aiding desperate Jews to find temporary haven in Great Britain until they were able to move on to permanent settlement there or elsewhere.

It is their dual story of their love for opera, the characters of operatic renown who became their personal contacts, and their dedication to the task of helping desperate Jews to find passage and safety out of Germany and Austria that this book focuses on. Since Ida was a professional writer, the book itself is well written, describing in fond (opera) terms their experiences and in horrified terms (the looming Holocaust) their knowledge and involvement in rescue.

They were able to bring 28 Jewish families out of harm's way by risking their own safety and security in their many purposeful trips to Germany and Austria to interview potential 'cases' that they took on, spending whatever profits were made through the publication of Ida Cook's many romance adventures which people paid attention to while studiously remaining ignorant of the colossal tragedy unfolding on the Continent predating and during the dreadful Second World War years.