Women in Action Series - Ida & Louise Cook

 

Ida and Louise Cross were unmarried sisters in their mid-30s who lived with their parents in a quiet London suburb in the 1930s. One wrote romance novels for Mills & Boon (the UK equivalent of Harlequin Romance), and the other worked as a secretary for the civil service. They wore homemade clothes and shared a love of opera. They loved it so much, they would go to Germany or Austria on weekends to see a performance, flying from Croyden Airport and returning via train and boat from the Netherlands

No one paid much attention to a couple of dowdy looking women, coming into Germany, plainly dressed in the clothes Ida made for them. Nor on their return trip with furs and jewellery in hand. 

You see, Ida and Louise had a secret; besides going to their beloved opera, they were collecting valuables for would-be German refugees to help them escape. The sisters found people to vouch for the refugees, people willing to house them on arrival in England and assembled the necessary paperwork for them. They even bought an apartment in London for new arrivals to use temporarily to help them settle in. The escapees would find their belongings waiting for them and could use them to finance their new lives. 

They would leave Germany through different checkpoints so as not to see the same officials twice and draw attention to the sudden acquistion of valuables. If questioned about the goods, they would lie and say things like "we can't leave them in our flat when we aren't there!". They acted, as Ida put it, "like a couple of dotty British spinsters, simple and foolish". They also used the Hide In Plain Sight method from time to time. Ida once fastened a particularly valuable diamond brooch to the front of her cheap sweater and kept her coat open the entire return trip. Anyone taking notice would have thought the brooch was just costume jewellery. 

The return trips must have been especially nerve wracking when the SS began stopping all trains to search them and the passengers. Though the sisters only mention "things getting a bit awkward" in their memoir "We Followed Our Stars" which was republished in 2008 as "Safe Passage".

When they eventually had to stop their trips, the sisters had directly saved 29 lives, mostly families. They continued to fund raise in England throughout the war. 

They were honoured in 1964 as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Ida died in 1986 and Mary in 1991.