Peter Campion, Suzi Smeed & Dr Bella d'Abrera on The Vikki Campion Show - 8 August 2024

 

Guest 2 Overview : It's 1944 and two-year-old Suzi Smeed is being smuggled out of a Hungarian ghetto into hiding. In three days, her grandparents will be on a cattle train to Auschwitz—a place they will never leave. Separated from her parents, the orphanage that was her temporary refuge is destroyed by bombing. Suzi was hidden by good people trying to keep her alive. Her desperately searching mother did find her—surviving, just, in a barn. Her beautiful red hair had fallen out and she was covered in sores. The clothes she wore, when taken away, more recognisable than her physical features. This is Suzi Smeed's harrowing start to life, revealed in her book The Courage to Care. Her memoire details her survival of the Hungarian holocaust and fleeing to Australia as a refugee with her mum and her then successful life in Australia. Now in her 80s, Suzi visits schools to educate children about the dangers of prejudice, racism and discrimination.

 

GUEST 3 OVERVIEW : Dr Bella d’Abrera is the Director, Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs. She has BA in History and Spanish from Monash University, an MA in Spanish from the University of St Andrews and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. 

She has written and illustrated a children’s book, is the author of The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism 1484-1515 and a trilogy on the English Reformation. She is currently on the Advisory Committee for the National Archives and is also member of ‘History Reclaimed’ a counter-offensive against “fake history” comprising a group of more than 40 senior UK and Anglosphere academics. 

Bella is a regular contributor to The Spectator Australia and other media.