The Perdicaris Incident

The Perdicaris kidnapping happened in Morocco in the early 20th century, but impacted American history significantly. It has been fictionalized in writing and film, but it is plenty dramatic all on its own. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracey Stevie Wilson. We're gonna
do a quick little bit of housekeeping right out of
the gate. So first of all, big excitement because we

(00:21):
are going to Paris, France, uh, and you are listeners
have the opportunity to come with us. So if you
would like to take the French Revolution tour that we
were doing in June of this year, you can go
check that out at our website Missed in History dot com.
And then if at the top of the menu bar,
there is a little option that says Paris trip with

(00:42):
an exclamation point because we are excited, and that will
take you through to all of the information and you
two can join us as we run around Paris and
go to Versailles. And I I'm gonna cry a lot,
So if you'd like to watch me cry, now's your shot. Uh.
The other thing that we have is just in case
you didn't know, or maybe you knew and forgot, we
have a tea public store where you can get all

(01:03):
kinds of goodies. You can get various designs related to
things that have come up on the podcast, on shirts
and on mugs and on stickers and all kinds of
other things. If you would like to check any of
that out, please do that. You can also go to
our website missed in history dot com. Click on in
that same menu, bar the words store, and it will
take you right there, and then you can browse and explore.

(01:24):
We recently had one related to our our ballet episodes
that I think is quite a cute design. I didn't
do it, so I feel comfortable seeing it. We also
have a lunar beaver's T shirt, which we said we
wanted years ago when we recorded the Hoax episode. I
actually had a funny moment recently while I was wearing
that shirt. This is true. While I was traveling this weekend.

(01:45):
I had that shirt on and I was at the airport,
and I was at the airport bar waiting on my flight,
getting a couple of cocktails, and this man leaned over
and said, you have to explain what lunar beavers are
to me. It's like, okay, where do I start. I
have a podcast. There's also so um okay, so uh,
they're beavers on the moon. Wait, no, like contextualizing that

(02:07):
quickly becomes tricky. So if you buy one, prepare yourself
a sound bite when weird random strangers ask you what
it is. I also had a friend asked me about it,
but that was easier. She knows about the show. Yes, Uh,
so weird now that we were done with housekeeping. That
is the sound of me wiping my hands from housekeeping work. Uh.
We can jump right into today's podcast. So today's episode

(02:29):
was suggested by our listener Edward Uh and he became
intrigued with this story when he was watching a fictional
version of it. That was a film called The Wind
and the Lion that was made in nine. It stars
Sean Connery and Candice Bergen and Brian Keith and John Houston.
It is a very fun watch, but it plays with
reality a little bit to make it more compelling. For example,

(02:49):
the character played by Candice Bergen was in fact not
a woman, um, but she's added in to create some
potential romance. So without any embellishment or gender swap ing
of figures to create weird romance subplots, this story is
fascinating all on its own, and it happened in Morocco.
In the early twentieth century, but it impacted American history significantly,

(03:10):
and it is the story of a famous kidnapping. And
to begin, we will first give some background on the
man for whom this whole affair is named Eon Perdicaris.
It doesn't entirely surprise me that a fictional romantic subplot
was totally made up to make this into a movie,
because that's the kind of thing that happens. But it's
one of those stories where you didn't need to do that.

(03:32):
It was plenty full of action on its own. Yes,
So Eon Perdicaris has a surprisingly scant biography for a
man who had the wealth and importance that he did.
He was born in eighteen forty. His father, Gregory Perdicarius,
was Greek and was a naturalized US citizen. He had

(03:53):
married into a wealthy Southern family in South Carolina. Gregory
Perdicaris taught at Harvard as a fessor of Greek language
and lived in Trenton, New Jersey. He made a nice
fortune for himself in the gaslight industry and eventually became
the U. S consul to Greece. Ion. His son went
to Harvard, but only briefly it appears that he enrolled

(04:15):
in eighteen sixty, but he decided to study abroad during
his sophomore year, and this of course coincides with the
beginning of the U s Civil War. It is unclear
what eon stance on the conflict was, as his parents,
according to the press of the day, were split on
the issue. So according to reports that circulated during the kidnapping,
press coverage that we're going to contextualize the kidnapping later,

(04:37):
but these things came up. Gregory EON's father supported the
Union and his mother was a Confederate supporter. So during
the Civil war years, Ion was sometimes at home in Trenton,
but also spent long periods of time in England and Morocco.
Also worked writing articles for magazines, and by the mid
eighteen eighties he was living primarily into Hanjier and a

(05:00):
whome that he had started building in eighteen seventy seven.
That residence, known as Villa Idonia, was also called the
Place of the Nightingales, and it sits on hills overlooking
the city and in Tangier. Perdicaris became a well known
member of the expatriate community. He threw extravagant dinners, and
he lived a fairly free life in the way that

(05:21):
an independently wealthy man of the day did, enjoying time
with his family and occasionally writing a book or article.
He was very engaged in the community, though, and he
lobbied against diplomatic corruption in the mid eighteen eighties, a
matter which made him fairly well known to members of
the U S government. That particular case had involved a
Moroccan woman who had accused a consular protege of sexual assault,

(05:46):
and Jan Perdicaris wanted the man prosecuted outside of a
consular court. This refusal to give the woman any sort
of justice led to him writing a pamphlet called American
Claims and Protection of Native Subjects in Morocco. He published
the pamphlet himself and had it distributed in London to
try to get the attention of the European press. While

(06:07):
the American consul who had protected the accused man was
ultimately fired from his position, it was really only after
the consul's office had waged this personal war on part
Carris for this embarrassment that they felt he had caused,
which included fines and arrests and just general harassment yeah.
He was basically like, if you try him in consular court,

(06:28):
nothing's going to happen to this guy. This woman really
deserves better than this. Could we actually try this as
a trial, but they were not interested in doing that.
By the early nineteen hundreds, Pretty Caress was a fixture
in Tangier, and while he often traveled to Europe and
the US, Morocco was really his home. But Morocco was
not the most stable place. The events that unfold in

(06:50):
this episode start a month after an agreement had been
struck between England and France regarding the handling of both
Egypt and Morocco. This entent cordial basically recognized France's power
in Morocco and Britain's power in Egypt. It was sort
of divvying up the power in other countries. This augmented

(07:11):
existing conflict on a couple of fronts. So, for one,
as the Scramble of Africa had been developing, Germany had
set its sights on Morocco for itself. So among the
European countries that were trying to seize power on the
African continent, there was tension, particularly because two of those countries,
Great Britain and France had just kind of decided between

(07:31):
themselves to this plan, even though other countries had interests
in both Morocco and Egypt, including Spain, which we've talked
about in our Francisco Franco episode. Yes, within Morocco also,
there was plenty of resentment toward Europeans just strolling in
and claiming things, not only because that was a jerk move,

(07:52):
but because their own Moroccan Sultan of Dela Zies was
really making this matter worse. Of Delazes had been sultan
for ten years in nineteen o four, having succeeded his father,
Hassan the First, and he was only sixteen when he
rose to power, and Morocco had been ruled by a
regent for six years before Abdelaziz came into his own
as a ruler, which happened when the regent died, and

(08:14):
surprisingly that could be its own whole story and podcast
that is not the scope of this particular day's discussion.
As Sultan Adlazis looked to Europe for inspiration and advice,
he wanted to modernize Morocco and its infrastructure, and he
wanted to change the way the tax system worked. This
entire ideology though did not go over well. Initially there

(08:35):
was support for his reform ideas, but the execution of
them was really poor. There just wasn't a system or
administrators in place to handle all the kind of changes
that he was trying to make, so his standing as
a ruler started to look very weak to a majority
of the people, especially the people in positions of power.
Some of them felt like the Sultan was trying to

(08:56):
sell his own country to Europe and to make matters
where he had driven up the country's debt with some
very frivolous spending on wild collections of things like bicycles
and grand pianos and cars, and he was borrowing money
from European countries to pay for all of this, particularly France.
So when Britain and France enacted their Entente Cordial, it

(09:18):
really looked a lot to people like France was just
taking possession of Morocco. Not surprisingly, the state of affairs
led to a lot of conflict within the country. Not
only had France suddenly gained a whole lot of power,
but an ally great Britain had just handed it over.
So there was a deep sense of betrayal by the
government which had been working with British interests at various

(09:41):
levels for a number of years. There was also a
very real sense that a rebellion could erupt at any time,
as numerous tribes and governmental factions were all jockeying for power.
And we are about to get into the kidnapping itself,
but before we do, let's take a quick break to
hear from a sponsor. It was dinner time May eighteen,

(10:07):
nineteen o four when the kidnapping took place. There were
shouts heard from the kitchen, but this did not initially
alarm Perdicaris too much. Two of his staff, his French
chef and his German housekeeper, commonly got into a lot
of loud arguments which Perdicaris had to break up. So
after hearing all of this ruckus, he got up from
his dinner and he went to handle what he believed

(10:28):
to be a minor skirmish between two staff members in
the kitchen, and his family followed behind him to see
just what had set this whole thing off. He did
not find the housekeeper and the chef like he expected.
He found men with rifles. Initially, the part of Carresses
thought these men were their own hired guards, but they
were not. The men cut the phone lines to the

(10:49):
house and used their gunstocks to beat the servants. Ellen
Pert Carris, who was Ion's wife, resisted these men but
was not to the floor, and her son Romwell Varley,
who was her son from a previous marriage, was beaten.
The men or a group of brigands led by Ahmed
el Rasuli, and he told them so, announcing loudly, I

(11:10):
am Rasuli, z Rasuli, and this was not an unknown person. Also,
I am probably butchering that name. My apologies to anyone
who is horrified by it. Rosalie was infamous in the
area as a leader of a group of very active raiders.
Rasuli had been in conflict with the Sultan of Morocco
of del Aziz, who he challenged for power in the region.

(11:31):
Pretty much as soon as he determined the Sultan was weak,
Rasulie directed his men to saddle horses from the Perdicaris
stable and to take Mr. Perdicaris and his steps on away,
and with a gunshot to signal their exit, he and
his men set off into the night, headed toward the
Atlas Mountains, away from the main road, with the men
they had kidnapped and before she was dragged away and

(11:54):
the phone line was cut, the housekeeper had managed to
get ahold of a telephone operator and asked for help.
The housekeeper at the time, though believed that the house
was being robbed, she did not know at that point
that a kidnapping was underway. But that telephone operator in
turn called the United States Consul General Samuel R. Gumer
to tell him that the home of an expatriot U

(12:15):
S citizen outside of Tangier was under attack. Gumare, who
had been in the middle of his own dinner, immediately
went to the place of Nightingales to investigate. He set
up a guard team to cover the house and did
what he could to try to reassure the members of
the household who were still there. And then he sought
the counsel of his British counterpart in Morocco, Sir Arthur Nicholson.

(12:37):
They agreed that the situation in Morocco, including the issues
that had arisen after Britain and France had reached their
agreement about who controlled each country, had been pretty tenuous.
It made sense that Razalie would makes this kind of
a move in the middle of all that. An essence
insulting the Sultan as weak and as unable to protect

(12:57):
the wealthy foreign expatriots who were living in Morocco. Gumare
next telegraphed the U. S. State Department to convey the
seriousness of the situation and to request military assistance. And
in a way this was welcome news. We will explain
why because at this point US President Theodore Roosevelt was
serving his first term and he was campaigning for a

(13:18):
second term. So he took immediate and decisive action in
the part of Carres kidnapping by immediately ordering a naval
squadron to Morocco. This was the entire South Atlantic squadron.
That naval squadron was headed up by Admiral French Answer Chadwick,
a West Virginia born man who had been outspoken on

(13:39):
the matter of naval reform in the United States after
the Civil War ended. Chadwick and Roosevelt were a men
with similar outlooks and a lot of regards and most importantly,
the willingness to use naval force to try to achieve
their objectives. The U. S. Consul Gumare received a response
via telegraph that said warships will be sent to Tangier

(13:59):
as soon as possible, and that message also indicated though
that it could take several days for them to get there.
This was really not an ideal response. It was easy
to think that Perdic Harris might not live that long,
so no matter how many ships were coming, Gamare was
afraid they wouldn't make it in time to save the
kidnapped men. Rasuli was known to be brutal, gamare spears

(14:21):
were really justified. For one thing, Rasuli had kidnapped foreigners
living in Morocco before. A reporter for The London Times
had been taken hostage in nineteen oh three, and he
was released in exchange for several of Rasulie's men being
released from prison, but that was an unusually good outcome.
Rasulie had been in a long standing war, for example,

(14:42):
with the local governor, and he had been known to
capture the governor's men and send back their bodies in pieces.
To try to avoid a similar end for Pertic Harris
and Varley, the next step that Gama took, along with
the British minister at Tangier, Nicholson, was to reach out
to the Selta and the government and to ask them
to acquiesce to any demands that Razzalie and his agents made.

(15:06):
Gamare was genuinely afraid that any kind of delay in
responding to these kidnappers would directly lead to the death
of these two men. But communicating with the government and
the Sultan proved to be a whole other tricky problem
as well. The Moroccan foreign minister was in Tangier, but
the Sultan was in Fez, almost two hundred fifty miles.
It's about four hundred kilometers away, and today that's a

(15:29):
distance easily traversed by car in just a few hours,
but in nineteen o four that meant several days on camelback.
So Gumar and Nicholson spoke first with the Foreign Minister,
Mohammed Taurus, and each man sent a member of his
staff to Fez to make their case to the Sultan.
Because France was so heavily involved in Morocco's affairs, the
French minister was also concerned once he received word of

(15:52):
this kidnapping. It wasn't necessarily as magnanimous as Gamare's concern,
which seemed to be for the safe return of these abductees. France,
on the other hand, was trying to kind of casually
take control of things in Morocco and had approached their
position there by keeping a pretty low profile to try
to avoid stirring up trouble. Yeah, they had reached this

(16:14):
agreement with Britain and then they were just kind of
trying to subtly get a little more ingrained in government
bit by bit, and they did not want a big
event that made it apparent that they were trying to
throw their weight into the region. So having a member
of the foreign community kidnapped created a whole pot of
problems for French Minister George Saint Rene Talandier, and he

(16:35):
couldn't let people get panicked, and he also didn't want
to bring in the military and upset this very delicate
balance that he had been trying to maintain. So he
too asked the Moroccan government to just please give in
to whatever Rasuli wanted so everyone could put the whole
affair behind them as quickly as possible, and he also
sent his own people to negotiate directly with the kidnappers.

(16:58):
Kamar and Nicholson even assaulted Walter Harris, who was the
reporter who had been captured by Rasulie the year before.
They wanted to see if he knew anything that might
help them. Gamera was rapidly losing hope. He wrote in
his journal, quote, I cannot conceal from myself and the
department that only by extremely delicate negotiations can we hope
to escape from the most terrible consequences. Yeah. By that

(17:21):
point he was thinking like, we maybe have like single
digit chance of success of getting these men back. And
one of the worst aspects was that the Sultan had
already been trying to stop the activities of Rasulie for
literal years with no success. So even if the Sultan
got on board and was willing to take action, there
was every likelihood that things were still going to fall apart.

(17:43):
Four days after the kidnapping, Raisulie's terms were relayed. What
he wanted was a ransom and exchanged for the return
of yon Pert to Carris. He demanded seventy thousand Spanish
silver dollars, but that was not all. He also wanted
the region known as the to be cleared of all
government and military personnel, and he wanted the government officials

(18:05):
who had wronged him to be either dismissed or in prisoned. Further,
he wanted to be made governor of two districts, which
would essentially be completely free of taxation and the law
of the Moroccan government, and he wanted his men to
always be promised safe passage wherever they traveled in the country.
This list was far more than any of the European

(18:26):
or US people involved had expected. They had kind of
expected the ransom, but all of these political demands and
demands for power were a little bit of a surprise,
and there was literally no way that these demands could
be met without hurdling Morocco even deeper into chaos. Frantic
telegrams were being sent to the U. S State Department
to inquire about exactly when those promised warships might arrive.

(18:49):
An additional demand was also sent out by Restily. He
wanted both the US and the British to guarantee that
Morocco would fulfill the terms. So all three of these
countries had to be basically give him everything he was
asking for, and he was asking for a lot. No
countries government wanted to be on the hook for another
country giving a violent terrorist everything he wanted. Was cable

(19:10):
was sent to Washington, d C. Explaining this whole new development.
And of course this story did not stay quiet, and
newspapers around the globe picked it up and were reporting
the incident. But the reporting tended to romanticize the whole thing.
So a rich expatriot, a dangerous bandit, the U. S.
Navy speeding to the rescue. It was all just too
much for papers to resist, and they followed along with

(19:33):
every step. When President Roosevelt got the cable about the
additional demands that were being put on the United States
and Britain, he decided to send the European Squadron of
the Navy, under the command of Admiral Theodore F. Jewel,
into the Bay of Tangier to try to back up
the South Atlantic Squadron. The United States also made an
official request of the French government to come assist in

(19:54):
this matter. Yeah, even though the French government had been
doing some things, they were acting independently for um. Britain
in the US at that point, they were trying to
clean up their own mess quietly. And at this point
the US was like, hey, dude, can you please like
step it up here? Um. And while papers in the
US touted the Navy's power and boasted that if needed,

(20:14):
they could go ashore and take rising Lee by force.
Those on the ground in Morocco who were more familiar
with the situation knew better first such an act would
almost certainly lead to the deaths of both prisoners as
well as Navy personnel. Like they knew that caution and
care had to be used. Finally, on May four, twelve

(20:36):
days after the kidnapping, the first of the U. S
Navy ships finally arrived. Once his flagship, the Brooklyn had
made its way into the harbor, Admiral Chadwick met with
the Consule Gamare. The two of them contacted the Moroccan
foreign minister, who was Mohammed Taurus, who met with them
on the Brooklyn later that day. The foreign minister toward

(20:56):
the ship and had a pretty cordial chat with the
two men, but when the terms of Bresili's demands came up,
he was crystal clear that the Moroccan government would not
give up anything. So Chadwick and Gamar were left fretting
about the life of a US citizen that they could
not reach nor could they negotiate for. And we're about
to get to a pretty solid twist in the story.

(21:17):
So We're gonna pause here for a quick sponsor break.
Just as things were getting very hand ringing on the
part of the U. S officials in Tangier, the unique
and surprising question arose as to whether Perdicaris was even

(21:38):
a U. S citizen at all. So remember when we
mentioned earlier how Ion Perdicaris had left Harvard as a
civil war broke out, and then he kind of tootled
around Europe with seemingly no specific direction. So on June
one of this year that everything is going down, that's
four the U. S. State Department received a letter from
a man in North Carolina named ah Sloca who claimed

(22:00):
that he had run into Perdicarius in Athens, Greece in
eighteen sixty three, and that Perdicarius was there. He said
to become a Greek citizen. Perdicarius, it seemed, had inherited
property in South Carolina from his mother's family and it
would be seized by the Confederacy if he was a U.
S citizen. Slocum was very adamant as to the accuracy

(22:21):
of his memory in the matter and this plan that
they were switching his citizenship to keep his land safe
and if Perdicarius was not a US citizen. This whole
business surrounding his kidnapping and arrest was an entirely different
mess than the one that President Roosevelt thought that he
had gotten into. We should point out that there's some
confusion here about whether claiming citizenship in Greece would have

(22:43):
eradicated his U. S citizenship, whether he would have had
a dual citizenship. It was what like fifty years later
that that this Free Court even ruled on such a thing.
When they ruled on and it was sort of like,
this is how we've usually done it, even though it's right,
but it did make things a little confusing and nuttie,
for sure. And it does seem like if his whole

(23:05):
idea was wanting to get around his property being seized,
that regardless of what he was actually doing, his intent
was to not be a citizen a U S crotect
his Yeah. Yeah, So, after several days during which there
was silence on this whole matter from the White House,
the U. S. Minister resident in Athens was asked to

(23:26):
perform a comprehensive search of the records available to see
if there was any truth to this whole thing, and
they did discover that on March nineteenth, eighteen sixty two,
not eighteen sixty three, Jon Perdicaris had been naturalized as
a Greek citizen. Despite this revelation, which was handled very discreetly,
Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay decided to press

(23:47):
on as things had already been planned. There were seven U. S.
Naval warships at Tangier, with other countries also bringing their
military aid to bear, so to go public with the
news of Perdicariss citizenship status would have destabilized more than
just Morocco. Additionally, uh Roosevelt felt like Rizal Lee thought

(24:07):
that Perdicaris was a U. S. Citizen, so it just
made sense to leave this new information alone. Finally, on
June eight, Sultan of Dela Ziz gave it. He told
the Moroccan government to give riz Lee whatever he wanted. France,
which had been putting pressure on the Sultan to resolve
this issue by meeting the ransom requests, loaned the Moroccan
government sixty two point five million francs a few days later. Yeah,

(24:31):
little little handshaky backscratchy situation there, But carrying out of
Dela Ziz's orders to meet Rasuli's demands also proved to
be difficult, and he was not going to give up
the prisoners until all of those other promises were kept,
so a standoff continued, with a Navy fleet parked in
the waters off Tangier and Rizalie up in the mountains,
awaiting all that he had requested. Negotiations continued in an

(24:55):
effort to get the brigand to understand the difficulty in
carrying out the specifics of his demand, but he was
utterly stalwart in his position, and Rosalie's refusal to budge
had backed multiple governments into a corner, and he made
clear that if anyone were to try to harm him,
his men would kill his attackers. Things started looking up
on June nineteenth, Conso Gomer wired a message that our

(25:18):
release had been negotiated for the twenty one, but then
that deal was rescinded. On the twenty Things had reached
a breaking point. In the United States, Britain, and France
were all growing really frustrated with Morocco, which was promising
to meet Rizzoli's demands but then failing to take action
to actually do it. The US threatened to seize Moroccan customs,
that the government did not act on all of its promises.

(25:41):
And as this whole thing was dragging on, the Republican
National Convention took place in the United States from June
one to three, and Roosevelt was wildly popular and he
was certain to get the nomination, but he left nothing
to chance. He had no opposition, but he still took
every step to ensure that things went smoothly at the convention,

(26:02):
and as a consequence, the convention was actually considered a
rather dull affair. On the twenty two a telegram which
is now famously quoted as being Roosevelt's words, was sent
out to the press and to Morocco at the same time,
and it read quote this government wants Perdicaris alive or
Risui dead. This was really Secretary of State John Hay

(26:22):
who had sent this message. The version that went to
Gomare and Morocco had an additional line that the version
that was sent to the press did not have was
quote do not land marines or sees customs without specific instructions.
This was meant to galvanize the convention and get sentiments
squarely behind Roosevelt. Yeah, it was almost like it wasn't
good enough that he was going to get the nomination.

(26:43):
He wanted everyone to really want him to have it.
Uh So he thought that we would look very strong
and that would that would get his support. It may
have also made officials in Morocco feel as though decisive
action was finally being taken if it were not for
the fact that the release of Perdicaris and his stepson
Varley had already been secured. By the time they got
this message. They had been traded halfway down a mountain

(27:07):
for a bag of Spanish silver dollars. After all the
dust settled, Gamer was told about Perdicarius's citizenship status, and
the Console got a written confession from him. Ion made
the case that because he had been born a U.
S citizen, he always felt that he was, and so
he didn't seek out to reinstate his citizenship situation with
his Greek citizenship was kept secret to try to protect Roosevelt,

(27:30):
and it only came to light in a biography written
about John Hay almost thirty years later in three Ion.
Perdicaris moved to England soon after this incident ended, and
he later wrote of Rasulie that he was quote one
of the most interesting and kindly hearted native gentlemen, and
that he and Varley had been treated kindly throughout their capture,

(27:51):
and he also went on to advocate for Rasuli to
be given control of northern Morocco because of his ongoing
praise of the man who kidnapped him. Long after this
whole incident was over, Perdicarius is often characterized as having
had Stockholm syndrome, although that term was not actually coined
until nineteen seventy three. He did continue to write about
Morocco after he had left, giving his opinion on the

(28:14):
politics and the cultural complexities of a country that was
being ruled largely by outsiders. He died in London in
and Rosalie was given the positions of power that he
had asked for after this whole thing, and his people
were freed from prison, but he was ousted in nineteen
o six due to serious corruption. He was not any
better at running things than the people that he had

(28:35):
been trying to overthrow. Sultan of del Aziz was also
deposed in nineteen o seven and was replaced by his
older brother. A book of letters written to Ellen Perdicarius
during the time that her husband and son were hostages
as in the Tangier American Legation, which is now a
museum and cultural center. Yeah, they're all things that are
along the general lines of I saw the news, I

(28:56):
am so sorry. Please, what can I do for you?
But it's she has all of these amazing letters from
really notable people, so it's kind of an interesting historical
record of that moment. Do you also have some listener
mail to take us out? I do, and I am
so excited about this particular piece of listener mail. Um
it is from our listener Carrie, and she writes, Dear
Holly and Tracy, I am a huge fan. You ladies

(29:18):
keep me company during so many of my daily activities.
I can't thank you enough for all the work you do.
Last February, my daughter asked to go on a school
field trip to the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh with a friend.
To keep it short, it was amazing. We had the
opportunity to hear two survivor stories, one from a daughter
of a survivor and the other from a survivor himself,
and both were incredible. The center also has a rotating

(29:39):
exhibit and at the time was featuring Kutz Pau superheroes
of the Holocaust, stories of upstanders, heroes and survivors told
in the form of a comic book. One of the
talented artists was there to talk with the kids, and
it just so happened that I had met him a
few years earlier during a girl Scout field trip at
Pittsburgh's Tune e M. I was so enthralled by this concept.
I wanted to share it with you both. Oh. She

(30:00):
sent us a signed copy of the collection of comics,
along with a little press release style print out from
the center's website that goes into detail about what it is.
These are so amazing. So again, this is the Holocaust
Center of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, which put
this whole thing together, and it is all of these

(30:21):
artists telling the stories of all of these amazing people
during the Holocaust. Again, it is called Kotz Pau so
at c h u t z dash Pau pow Uh.
And it is amazing and the art is really lovely.
I really like the art styles in here, and these
stories are very moving. It's a number of different arts
styles because a lot of different artists worked on it.
It's so fantastic. I hope everybody seeks it out because

(30:44):
what a great way to examine history and and record it.
Uh So, thank you, thank you, thank you to the
very wonderful Carey for sharing this with us, because I
had not heard about it and now I am in
love with it because I love comics as well as history.
Have you would like to write to us, you could
do so at History Podcasts at housto works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History, and you can visit our website missed

(31:06):
in History dot com, where we have show notes and
uh episodes going all the way back to the beginning
of the show, and things that you can click on,
like that trip to Paris information and our our store.
And we also hope that you subscribe to the podcast,
which you can do on the I Heart Radio app,
at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. For

(31:30):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
staff works dot com.