In a ‘death-defying’ flight from the Nazis, a Melbourne Jewish family survived the Holocaust – partly through clowning.
When Mindla Horowitz announced that she wanted to marry a circus performer, her father was far from impressed. “A clown is not a husband … nothing good comes from a clown,’’ he declared.
It was 1936 and Mindla was from a large Polish family who lived hand to mouth in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, where four or five-storey buildings typically housed more than 100 families. Despite the fears of Mindla’s father that a man who plied his trade with oversized shoes and a flap of fake “jumping” hair would be a poor provider, the wedding between his daughter and professional clown Kubush Horowitz went ahead.
When World War II broke out and the Nazis invaded Poland, the older man was proved wrong: The miming, juggling and dressing up skills that came so naturally to Kubush helped the young couple and their toddler son cheat death during the Holocaust in which most of Warsaw’s Jews were annihilated. To survive, Kubush performed “in plain sight’’ for the occupying Nazis, impersonated a train conductor and later joined the legendary Moscow Circus – a move that helped free Mindla from the Russian-run jail where she languished after being wrongly accused of spying for Germany.
Melbourne author and journalist Sue Smethurst tells the couple’s extraordinary wartime story of survival, escape and ingenuity in her latest book, The Freedom Circus.
Read the article by Rosemary Neill in The Australian.