Six years ago, journalist Sue Smethurst started a family history project she nicknamed Mondays with Mindla.
Once a week she would sit down at a St Kilda Jewish nursing home and interview Mindla Horowitz — the 95-year-old grandmother of her sports broadcaster husband, Ralph Horowitz — about her life.
“Why do you want to know?” the still sharp-witted Mrs Horowitz would ask in her Polish accent. She didn’t think her story was special.
However, prompted by a tin of old photographs, gradually Mrs Horowitz told an extraordinary story of how she and her husband, Kubush, and infant son, Gad, escaped Nazi-occupied Poland in World War II.
The result is Ms Smethurst’s new book: The Freedom Circus.
Kubush, also known as Michael Horowitz, who died in 1986, performed as Sloppo the Clown on Channel Nine children’s program The Tarax Show in the early 1960s, but before World War II he was a clown with Poland’s renowned Staniewski Circus.
He had met Mindla in 1936 when he helped her up after she tripped in a Warsaw street. They married and had a son, Gad.
The couple were very happy and Kubush toured with the circus until, in 1939, it disbanded while in the eastern Polish city of Bialystokas as the Nazis approached.