Jewish War Brides of World War II

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On Tuesday, May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the allied forces, ending World War II in Europe, although the war with Japan would stretch on for four more months. For the Jewish people who had been imprisoned in concentration camps, forced into hiding, or exiled from their homes, the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender did not mean an immediate end to their suffering. The liberation of concentration camps had begun before World War II ended, as Allied troops advanced through the regions where the camps were located. The prisoners who were liberated though, did not just walk out of the camps and back into their lives. Many were desperately malnourished and ill, in need of medical assistance, along with food and clean water. As survivors navigated the ravages of war torn Europe, learning the enormity of their losses, and trying to make some kind of plans for the future, some Jewish women survivors found the beginnings of the new life as they met Jewish military officers from the allied forces and fell in love. These couples met in displaced persons camps, or in synagogue. In some cases, the man had been part of the forces who had liberated the camp where the woman was imprisoned. Despite the many challenges they faced, including sometimes not having any languages in common, they managed to date and even to marry. They weren't alone. During and immediately after World War II, over 200,000 American military personnel married women they met while serving abroad, as did more than 40,000 Canadian military personnel. The huge numbers of war brides caused an immigration challenge in the United States. Immigration was still regulated by the Immigration Act of 1924, which had set quotas for immigration from each country, and which completely prohibited immigration from Asia. These national origin quotas would have made it difficult, or even impossible for most war brides to obtain visas, in order to ease the way for the spouses of military personnel to emigrate. On December 28, 1945, the United States Congress passed the War Brides Act to, "expedite the admission to the United States of alien spouses and alien minor children of citizen members of the United States Armed Forces." Through the act, dependents of military personnel were exempted from the national origins quotas. The act went a step further, providing for their free transportation to the United States, often on refit military ships that would bring hundreds of military dependents to the United States on each voyage, in what the United States military called Operation War Bride. It's worth noting here, that despite the name, the act did allow for war husbands, as well as war brides. Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, 350,000 were women, and some of those women did meet and marry civilian men during and just after the war. The overwhelming majority of these war marriages though, were between military men and civilian women. We don't know how many of the war brides were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but they would have been a minority of the overall group. The largest group of war brides, were the over 60,000 British women who married American soldiers. Because British war brides were the largest group, much of the advice for war brides was directed to them, and the social clubs that formed in the United States would have catered to them as well. Jewish war brides, whose experiences and backgrounds were very different, could feel like outsiders. There were other Jewish immigrants coming over from Europe to the United States, some, survivors of the Holocaust, who couldn't or wouldn't return to their previous homes, and who often felt unwelcome in other parts of Europe. The United States was slow to act on the issue, but finally, in June, 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed for up to 200,000 European displaced persons to be admitted to the United States over a limited period of time. President Harry Truman, who had previously issued an executive order to allow for the immigration of displaced persons, signed the bill into law, but issued a scathing statement of its inadequacies, excerpts of which I will read here. "If the Congress were still in session, I would return this bill without my approval, and urge that a fairer, more humane bill be passed. In its present form, this bill is flagrantly discriminatory. The bad points of the bill are numerous. Together, they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance, wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice. The bill discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith. This brutal fact cannot be obscured by the maze of technicalities in the bill, or by the protestations of some of its sponsors. The bill reflects a singular lack of confidence by the Congress in the capacity and willingness of the people of the United States to extend a welcoming hand to the prospective immigrants." In 1950, Congress amended the act, removing some of the more restrictive stipulations, and by 1952, over 80,000 Jewish displaced persons had immigrated to the United States. However, Jewish war brides did not always feel at home in communities of Jewish Holocaust survivors either. One of the Jewish survivors who married an American soldier and moved to the United States was musician, Flory Jagoda, whose most famous song is the "Ocho Kandelikas," a Sephardic song played each year during Hanukkah. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Robin Judd, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, and author of, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust."

Hi, Robin, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Robin Judd  9:31  
Thank you so much for inviting me to be here.

Kelly  9:34  
Yes, so I just loved this book. My own grandmother is a World War II war bride. So it was I learned a lot. It was sort of deeply meaningful. So I'm thrilled to have read it.

Dr. Robin Judd  9:45  
I had no idea that she was a war bride.

Kelly  9:48  
I had no idea there were so many of them! 

Dr. Robin Judd  9:51  
There were. And that was for me too, like part of the exciting realization as I was doing the research for this project.

Kelly  10:00  
Yeah, so talk to me about the inspiration. You talked about this a little bit in the epilogue of the book, but your own your own personal connection and why you wanted to do this research.

Dr. Robin Judd  10:10  
I long had been interested in questions and narratives that tell us larger stories. So my first book looked at debates over Jewish rituals as a way to tell 19th and 20th century Jewish history. And when I was thinking about the second book project, it was really important to me that I do something similar, where I ask a question that would tell a story that we think we know. But perhaps when we ask the question and do the research, it tells us a story in a slightly different way. And I had started down one path, but it was around the same time that I was teaching my history of the Holocaust course. And this memoir written by Gerda Weissmann Klein that I was teaching that it ended with her talking about meeting the man that liberated her, and I thought to myself, "Oh, my gosh, that's so funny. My My grandmother was a war bride," and, and so I began to sort of think more about this particular kind of experience, you know, "Who were the survivors who married military personnel, and how many were there?" And I assumed that there just weren't that many. The way my grandmother told her story is that it was exceptional. And in part because of how she dealt with the trauma of the Holocaust and the war, she really didn't want to talk about her own experience. So for me, it was beginning to kind of peel back the various layers of the onion, both that onion of my grandmother's story, but also the way in which we've told narratives about the history of the Holocaust, that encouraged me to keep digging, to research a little bit more, interview one more individual, find out what I could about the war bride ships, and then slowly but surely, I found myself with enough material to write a book. 

Kelly  12:05  
So let's talk some about the material then. So that, you know, there's lots of stuff out there on Holocaust survivors, there's less stuff but some stuff on war brides, but finding the people who are both and figuring out who they even are, you know, and sort of searching that out. How did you go about doing this research? It's a transnational project, you're in multiple countries. How do you how do you do that research? What were the sources you were looking at and able to find?

Dr. Robin Judd  12:34  
When I began the project, I thought that I would be writing an article around Holocaust survivors who married American GIs in occupied Germany. And so by start starting the project that narrowly, it allowed me, I think, to approach this large transnational project in a way that was not overwhelming. It was it was truly baby steps. And so that means that as I began the research and realized that I could not limit myself to Holocaust survivors in occupied Germany who married American GIs, was when I realized that I would need to expand. It forced me to go back and revisit some of the archives that I had already visited. But I think it made for a better book. So how did I do the research? I tried to cast as wide of a net as possible. I knew that during the Second World War, chaplains were heavily involved in the marriage processes. And so I thought that if I looked at the materials of Jewish chaplains, I would discover some materials around these couples. I created classified ads in Jewish newspapers, and Jewish War veteran magazines and journals. And that generated a fair number of interviews for me. Random keywords that that one begins to accumulate as one begins to learn more about these kinds of marriages. And that then allowed me to find materials and individuals. I looked at the wedding announcements of Jewish newspapers in the US and then in Britain and in Canada, because often the families of the American, British, and Canadian soldiers and officers wanted to announce their usually sons, but sometimes daughters, marriages abroad. So there were many ways in which I began to solely do the research. This was a great second project. This would not be the kind of project I would encourage my graduate students to do for their PhD. It took a really long time, it took me to several different countries, it made me brush off some of my college French that I haven't used in years and years and years. Right. But part of what was so exciting about the project was the very different kinds of sources that I was able to use.

Kelly  15:30  
There's multiple communities that these women are part of, mostly women that we're talking about. I wonder, though, if we could start with the community of being survivors of the Holocaust, and not necessarily in the camps, but survivors in some way in war torn Europe. So could you talk about what that was like? I think a lot of us have maybe read things about the Holocaust, but not so much about what happened right after what you know, the, as you say, in the book, like people expected liberation to be this, you know, happy moment.. It was still a fairly harrowing. So can you talk some about that, what life was like on the ground, especially for the Jewish survivors of the war and the Holocaust?

Dr. Robin Judd  16:16  
One argument that was really important for me to be making throughout the book, but particularly in those early chapters, when I'm discussing the period, during and immediately after the war, was an argument about the difficulty of liberation. And there were so many of these survivors who said to me, "You know, I thought liberation was going to be this happy moment. I had been praying for liberation, and then liberation came. And I had nowhere to go and no family to turn to. And I didn't know the language of the place where I was, and I had to get myself from point A to point B, or perhaps, I was in point A, and I was interned in point A, because the Americans, British and Canadians didn't want us to be traveling and perhaps taking whatever diseases we might have and spreading them." So there were so many layers of trauma and horror, that was part of the liberation experience. And when I originally began to sort of imagine what the outline of the book was, would be like, I first thought that I would start with encounter when these often women and men meet for the first time. And as I started to sketch out that chapter, I realized I needed to take a step back, and actually begin with that moment of liberation, recognizing that even that moment, didn't necessarily begin in 1945. It might have begun in 1943, for someone like Flora Yagoda, who was technically an Italian war bride, because she's in Bari, Italy, but it begins far later in 1945, for someone like Gerda Weissmann Klein, who is liberated in Czechoslovakia. So where one was located also would make a tremendous difference in one's liberation experience. 

Kelly  18:29  
And so,talk through then, a little bit this, you just call it the moment of encounter, you know, the, it's often not always, fairly soon after liberation that these couples are meeting. So what what does that look like? And, you know, I think it's interesting that so many of them it was both the military husband and the survivor wife are both Jewish, or, you know, perhaps very different backgrounds, but maybe both Jewish. So could you talk a little bit about those encounters, how they found each other, the probably really complex emotions that go around this horrific moment, but also they're finding each other and starting this new relationship. 

Dr. Robin Judd  19:13  
What really struck me about these encounters was the frequency with which I found that the site of encounter meant something to the individuals that I was studying, and very often, what was meaningful about that site, and I don't mean meaningful necessarily in a positive valence. It could be a negative meaning, but what imparted meeting was that these were imagined or seen or experienced as a Jewish sites, so places where their Jewishness mattered, and that might be literally the liberation from a camp, like Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein, the man that she eventually marries. It could mean being having that encounter at a Zionist youth circle, like Clara and Daniel Isaacman. It could be meeting at a synagogue service. It's so very often, the place of encounter was a way in which these couples created a lot of life for themselves, that has as his origin, "Jewish" base, and I put Jewish in quotes, because they're not always synagogues. They're not always Zionist youth meetings. But even one of the stories that I tell in the book, the couple meets on the, on a street in a French city, but they tell the story, as they're meeting on a street near a home that had the Mezuzah, the the kind of ritual kind of object that that is affixed to a door post in in Jewish homes. For them, right that they sort of turn their bodies, they turn their gaze in to that Jewish site, and was really struck by the way in which these Jewish spaces seemed to matter. And that's not to suggest that if we were to study a different group, that we might not find something similar in terms of that specific identity group. But in the case of these Jewish couples, so many of them did reflect back on meeting at the camp, meeting in a DP center, meeting in a Zionist circle, meeting at a Jewish education class, meeting at a synagogue service, that they were all these Jewish sites. 

Kelly  22:00  
I want to talk some about the challenges that these couples faced. And there's both sort of the mundane challenge in a sense that any war bride might, you know, there's the immigration and figuring out how we're going to get somewhere and being allowed to marry and all of that, but there's also the very particular challenges for this group. Maybe they don't have surviving family, their family is torn apart, they can't get records. They don't have language skills that are in common with their their spouse. So could you talk some about this sort of very, this, you talked about the layers of the onion earlier, sort of the layers of these challenges that these couples are facing?

Dr. Robin Judd  22:41  
I'm not going to do it, but I keep wondering, "Should the next book be about all the couples that don't get married?" Right? Because there are so many impediments to marriage and immigration for these couples. So first of all, they meet, but very often, they don't share language. So the first impediment impediment number one is how they can communicate with one another to get from encounter to marriage, right? You know, and so just even that process, in terms of how do they figure out what, when they're going to meet next? Or if they're going to write letters, how they'll send those letters, if they're in places where either they can't send a letter to a civilian or civilian can't receive a letter from a member of the military personnel? How are they going to communicate? So then the first immediate level challenges? To me that was sort of number one, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the question of communication. Was there a translator? Did they use dictionaries? What do their letters look like if we're lucky enough to follow their letters to see the ways in which they're perhaps slowly expanding vocabulary or moving from short notes to longer letters? Then we have, where are they actually going to be able to spend time together? This is a devastated landscape. And how is it that they are going to be able to find a moment where they can have privacy, where they can enjoy one another, where they can create the kind of relationship that might lead to marriage? And so that was sort of another set of hurdles that I tried to unpack as best I could. Once they create a deep enough connection that they are discussing marriage, whether that might be on day five, or after six months or after a year, what does that conversation look like? How do they come to that realization? Do they understand one another well enough to even understand what the topic of conversation is? And if they decide to get married, how they go about doing so and and I spend a good bit of time in the book, trying to unpack the really difficult policies around fraternization and marriage that differ depending on place and time and enforce of occupation. Then it becomes a question around the marriage itself. Who's going to do the ceremony? What will that ceremony look like? Does the timetable work with the military force in question? Will there be enough lag time for the couple to get married, and then for either husband or wife to be demobilized and leave the country? Does that country have a policy around fiances? And if the answer is no, then what mechanisms will the couple use in order to speed in or hasten their marriage so that they can end up together? So that was sort of another bucket. And then if you will, that wait time. Once the couple receives permission to marry, the survivor is no longer considered a DP a displaced person, or a returnee. That individual is now the fiance of an American, Canadian, or British soldier or officer. And so then all of a sudden, the whole nother set of things for these individuals to navigate? Do they want to take advantage of housing that's outside of the DP sector? Do they want a job on the army base, and not be with their friends that they had been living with in a small boarding house? And then we have immigration challenges, right? Will? Will they get their papers? Won't they get their papers? Will they be turned away? Will they be accepted? Will they will they pass the screenings at these various war bride centers and camps? For some of them, the screening is traumatic, because it it makes them revisit "medical examinations," which I put in quotes that they may have had during the Nazi years, or worse if they had been sexually abused or harassed. And then we have immigration itself, the process of being on the ships or these planes with individuals with whom they may or may not share the language, where they are being taken care of which I would put again, in sort of quotation marks by a Red Cross and a group of volunteers that imagine war brides as being very unlike the survivors that are there. And then they come to the US, Britain or Canada, and most often will be settling with their spouses' families, and now they're going to be trying to build families in a family setting that is entirely unfamiliar to them. And so there just was sort of layer after layer after layer of hurdle that made me just sort of amazed that there were any couples that actually ever got married and then emigrated and then settled in the US, Britain or Canada.

Kelly  28:59  
I was surprised, I guess, to see that there were such large numbers, not of the Jewish war brides specifically, but of war brides in general, that countries were actually changing laws to adapt to this. Could you talk a little bit about that? I mean, my own grandparents, as it turns out, benefited from some of those changes.

Dr. Robin Judd  29:18  
I think it's amazing that your grandmother was a war bride. Although again, it shouldn't amaze me because when I go speak with various audiences, invariably somebody will say to me, my grandmother was a war bride. My parent was a war bride, my sixth grade French teacher was a war bride. So absolutely. Beginning really in the First World War, although the war bride phenomenon predates it. Already, Britain, Canada, their governments were already sort of taking into consideration taking into account that military personnel were often marrying when they were serving abroad, and had long had a series of policies around wives that were "on the regiment" or "off the regiment," by whether they receive approval or don't receive approval. But certainly in the First World War, they're sort of the beginning of these policies. And in Canada, in part because so many of the first war brides are from Britain and Canada is a Commonwealth country, there develops a set of immigration policies that circumvent existing ones. As we move into the second world war, those numbers exponentially increase. So we're looking at over 200,000 war brides come to the United States, for example, which is quite staggering when we think about it. And in 1945, December of 1945, the US joins Britain and Canada in developing worldwide legislation that circumvents existing legislation. So one of the couples that I was able to interview, the woman, Lala Fishman, remembered that when she first met her husband, she met him because she was wanting to ask about how she might emigrate to the United States where she had a great uncle. And Morris Fishman allegedly said to her, "You are a beautiful woman, you should find a soldier and marry him and go to the United States like a war bride." And so part of the undercurrent or part of the, the narrative that I was dealing with, that these war brides and their spouses are dealing with, has to do with the concern, the hesitation the ambivalence over these war brides, like on the one hand, the war brides seem to demonstrate and affirm the allies in a spectacular humanitarian nature, their alleged, you know, skill and strength, their ability to beat Germany, right and Japan, but on the other, the worldwide. Oh, they also represent something different, something potentially deviant something strange. And so we see a fair bit of ambivalent treatment of the war brides in the American/British/Canadian Press. They're both heralded and touted. But then foreignness is also invoked and thrown into relief. So we see sort of both things happening at once. And I'm often I often sort of sit with how hard it must have been for any of these war brides to make a life in the US, Britain or Canada, and particularly for those individuals who didn't have English. How spectacularly difficult it must have been.

Kelly  33:04  
I want to talk about these war bride ships, because I did not realize that they existed. And I after reading your book, I looked up the ship manifests that my grandmother came over on and turns out she was on a war bride ship. I had no idea. So she was a British nurse who married an American soldier. And so she sailed out of Southampton, UK in March, 1946. So I looked it up and SS Bridgeport that she was on is one of these ships that was like recommissioned just to bring hundreds of war brides over. This is such a fascinating thing that there were so many and that they were coming from certain places that they actually had entire ships. And so I wonder if you could talk about that. But then also talk about how some of the war brides that you're looking at, maybe didn't fit in so well on these ships.

Dr. Robin Judd  33:10  
I found the ships so wildly fascinating, because they often are these huge ocean liners that are carrying demobilized military personnel, anywhere between dozens and hundreds of war brides and their dependents. So infants, young children, etc. And you might have survivors, refugees, other travelers as well. So these multiple communities on these large war bride ships, they're often departing from one of three or four major war bride sort of spaces or centers. But again, they're not the only ones leaving from those sites that but they're separated from their other travelers. So you have demobilized soldiers that are you know, being screened in one location. You have our war brides in another. You have your other travelers in the third, right? And so there's some mingling but also a fair bit of separation. And there are several different kinds of war bride ships. And the war bride ships that were often talked about the most were the liberty ships, which are ships that are sort of commissioned and repurposed for the war brides that were essentially supposed to have been taken sort of off the market out of the water after the Second World War. And yet, because there was such a need to bring the military personnel home, and also the war brides "home" and I put home in quotes, because they're not they're going to their new homes, not their old homes, that the liberty ships get used. And those are not ships where we see some kind of ship disaster taking place. But there seems to be a disproportionate number of them where there's some kind of mechanical failure, or some delay. And then number of ships where there are these illnesses that take hold, and really kind of ravage the infants on board. And so the ships themselves are these sort of large, almost like mini cities, and they depart from even larger mini cities and in some cases, like in Tidworth, which is by Southampton, right? You have, you have not just places where you are screened and where you would bunk and where you would eat and where you might have some kinds of Americanization classes, or Canadianization classes. But you also have some of the war bride camps, like the cigarette camps, which are in in France, where they have markets and cinemas. And they're they're essentially almost like these small cities and they're remembered as such. So they're, they're really these sort of large, I envision them as sort of boisterous spaces. And the war brides tend to remember them that way as well. They often write about or complain about having many many bunks in a room, sharing their space with own children, but other women and their children. They talk about the medical screenings before they are able to board. Many of them are on ships where only English is spoken on board. Because the vast majority of demobilized soldiers and war brides speak English. On some ships, they do, depending on staff make announcements in a number of different languages. So there are some ships that leave from France or leave from Germany, where they also may make announcements in French, or in German. But as one war bride recalled on those ships, what would happen is they would make the English announcement first, and then they would move on to the other languages. Well, the English speaking war brides will then start to chatter with one another. And so often, even if there had been, let's say, an announcement in German that somebody may speak or an announcement in French, there was so much happening around them that they might not have been able to pick it up. Or as one bride, recalled to me that the French was so awful that was spoken by the staff person on the ship that she couldn't quite understand right, what he was trying to say. And at one point had him write it down. Because his written French was better than his spoken French, which also kind of reminded me of me, which is you know, I do very well with printed materials, but put me in the archive. And I often have trouble remembering how to say like,"Where's the bathroom," or  "How do I find the water fountain?"

Kelly  38:59  
""My French is the same way. So I sympathize. 

Dr. Robin Judd  39:02  
Yeah, right. Much better on in the with the written word. So we have very few Jewish brides among the totality of brides. And I was really interested in learning more about their experiences. There were very few war brides that I interviewed who felt comfortable speaking in detail about what it was like on the war bride ship. Many of them said, "I didn't understand what happened, what was happening around me," if they had children, "I focused on my children." These were long journeys. I mean, this was not an overnight ship home. And so I wish I could have learned more. Instead I sort of had to pull out, either from the materials of the individuals who were willing to talk about their experiences on the ship, or from other war brides, non-Jewish war brides who remembered the Jewish brides. So, I had an amazing opportunity to interview an American Red Cross nurse who was on a  number of different ships and she spoke with me about the difficulty of these women, I mean, she didn't use the language of survivor, but she talked about women who had suffered in the Nazi years who couldn't understand anything around them and kept to their room. So, I have a sense that these were incredibly lonely times for many of these war brides.

Kelly  40:38  
And then in some cases, those lonely times might have continued once they got to the US. So they were, you know, at the very least, possibly reunited with their new spouse, although maybe not yet. But, you know, trying to find their way in a community where again, they might not speak the language. They might not have a lot in common with other war brides but also don't have a lot in common with the other survivor community. You know, can you talk a little bit about that then sort of what what life was like once they were in their new home?

Dr. Robin Judd  41:08  
Part of the reason why we decided to stick with the title, "Between Two Worlds," was because it felt as if there was no point really, during the story that I tell where the war brides felt solidly as if they were in one place. Right, they always were kind of in between, or moving between different communities. And that was certainly the case when they arrived in their new homes. They often were living with in-laws that they had not previously met. In many cases, these in-laws did not approve of the marriages in the first place. And so these war brides knew that they were coming into a somewhat hostile environment. I mean, as we all know, if any of us had been had been married or are married, right, relationships with in-laws are fraught, to begin with. These relationships were particularly fraught. In some cases, families had been invested in former girlfriends or fiances, and so there were, the women who were left behind are women's groups that are being asked to help guide these Jewish war brides into assimilation, into acculturation. And those women are somewhat ambivalent, because in some cases, they imagined themselves as the lawful future spouses of these men coming home. And there's a lot of talk about a potential spinster crisis that may take place. The Jewish war brides, not language or know the cultural mores. They may be Sephardic Jews originating from the Iberian Peninsula and their ancestry and find themselves in an Ashkenazi home, a home that originates in central and eastern Europe or vice versa. So there are just so many ways in which they're saying like, they don't totally belong. And in some cases, they may go to a war bride club, and everyone speaks English, and that's not their language. So they're just all these moments after the war, but still not feeling as if they're in a room of their own. And in that last chapter, I cite a woman who I don't think was was invoking Virginia Woolf, but where but she might have been where she was, she said, "I just, I just really wanted a room of my own." And, you know, she wanted to get out of her in-laws' house, and she wanted a moment of quiet and she wanted to be able to spend time in a survivors club, and yet her husband's family was taking her in a different direction.

Kelly  44:06  
Well, this is a fascinating story, a fascinating book. Can you tell listeners how to get a copy of the book?

Dr. Robin Judd  44:13  
Thank you so much. I hope the listeners will want to read the book. I really wrote it for a general audience, because I think it's such a great story. They can get the book from their favorite bookstore or online at Amazon or Barnes and Noble books, or they can purchase the book from the fabulous press itself, UNC Press, the University of North Carolina Press.

Kelly  44:37  
Robin, thank you so much for speaking with me. I love the book and it made me think a lot about my Grandma and her story. And so it just was, it was so much fun to read. 

Dr. Robin Judd  44:49  
Thank you so much. It just means so much to me that you enjoyed it and I love that your Grandma was a war bride. 

Teddy  45:14  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episodes suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai