From the Library With Love

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Susan McBeth is a woman steeped in books. She founded Adventures by the Book in 2011 to bring literature to life for readers and book clubs through interesting, unique, and adventurous events and travels with authors.

In 2018, she also founded NovelNetwork, a service that provides assistance connecting book clubs and authors. She is a content creator for Fireside hosting virtual author interviews, a former Board member with the Southern California Booksellers Association, and a member of Writing Women of San Diego.  

There is nothing this lady doesn’t know about authors, readers and how to connect the two. But in this fascinating conversation she reveals how a deathbed plea from her German-born mother ‘I don’t want to be forgotten’,  led her to uncover a more personal story.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Welcome to a special episode, in which I seek out east London’s vanishing wartime voices.

From my experience cockneys aren’t a dying breed, they are alive and flourishing, part of the cockney diaspora of Essex, Suffolk, Kent and even as far afield as Australia.

What is in danger of disappearing are the vanishing voices of wartime East London. Go to East London today and you will hear a myriad of accents, transformed as it is by immigration and gentrification.

What you will struggle to hear are the voices that were heard in the shelters, pubs, markets and factories of wartime London. Even less likely, the beautiful lyrical songs, like the one which starts this special episode by east ender Dot Smee who sung in the shelters during the Blitz to drown out the sound of the bombs. Or poetry written and recited by Whitechapel seamstress, Sally Flood to express her frustration at the monotony of wartime work.

This episode features three enterprising east enders who, like Dot, didn’t just survive during the Second World War, but thrive. Their unique and beautiful voices, songs, poems and memories offer a fascinating glimpse into the kind of people wartime east Londoners are and the war that shaped them.

For more true stories from East London, why not check out my only non-fiction book on the wartime matriarchy, The Stepney Doorstep Society.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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The strikingly handsome couple looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Hollywood motion picture from the glamorous golden era. The reality was somewhat different.
Anka and Bernd met in Nazi occupied Prague, in 1940 and it was love at first sight across a crowded nightclub. Like it was for so many young couples in wartime a whirlwind courtship ensued followed by a wedding. 

In December 1941, Anka and Bernd were amongst the first transports sent to Terezin, the first camp in Czechoslovakia where they remained for three years. 

During their time at Terezin, and despite the sexes being segregated, Anka became pregnant with a son. When the Nazis discovered this they were forced to sign a document stating that when the baby was born, it would have to be handed over to the Gestapo to be murdered. In the event, her baby son died of pneumonia two months after his birth.

Anka fell pregnant again and this time tried her hardest to keep her pregnancy a secret, knowing full well what would happen should her SS captors discover it.

Soon after she fell pregnant, Bernd was deported to Auschwitz in Sept 1944. Heartbreakingly Anka followed him. She was the eternal optimist and thought that as they had survived that long nothing could get any worse…

Anka was at Auschwitz for ten days, a time she described as being like ‘Dante’s Inferno, hell on earth.’ Being young and fit, she was sent to work in a factory near Dresden as slave labour, never to see her husband again. 

By the spring of 1945 the Germans were retreating and evacuating concentration and slave labour camps. Anka, by now looking like, in her words, ‘a scarcely living pregnant skeleton’ was transported on a filthy open coal wagon to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, a horrendous journey that took seventeen days. She weighed 5 stone. So horrified was she to see that she had arrived at yet another concentration camp she immediately went into labour. 

It’s hard to conceive of the following scene. Anka, surrounded by the dead and dying, giving birth in the squalor of a coal wagon. An SS guard walked past and noticed. ‘Carry on screaming,’ he told her. Baby Eva came into a cruel world weighing just 3 pounds. Anka attributed her and her baby daughter’s survival to luck and timing. 

The day before she gave birth the Nazis ran out of Zyklon B gas. The day after she gave birth Hitler committed suicide. Soon after Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans.

Returning to Prague with her tiny newborn baby girl, Anka stayed with relatives who had also survived the Holocaust. To her devastation she discovered her husband, parents, and two sisters had been murdered at Auschwitz.  Bernd was shot dead near Auschwitz in January 1945, just one week before the camp was liberated. He never knew his wife had fallen pregnant again.

Anka met Karel Bergman, a Czech who had fought with the RAF during the war, and moved to Cardiff in 1948 to start a new life.  

78 years on, Eva shares her astonishing story. Please be warned, there are some distressing scenes described in this episode.

This is one of the most emotional interviews I’ve done. It reveals not only the depth of the atrocities committed in some of the foulest spots on earth,  but also that life hung on chance, degrees of fate, turn left, turn right, a flick of the whip. Buried within this story are also tiny fragments of humanity that have the power to change a life.

How I wish I’d met Eva’s extraordinary mother Anka who lived to 96 years old and never tired of telling her daughter ‘You don’t know what you can withstand until you are put to the test.’

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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101 years ago today a large crowd assembled on a crisp October morning in 1922, when Bethnal Green’s first permanent public library opened its doors in a handsome red brick building in Barmy Park. The philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie provided £20,000, and the remaining £16,000 was raised by the local authority.

‘The council was handing down to future generations a legacy which would enable them to obtain knowledge and sweep away misery and poverty,’ said the Mayor in his opening speech. This was a thinly veiled reference to the fact that only two years previously, an asylum stood on that site.

Bethnal ‘madhouse’ operated for 120 years in Bethnal Green, East London, and was notorious for its cruel treatment. Even today, most East Enders still refer to the grounds around the library as Barmy Park. Shockingly, the asylum only closed in 1920.

Two years later, the library opened in what had been the male block. The disturbingly cruel incarceration of the mentally ill, replaced with learning and literacy. What a message of hope that must have sent to the community.

But trials loomed ahead. Eighteen years after the library opened, in September 1940, a bomb crashed through the roof of the adult lending library at 5.55 p.m. on what would later be known as ‘Black Saturday’, the start of the Blitz. What had been an orderly and well-equipped library became in a split second a scene of destruction.

And here the story takes a surprising twist. Rather than simply hurrying for the nearest shelter, the borough librarian, George F. Vale and his deputy, Stanley Snaith, calmly pulled a tarpaulin over the shattered glass dome roof and set about planning a pioneering social experiment that would transform the lives of wartime Londoners.

Bethnal Green Underground was a half-completed stop on the Central Line when war broke out. Builders were working on connecting it to Liverpool Street, but from 1939 it had been locked up and left to the rats. One week after the Blitz began, East Enders defied Churchill’s orders not to shelter in Tube stations and claimed their right to safety. At seventy-eight feet below ground, it was one of the few really safe places to shelter in Bethnal Green and was referred to by locals as an ‘Iron Lung’.

Over the course of the next twelve months, it was transformed into a fully-functioning subterranean community with an astonishing array of facilities. Metal triple bunks sleeping up to 5,000 stretched three-quarters of a mile up the eastbound tunnel. A shelter ticket reserved you a bunk.

There was a three-hundred-seat shelter theatre with a stage and spotlights, which hosted opera and ballet, a cafe, doctor’s quarters and a wartime nursery, which enabled newly enfranchised women to go out to work. But here’s the best part – there was a library!

I love surprises in history and finding out about George and Stanley’s secret underground library, built over the boarded-up tracks of the westbound tunnel, felt like nothing short of magic.

100 years on from the library’s opening, on October 13th 2022, I launched my novel, The Little Wartime Library, in Bethnal Green Library and I was joined by some very special  guests.

No one knows more about the complex labyrinth of Tube tunnels that run beneath our feet than Siddy Holloway, actress, historian and presenter of Secrets of the London Underground. 

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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So many readers have got in touch with me since reading The Little Wartime Library to tell me how much they enjoyed reading about libraries in wartime, a facet of history many of us know so little about.

When I began to research the novel I realised I knew precious little about the history of librarianship, so I was lucky enough to stumble upon Anne Welsh. Anne has been a librarian for quarter of a century, mostly working in small, special libraries. Although she has held other roles, as a deputy librarian, library manager and as an academic, cataloguing is her abiding passion. The way people make, share and interact with books fascinates her. She also has a brain bursting with knowledge about the history of librarianship and was kind enough to allow me to pick those copious brains.

In this conversation we talk about how war broke down the class barrier, the power of the bodice-ripper in the blackout hours, fighting misogyny in the publishing world and how Reading for Victory changed the face of reading for women forever.

If you want to immerse yourself in the surprising history of the library then this is the episode for you.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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You can never be sure what you’ll discover in the pages of a book. That’s even more true if that book is checked out from a library. In twenty years of library work Sharon McKellar from Oakland Library in California has been documenting the weird and wonderful things she finds in library books. From recipes, to kids drawings and crochet hooks and even a backstage concert passes. Each item is an anonymous glimpse into someone’s life. Now she’s helping reunite readers with their lost relics through her ‘Found in a Library Book’ project.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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‘We run a ‘Lost Quote’ service here at the National Poetry Library,’ said Karen Smith, who also told me proudly that nothing feels as natural to her as being a librarian. Lucky Karen is surrounded by poetry books, 250,000 of them to be precise. ‘People contact us all the time. Today I have had two enquiries from people who are looking for poems. Sometimes they can remember one or two lines in a poem, but they don’t know who it is by or can’t remember the rest of it. Sometimes they are looking for using it at a funeral. It is very gratifying when you find that poem for someone and they can read it at their grandfather’s funeral.’

Karen, who did a masters degree in modern poetry, is the perfect person to be a poetry detective (there’s a novel right there) and has great success, using online databases, or sometimes just good old word of mouth by asking colleagues. They used to pin it on a noticeboard, now they are going to start putting Lost Quotes on the virtual noticeboard of Twitter.

I’d bet a lot of people, myself included, had never head of the National Poetry Library, Located in the Royal Festival Hall, looking over the Thames and filled with rainbow-coloured rolling stacks, it sounds almost dreamlike.

‘Anyone can visit and it is absolutely free,’ Karen insists. ‘We’ve so many treasures here. Poetry is a distillation of words. The white space on the page is important, the pauses and the unsaid part. I think that is what makes it poignant. A poem is emotionally powerful because it means something different to everyone, you see what you want to see.’

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Powerful. Seditious. Pioneering. Not adjectives you would usually associate with librarianship, John Pateman is a passionate believer in creating needs-based libraries and why libraries are about so much more than books.

John Pateman has worked in the library system for 44 years, working his way up from a library assistant at Bromley Library in 1978 to Chief Librarian of Thunder Bay Public Library in Canada. Along the way he has picked up awards but also criticism for calling out racism and discrimination. I started by asking about his move to Canada…

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Last year,  spoke with Kathleen Milne, a librarian responsible for the running of four remote libraries, each on a Hebridean island. Speaking from Stornoway on the Island of Lewis, she was angry when she told me.

‘Here, like everywhere else in the UK, the last decade has been nothing but fire-fighting. Some libraries have been cut and cut and cut. We’ve never really been able to do what we want to do and we can do. Libraries are a basic human right and I long for the time we don’t have to fight and we can concentrate on making a difference. ‘Libraries are part of what it is to be human. It is one of our greatest human achievements..’

I started by asking Kathleen how she made the move from South Africa to the outer Hebrides...

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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It’s Libraries Week! To celebrate, I’m releasing one episode everyday this week with some remarkable, creative and courageous librarians with weird and wonderful stories to tell.

Meet Angela and Simon Bond. They’re the husband and wife librarian team smashing the sssh stereotype. When Angela and Simon Bond are in Pontefract Library it’s anything but quiet. In this fascinating chat we explore the enduring value and love for community libraries… 

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy.  Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.