It’s October 1940 and you are walking down a dusty lane when someone slips a scrap of paper into your hand. You hold it tightly in your palm, waiting until you’re round a corner and away from prying eyes.  When you manage to find that moment and open the folded paper square, you read: “Milena from Prague requests a meeting.”

You are Margarete Buber-Neumann and you are a prisoner in Ravensbruck concentration camp. The note in your hand is from Milena Jesenska, who has just arrived in the camp. It is a note which heralds the beginnings of hope, of friendship – of love – in the midst of death.

Join Oswin and Carla as the historian Gwen Strauss tells the life-affirming and heart-breaking tale of Grete and Milena as they try to find a reason to live.

Please put your hands together for Sarah-Jane Morris' Hall of Fame nominee, the singer Mary Margaret O'Hara. Michael Stipe, Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones and Everything But The Girl love and admire her but Sarah-Jane thinks we should too. And I think she's right!

A decade before Dylan, there was Connie Converse – arguably the very first singer-songwriter with inner-city tales of loss and longing. But have you heard of her? Have you heard her music? And why isn’t her name sung from the rooftops?

Oswin and Carla are joined today by the singer Sarah-Jane Morris to help us understand the joy and sorrow of Connie’s short life, the pressures on women in the music industry then and now and how luck, time and place can conspire to sweep people’s stories away.

Nihal Arthanayake's nomination for the Trapped History Hall of Fame is a great one. The lost, forgotten and overlooked Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva. She was the first Asian woman elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects and a friend of Le Corbusier and Picasso. But she's been overshadowed by those men and by other Asian male architects.

So tune in to hear her story and why she means so much to Nihal.

How do you hear the testimony of someone who has been terrorised and tortured? How do you listen as a perpetrator defends their crimes? How can two peoples who have hated and killed each other learn to live in peace?

These are the questions Helen Bamber asked herself when she travelled to Belsen at the end of the Second World War and bore witness to survivor memories. She would spend her whole life working with victims of genocide, torture and human trafficking and her questions are as vital today as they were 80 years ago.

Tune in for a riveting discussion as the broadcaster and author Nihal Arthanayake joins Oswin, Carla and MK for our season opener on why we need to have these conversations, why listening is as important as talking and why connection is our only hope for the future.

Our new season kicks off proper next week with an enthralling episode where the broadcaster Nihal Arthanayake helps us tell the story of the woman who listened – the great Helen Bamber. And we’ll be taking you all the way through the summer till it starts getting cold again – introducing you to the tragic tale of the first singer-songwriter alongside the Communards’ Sarah-Jane Morris, the first female bodybuilding world champion with Jet from Gladiators, a story of love among the ruins of the concentration camps with the historian Gwen Strauss and the rollicking tale of genius and self-deception with the author Helen Lewis.

But to whet your appetite . . . we are absolutely delighted to give you this wonderful taster from the brilliant Astrid & Chinny, the brains behind the award-winning It’s A Continent Podcast. Which uncovers key moments in African history, one nation at a time. It is bite-sized history, it is accessible history and it is history which will deepen and broaden all of our understanding. So I strongly recommend seeking them out on apple, spotify, wherever you listen to stuff, right after you’ve listened to this episode.

Which we particularly want to share because Astrid and Chinny got there before us! I really think that this person is someone we should all know about and carry his name in our hearts. He is Patrice Lumumba, and he was a distinguished Pan-African politician who served as the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo after the country gained independence. Patrice was well-connected but as he became more politically active and vocal, calling for an end to Belgium's rule and advocating for his country's independence, he became a target of both the Belgian and American governments.

 To such a point that we need to give you a trigger warning: there is a graphic depiction of death at the 29 minute mark.

In the meantime, sit back, enjoy the ride and make sure you’re back here from 1st July for the rest of Trapped History’s summer season.

A heads-up for Season 5 of Trapped History which drops from 1st July. Carla can't wait and neither can we, so head over to trappedhistory.com and subscribe!

We've spent so long asking our guests who they'd like to see in the Trapped History Hall of Fame, that for our 30th episode we thought we'd do something a bit different.

And so Carla, MK and Oswin have each brought along someone they'd like to see honoured. Tune in for a whistle-stop tour through the lives of a First World War heroine, a couple who fought for freedom in South Africa and a union leader who was a conscientious objector.

Three different stories, four hidden and forgotten people, but we hope you will agree, they led some of the fullest and most compelling lives you will hear of.

We want to hear your own nominations for the Hall of Fame, so be inspired and head over to trappedhistory.com to send us your own nominees.

Here's a taster of Season 4, starting with Mishal Husain's Broken Threads before moving on to Mishka Sinha on Untold Lives, Kim Wager on Making Sense of Murder, Chris French on the Amazing Randi, Clare Mulley on Agent Zo and finally, Martin Burton AKA Zippo the Clown on the Animal King.

Enjoy!

Roll up, roll up for the Season Four closer — as we take a trip to the circus!

At Trapped History, we look at lives and stories which have been forgotten or ignored, and there is one community in Britain which is still shrouded in mystery even in the 21st century: that of the circus people. So who better to lift the curtain than the King of the Ring himself, Zippo the Clown — or just plain Martin Burton to us.

Not only does Martin shine a light on the lure of the circus but he also joins us on a journey back in time, when America was in thrall to the greatest showman of all — Frank Bostock, the Animal King from Darlington. Frank's is an astonishing story and an amazing life, which tells us so much about the glory years at the turn of the 20th century when technology, travel and theatre collided to create the magical potion of 'Spectacle'.