My Nudist, Holocaust-Survivor

Grandma Spied on the Nazis

Enid Zentelis

6-7 minutes

My grandmother passed away in 1998. When I think back to what

caused me to re-examine her life, I think of a confluence of events
and emotions. My grandmother and I had been very close. My
parents divorced when I was young, and we spent a lot of time
together. From the time I was in high school, anytime I was
frightened or unhappy about something, my lighthearted mantra
was: “This is not as bad as granny surviving Nazis, you can do
this.” Isabelle, or Bella as my grandmother was known, had
survived the Holocaust in Budapest with two young children in tow,
my mom and uncle. Bella was my rock when things in my life
weren’t going well.

I had hit a point where my mantra wasn’t working anymore, and

my grandmother was gone. Over the course of several years,
terrible things seemed to pile on. My sister died of an opioid
overdose, and my dad died of brain cancer after battling
alcoholism, and then Trump was elected, and emboldened neo-
Nazis and white supremacists started high-fiving in the streets of
America. My mind connected all of these events. All I had
inherited, I thought, was trauma—and history was just a treadmill
we all rode, constantly moving and exhausting us without ever
really going anywhere or changing.

On the one hand, I was glad my grandmother was not around to

experience what I perceived to be End Times, with fascists
reinstalled all around the world. But on the other hand, I kept
feeling like she would have known what to do or how to be
somehow.

Something was leading me back to her.

It was a gray northeastern day and the Hudson River looked

frozen solid. I was inexplicably stuck on a comedy script I was
writing. I slid off my chair in order to stare at the ceiling for a time,
when a box of photos and things that my mom had sent me caught
my eye from across the room. Most of the photos were my
grandmother’s, and the papers were hers as well. I found myself
staring at an old letter, a war commendation I had seen in
childhood, but had never fully understood. It was from the Allied
Control Commission (ACC) addressed to my grandmother,
thanking her for her “highly confidential work.”

This was the start of a four-year journey, creating the podcast

series “How My Grandmother Won WWII” with my producing
partner Vicki Vergolina, trying to unearth the truth about my
grandmother’s past.

Highly confidential? I had seen this letter before, but I had

conflated every document and piece of writing my grandmother
had as having to do with surviving the Holocaust, with being saved
by the now well-known and revered Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg
was a Swedish-born architect and hero commissioned by the
American War Refugee Board to go to Hungary during WWII to try
to save the last of Hungary’s Jews from being murdered by Nazis.
I soon realized that this letter had nothing to do with Wallenberg,
nothing to do with her survival. It appeared to be about fighting
back as a spy of some sort for the British.

“I soon realized that this letter had nothing to do with Wallenberg,

nothing to do with her survival. It appeared to be about fighting
back as a spy of some sort for the British. ”

A quick online search revealed that Brigadier Ferryman, the

signature on my grandmother's letter, had been Head of the British
Special Operations Executive. SOE was a branch of government
created by the British to fight Nazis using covert agents and
collaborators, or nontraditional warfare. Had my grandmother been
a spy? Was there a whole new chapter of my family history that I
was unaware of? These questions alone were already pulling me
upright, enabling me to put one foot in front of the other. My first
instinct, once I discovered the identity of Brigadier Ferryman, was
to brag about my grandmother. I desperately needed to feel good
about my family, and this was undeniably good. It was bigly good.

The deeper I got into my journey to discover the truth about my

grandmother’s World War II history inside fascist Hungary, the
more alarmingly similar present-day events in America kept
appearing. Charlottesville, police murders of innocent Black people
—everything seemed to be sliding backward at a rapid pace. And
since I was knee-deep in history, this podcast enabled me to
examine why history seemed to repeat itself; to question this
concept fundamentally. Is it that we were doomed to repeat
ourselves as a species, or that we never fully address and repair
ourselves after the apex of conflict, such as a war, or a storming of
the Capitol Building? A line from Amanda Gorman’s brilliant
inaugural poem really struck me on this point: “…because being
American is more than a pride we inherit—it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it.”

In our rush for normalcy and the status quo after war, or after over
400,000 deaths and destruction in America, if we fail to do the
work of repairing ourselves, of repairing history, of addressing the
fomented bigotry and hatred which drove us to our breaking point,
then the fault lines remain, permanently. Hungary never addressed
its systemic anti-Semitism after WWII—it became a Communist
police state where history was literally burned. Hungary today is
once again marked by rapidly eroding civil rights, bigotry, and
xenophobia.

Unity must be earned, not decreed. To quote congresswoman Cori

Bush, rebuking Republican colleagues on Twitter who argue for
their version of whitewashed unity in the wake of murderous,
seditious rioters roiling our country: “It’s not divisive to call out
white supremacy. What’s divisive is to not work to eliminate it.”

Discovering that my grandmother and the rest of my family

proactively fought for what was right in the face of Nazis, rather
than obey or remain silent, changes my family narrative. It also
changes the way I think about the power of individual action and
resolve. And it gives me hope for my own country now.