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Ida (seated) and Louise in their Mab’s Magazine finery. Image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.<\/em><\/p>\n On their return home, Ida wrote a short story about their adventure and sent this to Mab\u2019s Magazine<\/em>.\u00a0 To her delight, this was very well received and, after a few more tentative adventures in journalism, left her job in the Civil Service and started working as a magazine writer.\u00a0 She earned more money, which allowed the sisters to travel around Europe to visit their favourite opera stars in places such as Saltzburg, Munich and Vienna.\u00a0 One particular favourite, who became a friend, was Rosa Ponselle.\u00a0 Through Rosa, they met and befriended conductor Enzio Pinza, who introduced them to his friend, Clemens Krauss in 1934.\u00a0 Kraus was married to soprano Viorica Ursuleac who became a close friend of the sisters.<\/p>\n Around this time, Ida had signed a contract to be one of the first novelists for a new series of romances, published by Mills & Boon.\u00a0 The payment she received for this was beyond anything she had received before and she used the money to purchase a newly-built flat in Dolphin Court, which would act as a central pied-\u00e1-terre for the sisters to entertain their opera-loving friends.\u00a0 Ida\u2019s first book for Mills & Boon was A Wife for Christopher<\/em>, which proved to be a huge hit.\u00a0 She dedicated this book to Viorica Ursuleac, writing: \u2018To my Dear V.U. who. Lent me her initials to bring me luck, and to whom I now offer my first book as very small tribute to a very great artist.\u2019 Ida wrote under the pen name, Mary Burchell: Mary was their paternal grandmother\u2019s name, and Burchell was their mother\u2019s maiden name.<\/p>\n To return to Clemens Krauss for one moment: Krauss rose to be the manager and director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich following the departure of Richard Strauss.\u00a0 Hitler has spent the previous few years trying to create an opera scene in Munich that would rival that of Salzburg.\u00a0 He granted Krauss the equivalent of \u00a320m in annual costs.\u00a0 Krauss was directly responsible to Hitler.<\/p>\n This brings us to the period 1937-1938.\u00a0 Ida and Louise had a growing relialisation that there was something very wrong going on in Germany.\u00a0 Many of their opera friends were Jewish, and the sisters were increasingly alarmed by the treatment of these friends.\u00a0 They hatched a plan to try and help as many people as they could, using opera as their cover.\u00a0 Krauss and Ursuleac were central to this, as the sisters used letters of invitation from them as a pretext to travel so frequently.\u00a0 Louise started to learn German so as better to understand the people they were interviewing to help flee persecution.\u00a0 Ida took up public speaking in the UK, such on Hyde Park Corner and in town halls across the country, trying to raise awareness of the plight of the Jews.<\/p>\n So frequent were their trips to Germany, they started to suspect that they were being watched.\u00a0 They took the decision to \u2018hide in plain sight\u2019, using the same luxurious hotels as the Third Reich officials when they stayed in Berlin and Munich, trips funded by Ida\u2019s Mills & Boon payments.\u00a0 The flat in Dolphin Square started to be used as a base for newly-arrived refugees.<\/p>\n Immigration in the 1930s was feared just as it is today.\u00a0 The USA, for example, had a cap of just 7,000 visas for people from Germany in 1937, whilst there was a waiting list in excess of 90,000 that year.\u00a0 Britian also tightened its rules on refugees at this time, including the requirement that all refugees should have secured work before arriving, or else arrive with a considerable fortune.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in Germany, new anti-Jewish laws prohibited the transfer or removal of money and valuables from the country.\u00a0 This is where Ida and Louise were able to help.<\/p>\n They volunteered to smuggle jewels and furs out of Germany, again adopting the \u2018in plain sight\u2019 approach.\u00a0 As they travelled home with handbags bulging with jewels, they played up on their gender stereotype, Ida writing that \u2018We would put on our nervous British spinster act and say quite simply we always took our valuables with us because we didn\u2019t trust anyone with whom we could leave them at home.\u2019 They were very careful in what they carried: neither sister had pierced ears, so any earrings they smuggled had be clip-on.<\/p>\n At one point, Ida describes being given an incredibly valuable diamond brooch to smuggle.\u00a0 She pinned it to her Marks & Spencer jumper, opened her coat, and brazenly rationalised that no-one would think that anything pinned to such a cheap garment could be valuable, likely thinking that it would be from Woolworth\u2019s.<\/p>\n They also took expensive fur coats out of Germany to sell back in Britain. They were very careful to unpick the German labels and replace them with British ones.\u00a0 They also were careful not to use the same airport to arrive and depart, in case they aroused suspicion in their dramatic change of clothes in the space of two days.\u00a0 Ida writes: \u2018We came into the Cologne airport each Friday evening with practically empty suitcases, shivering in our tweed suits, and we went across the Dutch boarder on Sunday wearing furs, sparkling with jewellery and scarcely able to drag our bags. We were smuggling people\u2019s lives.\u2019 (2020: 172)<\/p>\n Throughout 1938 and into the middle of 1939, the sisters made almost weekly trips to Germany.\u00a0 They rescued 29 individuals and assisted the escape of dozens of others.\u00a0 Their last visit was just one week before war was declared in September 1939.<\/p>\n After the war, Ida\u2019s career as a novelist continued to be highly successful.\u00a0 She became the President of the Romantic Novelists\u2019 Association, and in 1959 was the subject of the tv show This Is Your Life<\/em>.\u00a0 Ida and Louise had a tree planted in their honour in 1962 in the Avenue of the Righteous in Israel.\u00a0 Rather oddly, the records the sisters had kept of their travels and the individuals they had tried to help were all destroyed by Louise, without any known reason, in the 1950s.\u00a0 She burnt them all, to the dismay of Ida and later historians.<\/p>\n