The Freedom Circus: Sue Smethurst in conversation with Sue Hampel OAM

The Freedom Circus tells the story of one family’s courage, hope, survival as well as their death-defying act escaping the Nazis and starting a new life in Australia.
After Sue Smethurst married into the Horowitz family, she heard snippets of stories about an astonishing cross-country escape through Poland and Russia during World War II, and of life in a circus. Sue realised she was in possession of an important piece of history and so, armed with a tin of old photographs and a voice recorder, she visited her husband’s grandmother, Mindla Horowitz, each week in an attempt to find out more.
Mindla was a young Jewish girl living in Warsaw when she met Kubush, a clown performing with Poland’s famous Staniewski Brothers circus. The young couple fell in love and were married, but soon after, war broke out. When Hitler began his reign of terror in Warsaw, Kubush was far from home with the circus. Mindla fled with their little boy, Gad, to be with her husband, but after arriving in the eastern city of Bialystok she found the circus had already moved on. She was captured, sent to a Russian prison and Gad was taken from her.