The Keeper

On a bitter cold Christmas eve in 1944, a little Jewish girl, 13 years old but with her diminutive size and Shirley Temple curls looked closer to 8, kissed her mother goodbye and alone began to make her way towards the Swiss border. A short while earlier, they had fled from Hungary where Jews were facing deportation and death at the hands of the Nazi occupiers. The family had sought refuge in Switzerland, but the Swiss had expelled them. They had heard that children alone might be given refuge and so with fearful broken hearts, they said goodbye and this child walked with her little suitcase in hand towards the barbed wire of no-man’s land. Mrs. Annette Lantos shares some of her story of that terrible night and how she survived to become one of our country’s great advocates for human rights all around the world.

Over fifty years ago the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the fierce urgency of now as he sought to make America at long last live up to the promises of our founding. Our guest on this episode of The Keeper is another man of the cloth, Father Patrick Desbois, who understands the fierce urgency of history and the need to document it and claim its secrets before all the witnesses to the past are gone. Father Desbois is the author of the book “The Holocaust by Bullets”, which recounts his mission to uncover the truth behind the murder of 1.5 million Jews in the Ukraine. With utter dedication and quiet determination, Father Desbois has succeeded in breaking the code of silence and the cloak of invisibility surrounding these unimaginable crimes.

Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital, has become an unlikely human rights crusader who was almost single-handedly responsible for the adoption of the Magnitsky Act, a groundbreaking piece of human rights legislation. Bill and Katrina recently had the chance to talk about his life and the singular, tragic injustice that transformed him from an international financier to an international advocate for human rights and the rule of law.

Recently, Katrina sat down to speak with Mr. Jared Genser and Dr. Yang Jianli. Jared is the founder of Freedom Now, an independent nongovernmental organization that works to free prisoners of conscience around the world. He is often referred to in the media as "the extractor" for his work as a leading human rights lawyer on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Dr. Yang Jianli, founder of Initiatives for China, is a Chinese dissident who was detained and imprisoned by the Chinese government in the early 2000's for his activism. Katrina spoke with these two extraordinary men about how they came to be human rights activists, the shameful death of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Chinese custody, the Chinese governments moral bankruptcy, the underlying political weakness that the regime is desperate to hide, and a bold prediction from Jianli regarding the Chinese regime's inevitable end.