Olivia Campbell, SISTERS IN SCIENCE
Zibby is joined by New York Times bestselling author Olivia Campbell to discuss SISTERS IN SCIENCE, the extraordinary true story of four resilient women physicists who escaped Nazi Germany and made groundbreaking contributions to science. Olivia describes her fascinating research process and then shares the untold impact of systemic misogyny, anti-Semitism, and fascism on scientific progress. She and Zibby also discuss the parallels between past and present, the themes of resilience and loss, and the haunting “what ifs” of history.
Transcript:
Zibby: Welcome, Olivia. Thank you so much for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Sisters in Science, How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany, and Made Scientific History.
Congratulations on this book.
Olivia: Thank you so much.
Zibby: I loved this book. This book has to be a movie. I'm going to post about it because I took this really cool picture of it. But I was like, Should I post and say, attention all producers, make this a movie? Or should I try to email anyone I know first and say, make this a movie?
And so that they're not like, why'd you post about it?
Olivia: It's very epic. It's so, you know, cinematic, uh, the stories are just so incredible. And the fact that we haven't really heard hardly any of them, you know, we, we probably let no least minor the most, right. But even, even her name really isn't the household name that it should be.
You know, she worked with Einstein. She, there's, I have photos of her with, with Einstein. There's a regular, you know, collaborators that this, I, I was shocked, you know, by discovering how impactful these women's lives were and how little we had heard of them, you know?
Zibby: Me too. I'm like, who even are these? I didn't recognize them.
Their pictures aren't anywhere. Um, I don't know. It's just, not only are these women amazing, and I feel like you should explain the whole premise of the book, but not only were the stories of these women and some of the unlikely, their survival, the unlikely survival, And all of that, but it just goes to show how much was also lost, right?
How much potential women, Jewish women, was, just imagine what could have been contributed. That's all. And so I mourn that.
Olivia: That was really like, I wanted to drive that home as the main point of this. Like my, my first idea for this book before I even discovered, you know, the, the characters or anything, I was like, I want to find a woman who made it out.
Yeah. And a woman who didn't make it out. And then I want to juxtaposition that. And I actually had more of several women who didn't make it out in the book. And my editor was like, you know, they're, they're not the main focus. You can't, you have to pull that back a little bit, but that the chapter, I mean, you know, it was really dedicated to having that chapter full of all of these women scientists who didn't make it out, you know, that it was.
So hard to research and write. I, every time I edited it, I was crying. You know, I, while I was researching, I was crying. This was a really intense book to write, but I was really married to the fact that these stories were gonna go in there because that, what is my point? Yes. These four women made it out.
But so many others did it and so much lost potential the story of the husband and wife team who was working on this research that was really important like this was like massive research and then they're you know The the nazis murdered them and then their kids took over the research You know once the the nazis had left and they completed that and they got a nobel prize, you know These people would have won prizes if people made would have made really impactful discoveries and research, and it just, the level of destruction, the, the hands, how far the hands of destruction reaches throughout history was, was shocking to me.
Zibby: So to back up for a sec, so the book really tackles, why don't, why don't you give it your elevator, elevator pitch, and then I want to keep diving deep.
Olivia: Sorry, yeah, I'm really, I'm really excited.
Zibby: I'm so excited to talk about it, me too, me too, but just for context, for those who haven't read it.
Olivia: Of course, of course.
Yes. So sisters in science, I. Developed this idea from what the first thing I did was I went to this Northeastern University research database where they were compiling information on women scientists in the Nazi era and who was getting the awards who was, you know, who has got fellowships who got out who didn't, it was full of information, like whether they had kids, whether they were married, what languages they spoke, what their, you know, native country, um, whether they were Jewish or not.
And so I, I was trolling this database going, okay, there's got to be something here. There's something that needs to be told here. And I found these three women who have all have H names, right? Hedwig, Hildegard, and Herta. And then we have Lise also, who is much more famous. So she's going to, you know, bring, bring more people into the book.
So I found these, the stories of these four women who all happened to know each other at some point where, you know, they're, they're working together to helping each other get, get out of Nazi Germany, uh, the fact that they, they most of them were in the same area of physics, too. It was just, I couldn't believe what I'd found.
So. It's the story of how these four women physicists help each other and try to stay in Germany for as long as possible and realize, you know, two of them are Jewish, two of them aren't, but the ones who aren't Jewish are very much anti Nazi. They're, you know, their, their ideas and ideals are going to get them kicked out anyway, or, or basically because they were women, they, they didn't have jobs anymore, right?
The Nazis were also deeply misogynist as well as being antisemitic. So it's the story of how these four women. Managed by the skin of their teeth to escape the Nazis. Like the two Jewish people were definitely, uh, you know, on the chopping block, they were very close to being sent to death camps. And the one of the non Jewish woman, her sister was in the resistance and she was murdered by the Nazis just because they weren't Jewish doesn't mean they weren't going to be about to get murdered.
So it's a story about resilience, but also about horror, you know, there's no sugarcoating it. Like while I was writing this book, I'm like, I don't know how authors write happy, comforting, you know, cozy books about this era, because it is not cozy and comforting. Like, yes, the story is about the four women who escaped and went on to Make, you know, develop scientific communities in other countries, right?
Or, or they struggled to develop scientific communities in other countries. Most of them went on to teach or mentor at universities. And so they use their expertise in other ways, but they definitely, their potential was squashed for sure. I think if they had staged with their research groups in Germany, you know, if the Nazis had never come to power.
Then so much more advancement would have been made in their, in their science and their research. They really, we lost a lot of potential, even though they survived.
Zibby: It's amazing. I'm so grateful that you were the one who dug deep and found all these stories and trace the history. And I even found it really interesting, the people who tried to be allies, the people who tried to help the universities that tried, you know, even the history of how, you know, American colleges were involved in pre Holocaust even, trying to save scholars and who did this and who did what I found that totally interesting as well, especially as college campuses now are such a hotbed for protests and all of this. Like, it's so ironic. Have we progressed? I don't know.
Olivia: Yeah. The, the letters from like the deans and there's, there's like the higher up peoples are like, Ooh, what if they're a mole?
What if they're, you know, this is, this is, you know, this was a huge deal to earlier on when it wasn't, you know. Before people knew what the Nazis were about, right, that people were, were moving over here because they realized what was about to happen. Right. So we have scholars moving to America fairly easily.
And then, you know, as we get through the thirties, we have huge restrictions going down because we have a flood of people trying to leave. Right. And that's when we have these colleges going, Oh, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't take this person. And it's really, it's really The difference between life and death for a lot of these scholars was to have that one person in one college that was like, okay, I'm going to go to bat for you.
I've never met you. I have no idea what what you're like as a person, but I'm going to I'm going to save your life. You know, basically, that was it. Like, and if you didn't have that person, then you had all those other voices at those colleges saying, you Well, what if they're, they're, you know, a Nazi plant and they're trying to like, you know, they're bringing communism or, you know, they're just, this is wild ideas about what these women were, were going to be trying to do.
And it was really, uh, just, just crazy. Like they didn't need to be worried about this. Right. They just needed to say, um, Oh, okay. Yes, we can. We can pull you over for for a semester a year. You know, they didn't need much to get out of the country. They just needed a college to say, okay, sure. And they had all these organizations saying, Oh, here, we'll give you the money.
Just take this person. Just say we have a position. Just create a position for this person. We have the money. And they were still like, Oh, I don't know. But yeah, it was that one, you needed that one person just to say, okay, yes, I, I, you know, the person that brought me to you through this other organization, I believe in them.
So I believe in you that you're not a plant.
Zibby: I mean, it just goes to show the power of what you can do for an individual can have worldwide consequences. I feel like people are like, well, I only, what if I could only save this, you know, these two people or what, you know, does it matter? Yeah, it all matters.
Like every life saved is a life in generations, not to be overly simplistic, but your book highlights this in such vivid detail because as you outline all the scientific achievements, Of the women. You're like, by the end, you're like, for goodness sake, look what she did. You know, like, like, come on. I can like hear you getting, like, come on, you know.
I love it. Because it's powerful stuff. And it was so easy. And, you know, at one point you outline again, some of the things that I know, right? I've learned all this a million times, the rules of the Nazis, how it slowly started in the early 30s and built up. Like, I've learned this over and over, although it's super useful for people who may not have known all of this backstory.
And then you even. include, again, the statistics of how many people each country welcomed in at the time and the boat that got turned away and all of that. And seeing the numbers, it's so small. Like there were so few people that other people took in relative to the large scale destruction and just seeing it in stark relief and seeing individual women who are trying to get in and can't and saying like, are you part of the 60, 000 people?
Like what makes you okay? Like, what if they had let in more? I don't know. Doesn't your mind just spiral?
Olivia: I had to step away so many times from this book. I pushed the deadline. It was, it was so much. And I had to also kind of try really hard to avoid the creep. Like there are so many books about just about the Holocaust, just about, you know, these things, like you said, a lot of people know these things.
And I had to, when you start to like. It gets really overwhelming when you think that you have to include all these things in your book, right? You have to really laser focus on these people's stories, but I really needed those context points also. And yes, to juxtaposition these stories against those numbers.
And I also, I discuss in the book a little bit, but I It really bugged me that the scholars were the ones getting attention, right? It was, it was very eugenics esque in a way that the Nazis were advocating for, but that the resistance was saying this was not good. But at the same time, the allies are going, Oh, well, we'll take this person.
They're smart. They have all these degrees. Sure. We'll let them in. They will have a special, you know, visa for these kinds of people. And I, you know, that was really disturbing to me as well. And I wanted to highlight these stories, but I also wanted to highlight that lots of people that didn't have degrees were not scholars.
They, you know, they're the ones that are getting left behind in addition to the scholars that also got left behind, but the special category for smart people was also bothersome to me.
Zibby: It's crazy. What and how you even define utility. Like, what does it mean to be useful? How do you determine that? Crazy.
You have a paragraph. Can I read this? It's towards the end. Sure. At the end, rather. If we take anything away from these women's stories, it should be that the Nazis didn't win. The Nazis didn't rob the world of all its Jewish thinkers or women scholars, despite its determined efforts to do so. The Nazis could never rob their opponents of their indomitable spirit, their will to go on and help others do the same.
These women's stories show us the importance of maintaining hope in the face of despair, of persevering amidst desperation. They illustrate the power of fascism and institutionalized intolerance to rob the world of incredible minds and severely stunt scientific progress. But they also show us how sisterhood and scientific curiosity can transcend borders and persist, flourish even, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Oh my gosh, so good. I mean, I had tears in my eyes like finishing this like it gives us hope literally goosebumps again Hope you're giving us hope like evil can't win it can damage it can hurt, but it can't win
Olivia: I'm really upset by how timely this is. I didn't want it to be time I didn't want the story of fighting fascism to, to be relevant to today, but it absolutely is.
And I'm glad that it is, but the parallels that I was seeing in my research were shocking to me. Yes, there are absolutely applicable lessons to today here. The rally against the theory of relativity that I found out about that. I can see that happening today. Like you see, you see it basically today. Uh, there was an onion headline that was, that was very similar to that.
And I was like, no, no, that actually happened. That was real. And I can absolutely, uh, envision that happening today.
Zibby: Someone said something to me recently, like, welcome to being a part of Jewish history. Do you know, like, we are living through a historic time now and we can't see the end, which is crazy when the present is.
It's something you know will be history later, and you don't know where it's going. But I feel like in these moments of uncertainty, having a book like yours and having context and hope and roadmaps and even love, right? You threw in a little love story in there. Which was nice. Thank you for that. Gotta love some midlife love.
Olivia: It took so long. It was so beautiful. And I, you know, you have to be so careful that you're not like, you know, he was married before. I didn't want to insinuate there was anything untoward going on. You could definitely tell she was totally in love with him. The whole time, but she would not, you know, she loved the family.
She loved his wife and his kids. Like she would never have done anything to, to ruin that, you know, and that she waited a very long time and she, yeah, she got her man and the end, it was so beautiful. And you know, the fact that she was so dedicated to him, that she. Couldn't stay in Germany anymore. You know, she wasn't Jewish, but he was so she was like no, you know You would look what you've done to him.
This is not fair. I'm done with you You know, she goes to Norway and they find out and she's become as you know, no, she's an enemy of the state And yes, it's it's it's very much a movie. Definitely
Zibby: But it has not been optioned yet, right? Not like this. No. Okay. Well, I mean, it's so good. Not that it has to be a movie.
I mean, I remember my, I remember talking to my brother at one point trying to talk about like, well, why is my book not being a movie? He's like, why can you not be happy that you actually just achieved what you were trying to do, which is write a book? Like, why does it now have to be something else? And I'm like, I don't know.
Because there's always something else to try to get, you know, like.
Olivia: I feel like it's, it's accessibility here in this country, at least. Uh, I feel like movies are, you know, seen by so many more people. And so that's why we sort of elevate. But yes, the book, the book should be just as an accomplishment as, as a film.
And there's always more information and more detail and more uniqueness to, to a book, honestly, so.
Zibby: But the simple stories, the stories of the women, the stories of these lives, are so poignant and so representative of this time and overcoming, right? This is the ultimate sort of resilience and fate and circumstance and what if they had been born at a later time?
Right, what if they, like, there are just so many what ifs, and who, and again, like I started saying, which I have to stop at, who didn't make it? And where would we be as a society if one nation sort of hadn't decided to eliminate all these people? What advances would be made? What diseases would be cured?
Where would we be? Alternate narratives.
Olivia: That was the point that I kept sticking on, you know, if we didn't have racism, if we didn't have anti Semitism, if we didn't have misogyny, that was what killed so many of these women. That's what, because they weren't allowed to be achieving, you know, at higher levels in academia, they were not seen as a good candidate to import to a new university, right?
Because the, the, you know, Universities in Germany had been like, Oh, you're a woman we're not going to let you become a professor yet. We're not going to certify you. Oh, you can't come work with us, but you're going to be an assistant for your whole life. Well, then, so this emergency comes and they need to escape.
Well, all these other universities outside of Germany are like, Oh, well, you're just an assistant. We don't need more of you. That's, that's not cool. That's why they died. That's why, because they weren't allowed to pursue what they were capable of, because universities were like, no, because you're a woman, you can't do it.
Also because you're Jewish. A lot of, you know, anti Semitism was not new. And the Nazis, you know, when the Nazis took power, it had been being sowed in this, in the country since the twenties and before, you know, and, and even when they came to the U S there was anti Semitism, you know, we have Henry Ford.
You know, being mentioned in my comp as a great guy, this is, you know, they were not coming to welcoming circumstances always, but yeah, I was really struck by how misogyny translated into death, like literally meant death. And today, you know, that's. Limiting our autonomy over our bodies. Like that's how misogyny kills women today, but this, you know, keeping them back in their careers, the reason we, we know all the names of the male physicists that we know that are household names is because they were already famous in Germany before they immigrated before they, because that's why they looked like good candidates.
You know, Einstein had a Nobel. Of course he was going to be pulled out and able to go to any country he wanted to. But these women were being held back. They had been trying to become professors. They'd been trying to move up in their careers for decades and they were not allowed to, they had barely been allowed to attend university.
These are the first women who are like legally allowed to attend university. And a lot of cases, uh, in the sciences, especially it was, it was very hard.
Zibby: And it had to start as, you know, elevated assistance just to get their work in.
Olivia: Yeah. Most of them were started with unpaid jobs and my, my copy editor was like, can it be called a job?
It's unpaid. I'm like, well, that's what it was. I don't, I don't know what to tell you what that was at the time.
Zibby: You're like today, this would be called volunteers.
Olivia: Yes, exactly. But they were considered workers that were unpaid. Like, yes, it was, it was crazy that they were not able to support themselves.
They still had to rely on, you know, other work. They're, they're editing papers. They're, you know, some of them might have had family money coming in, probably not a lot, but they had to find other ways to, to live. And we have stories of leads like deciding what's important. Like, she always saves money for cigarettes, right?
Like, I love that. But I also love that she was like this lifelong smoker, but she lived to be the oldest of all of them. It's just a glorious F U to the Nazis. I love it.
Zibby: Oh my gosh. It's crazy. How long did this whole project take you?
Olivia: Oh my gosh. Longer than I'd hoped. So I, I don't know anything about physics.
You know, my work has largely been women's health, popular psychology, you know, more of the poppy sciences. So this, you know, it's a learning curve for sure. I don't know German, and I'm not Jewish, so I had all of these things to learn about before I could process these stories and, you know, transform them into a readable narrative that was engaging.
So yeah, I had to get a translator, I had to read up on, on physics, and I had a um, sensitivity reader, Jewish sensitivity reader at the end, also, who pointed out any problems for me. The biggest sticking point that she found was the, the really Interesting aspect of Lisa's life, which is she was her ancestors were Jewish, but she did not consider herself Jewish because she wasn't practicing the faith, right?
Well, the Nazis didn't care whether you practice faith or not. It was all about your ancestry. So it's like how to describe that. She did not self identify as Jewish, but she was being identified as Jewish. So, you know, she felt very uneasy about being welcomed in the U. S. as this Jewish heroine after the war, because she didn't really identify as that.
But, you know, Because she was viewed as this, she was always referred to as Jewish, so I tried really hard to articulate that appropriately in the book in a way that wouldn't make it sound like the Nazis were correct in the way that they were viewing her, right? They, the way that they identified people was not how they always identified, but that, you know, that didn't matter.
Zibby: Wow. Crazy, crazy stories. Worried, or did you consider, like, I'm not Jewish, why am I going out on a limb for these? People? Did, like, do you know, like, or, are, is this story going to be received positively? Or did you have any thoughts like that at all?
Olivia: I do, and I see a lot of authors writing about cultures that aren't theirs, and I kind of bristle, you know, I see a lot of white women writing Black women histories, and I bristle at that.
I hope that I got it right. I'm a believer that you can write about whatever you want, but you deserve to have the feedback, you know, poured upon you that you deserve. I felt that since the story had two Jewish women and two non Jewish women, that it it was probably more my, okay for me to tell and the fact that I was going to get a sensitivity reader, the fact that I was trying to be really, you know, sensitive about these things.
I hope that that, that has worked in my favor. I hope that it's translated. Okay. But I, you know, if, Jewish people are going to be upset about parts. I would be very upset about that because I tried very hard to do justice to all the stories.
Zibby: I feel like you win like the Jewish ally award. I, I hope that nobody would find anything to be upset with.
And I certainly didn't. I didn't know if you were Jewish or not. It didn't actually occur to me until we were just talking and you mentioned it. I was like, oh, she's not Jewish. I mean, I hadn't even thought about it. But then the fact that you're not makes it even more amazing that you're going out on this limb and it's not an easy time to publish Jewish stories.
And not only are you doing that bravely now, you didn't have to. You didn't, you know, but this is history and it's important. This is so important. So hats off to you. And I think it's great. I think it's really wonderful and important. And I hope many people follow in your footsteps and you will, I'm sure, be flooded with gratitude rather than vitriol.
So I hope that comes to pass.
Olivia: Well, your support means a lot to me. Thank you. And I'm excited that it's being published during Hanukkah. It could be a nice Hanukkah gift.
Zibby: Absolutely. Yes. Love it. Love it. A little uplifting. Well, I'm excited. I know this will find its way to the screen one way or another because it is such a great story.
They're all great stories. All interwoven. The whole thing is great. So congratulations.
Olivia: Thank you so much.
Zibby: And thanks for all the work you did.
Olivia: Thank you for having me.
Zibby: My pleasure.
Olivia Campbell, SISTERS IN SCIENCE
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