This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

It was a late night in Eastern Europe in 1942, and Tanya was hard at work.

She bobbed and weaved through the dining room, delivering food to hungry men.

To the officers who sat at the tables, she looked like nothing more than a pretty dark-haired waitress.

Rumor was that she was the daughter of a prince from the country of Georgia, and she hated

the Soviets for killing her father, hated them enough to work in a Nazi officer's dining

room.

As she passed by the table of drunk soldiers, she paused for a moment to deliver a very special dish to

their table, one that she had made herself with a few extra ingredients. She smiled at the SS

officer, who gave her a wink and took a large bite before offering it to his friends,

and then she returned to the kitchen, grabbed her bag, and slipped out the side door. She did

not want to be there when the poison

began to work. Tanya was no Georgian princess. She was really Tatiana Marcuse, a Jewish femme

fatale from the Soviet resistance. Born in 1921 in Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union,

Tatiana wasn't a soldier, a spy, or even a train killer.

She was from a large Jewish family and worked as a railway secretary in Kiev before moving

to Moldova in 1940. But like millions of others, she suddenly found herself living in a nightmare

as the Nazis invaded the rest of Europe. And she could only watch from afar in horror

as Kiev, her hometown, quickly became home to one of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust.

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