IT entrepreneur and philanthropist - Dame Stephanie Shirley
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eighty years ago, hundreds of Jewish children were smuggled out of Nazi occupied Europe by train in a covert humanitarian mission which became known as the ‘kindertransport’. Stephen Sackur speaks to Dame Stephanie Shirley, who was one of those children. She went on to live an extraordinary life of achievement and philanthropy, blazing a trail for women in business, science and technology. What lessons can we learn from a woman determined to make the most of a life so nearly extinguished in childhood?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:06.6 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.2 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has |
| 0:16.9 | very consciously made an effort to make the most of every day of her long life and with good reason. |
| 0:23.9 | Dame Stephanie Shirley, or Vera Bukthal, to give her her birth name, narrowly escaped being a child victim of the Nazi Holocaust. |
| 0:33.7 | Her father, a German Jew, saw just in time that his family was in grave danger. |
| 0:39.7 | Almost exactly 80 years ago, he put his five-year-old daughter Vera and her older sister |
| 0:45.9 | onto one of the Kinder transport trains, taking hundreds of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied |
| 0:52.4 | Europe to the safety of London. She lived with the foster family, |
| 0:56.7 | proved adept at maths, and from a first job in the technical department of the post office, |
| 1:02.7 | developed a fascination with early computing, which saw her set up a hugely successful business. |
| 1:08.5 | All of this in a world dominated by men. Stephanie, as she now |
| 1:12.9 | called herself, saw the untapped potential of women in this new field. She employed women on flexible |
| 1:19.4 | contracts. She became one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in the UK. She was also |
| 1:25.4 | a committed philanthropist focused on deepening knowledge of autism, |
| 1:29.8 | a condition which affected her own son. Dame Stephanis is a remarkable life story. So what lessons |
| 1:36.5 | would she most like to pass on? Well, I'm delighted to say she joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:43.7 | Thank you for inviting me. |
| 1:45.1 | Well, we've invited you almost 80 years, exactly 80 years, from that moment when you were forced to leave your home, your father put you on a train. |
| 1:55.7 | It's called the Kinder Transport and you ended up in an alien country in London, in England. What do you remember |
| 2:04.6 | of that journey? Well, of course, I was only five years old. So all the things that I remember, |
| 2:11.9 | the childish things. I remember the little boy that kept being sick. I remember losing my doll and then finding her again. |
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