Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week from the 1980s battling the bureaucrats to organise the Soviet Union's first big charity event, a rock concert for the victims of Chernobyl.

We must have well-proven artists, not some doubtful rock and rollers.

Plus, overcoming the gender barrier, we hear from the first ever woman ordained as a rabbi in the US.

Mr sanitation, the man who brought clean and safe toilets to India and

acting out a shocking scene of murder in one of Alfred Hitchcock's most controversial movies.

There were a lot of phone calls about did I object to the

violence in the film and I've just been playing Lady Macbeth. That's all coming up

later in this podcast but once again we begin with a moment from history which sheds light on an issue of the present.

With so much talk these days about the rights and wrongs of migration and the human rights of asylum seekers and refugees,

it's instructive to look at an example of how things were done

in the past. In the late 1970s, ordinary Canadians came to the aid of tens of thousands of

Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing Communist Vietnam

by paying for their resettlement in Canada.

It turns out that what they did was to launch the world's most successful private sponsorship program for refugees.

Alex Last reports.

The minister and the Christian Reformed Church got off in the meeting and he gives me a hug and says,

Howard, isn't it wonderful when a Christian believer

can hug a Jew for sponsoring a Vietnamese Buddhist?

And that sums it up for me.

In 1979 the world watched as hundreds of thousands fled Vietnam by sea.

Under the post-war communist regime many had faced political repression,

...