Keeping the Nazis and the Soviets laughing helped this circus family survive the Holocaust

Kubush Horowitz survived World War II by making the enemy laugh.

A clown in the famous Staniewski Brothers circus in Poland, his ability to bring humour to dark times eventually became his family’s ticket to freedom.

Decades later in Melbourne, his grandchildren heard bedtime stories about the wonderful clown and his wife Mindla.

“While the Nazis laughed, they lived,” says journalist Sue Smethurst, the couple’s granddaughter-in-law.

“But they heard these as fairy tales in a sense as children.”

In 1936 as the threat of war loomed, Jews were already being persecuted in the streets of Warsaw.

“There was a dark culture…