Lodz Ghetto • Britain's earliest films • Crucifixion in Roman Britian • St Benet's Abbey, Norfolk [audio 30min]

Nick Baker and the "Making History" team examine listeners' historical queries and get to the bottom of historical mysteries, local legends, family curiosities and architectural oddities. 1) Henryk Ross was a photographer in Poland's Lodz Ghetto. He kept a clandestine diary of ghetto life in powerful and often brilliant images and, when the ghetto's liquidation began, he buried them. A survivor, he dug them up after the war, releasing many that were to become icons of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Incredibly, at a Holocaust remembrance day in Nottingham in 2004, "Making History" listener Helena Aronson saw herself in one of Henryk Ross’s photographs and a story that she had kept secret for over 50 years was finally told. 2) In the summer of 2005 a plastic bag full of very old, fragile film, was deposited at the National Fairground Archive in Sheffield. Specialists at the archive and film restorers based in London soon realised that these were hugely important archives including the earliest British-produced fiction film (1895). Donated by a long established family of showmen, the films have now been painstakingly restored and have recently been premiered at the Giornate Del Cinema Festival in Sacile. 3) "Making History" consulted David Mattingly at the University of Leicester, where he is professor of Roman Archaeology. Professor Mattingly argues that capital punishment was a way of enforcing imperial control by a militaristic power. Death was a way of terrorising the population and was characteristic of the imperial regime. It seems likely that the Romans used crucifixion, but it would be very difficult to identify reliable evidence for it in the UK stuck on sticks. What we can do is infer what would have happened in Britain from what happened elsewhere. 4) A listener asks how Norfolk's remote St Benet's Abbey 'escaped' dissolution during the reign of Henry VIII. It is the only Anglo-Saxon monastery in the county to be continually used throughout the Middle Ages. The Norfolk Archaeological Trust confirm that this was the only monastery in Britain which survived the Dissolution, because, "instead of closing the monastery, the king [Henry VIII] exchanged it for lands owned by the Diocese of Norwich. Although it was soon closed and all the buildings, except for the gatehouse, were demolished, the Bishop of Norwich can still claim to be Abbot of St Benets".