Female heroes of WW2 and the Iranian Revolution
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Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. 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, stories from Iran's history, including a lavish party for the Shah. Anybody who could wear a tiara and get away with it, or a crown did. And the necklaces and the bracelets and the earrings were just incredible. Two women won the empress, no less, exiled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution, and the US embassy hostage crisis in Tehran that lasted 444 days. I want you to sign this.

admitting to your spying? And I said, no. And he said, I'm going to count from 10 to 1, and if you don't sign it, I'm going to blow your head off. That's all coming up later in the podcast. But we're going to begin during one of the darkest moments of the Second World War, and with a young Polish woman who risked her life to save thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Jane Wilkinson has this remarkable story.

Heroes do extraordinary things and to me what I did was not extraordinary, it was just normal. Those are the words of Irina Sendler, interviewed for a 1992 documentary film.

Back in 1939, she was a 29-year-old Catholic working in the Warsaw Welfare Department when the war began. British Pathé.

A year later, Poland was still under German occupation and the Nazis ordered Warsaw's 375,000 Jews to move into an area of just 3.5 square kilometres, the Warsaw Ghetto. It was then sealed off with a three-metre high wall topped with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. On one side were the so-called Aryans, the people Germany deemed the master race.

And in the ghetto were the Jews. Disease and starvation were widespread. If you hadn't been to the ghetto and seen the way people lived there, you had no idea what it was. Pure hell. Streets full of cadavers of children, little bodies covered up with old newspapers. The Polish capital was turned into a shambles.

Shells and bombs crashed into the streets throughout the length and breadth of Warsaw. Of the population, tens of thousands, still uncounted, were slaughtered, while tens of thousands more have been murdered since the German occupation. Survivors face death by starvation. Many Poles wanted to help but were afraid to.

I should remind you that Poland was the only country in Europe where even giving the smallest help was punishable by death. And there is no antidote for fear. But Irina didn't let fear stop her. She joined Żegota, an underground Polish rescue organisation. And as a social worker, she secured a permit allowing her to enter the ghetto at any time.

Soon Irina was smuggling in food, medicine and clothing and smuggling out children. I was escorting the children and babies past the sentry in a very secretive way. And huge appreciation should be given to the building caretakers who were positioned between the ghetto and the Aryan site. Thanks to their courage, I was able to go through.

But of course I could always have come across an anti-Semitic caretaker who could have killed me and the Jewish child too. Despite the dangers, Irina recruited others to help. Nurses, plumbers, undertakers, anyone who had a pass to get inside the ghetto. And they devised ingenious methods to smuggle out the children. Some were hidden in suitcases, potato sacks and even inside coffins.

Others escaped through the sewers. But it wasn't always easy to convince families to let them go. When we were going to the ghetto to pick up those children, there were terrible scenes. One mother wanted the child to leave while her father did not. A grandmother wanted to hand over a child but the mother did not.

They asked for a guarantee, but what could I give them? I could not even give them a guarantee that I could get past the century. In those cases, I was often not given a child and I was left frustrated and often crying.

The next day when I went back again to try to convince them, it would be too late. All the residents were already at the Umschlagplatz. The Umschlagplatz was the Warsaw Square where Jews were rounded up to be sent from the ghetto to the Nazi death camps. In 1942, Henja Koppel was among those deported.

But before she left, she handed over her baby daughter, Elshbetha, to Irina's network. I was brought to her when I was five months old. I was driven out of the ghetto in the back of a truck, inside a pile of bricks where I was concealed in a small wooden box with air holes. Elshbetha, speaking through a translator in 1992. In that box, as a sleeping infant, I was driven to the Aryan side,

I was taken to the home of this midwife, who at that time had prepared a safe home for me on the outskirts of Warsaw. Elshbeta was one of the many Jewish children given a new name and hidden in Catholic orphanages, convents, hospitals and homes. Each time, Irina would carefully record the details in code so that the children could be identified by relatives after the war.

Then, in 1943, one of the rescue network was captured by the Nazis' secret police and Irina's luck finally ran out.

Well, in October, the Gestapo came for me. Of course, I was arrested. The woman who reported me couldn't stand up to the beatings and she gave them my name. So the Germans learned that I belonged to an organization which helped Jews. The Germans beat me, tortured me, broke my feet and legs.

And when they finished, they condemned me to death.

But during the interrogation at Warsaw's Powiak prison, Irina did not reveal a single name. While this was happening, my Zagota colleagues did everything they could to free me. Not only to help me, but also because I was the only one with details and names of the two and a half thousand Jewish children hidden in various places.

This file of encoded information was hidden in my home. By that I mean the names were written on narrow stripes of paper in code. So let's say Marysia equals Rachela, who is hidden in such and such a convent. So Zhegota knew that if I was killed, then these children would never make their way back to the Jewish community. Irina was sentenced to death.

But Chagota leaders bribed a Gestapo guard to release her and she escaped, living under a false name for the rest of the war. But Irina did not stop her work. And over four years, it's estimated she and her group rescued two and a half thousand children from the Warsaw ghetto. And her list of coded names, buried in glass jars in her garden, never fell into Nazi hands.

It was simply by a miracle that I escaped from them. All of this activity constantly kept her and her family in danger of being betrayed and receiving the death penalty.

When somebody makes me out to be a hero, it is very annoying to me because it was not a heroism. It was just a simple human duty to extend a helping hand towards another person. And not only was it worth the effort, but I have a strong feeling that not enough was done. I can still see the eyes of a mother who gave away her child.

And I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little. Jane Wilkinson with the story of Irina Sendler, who saved so many Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Of course, Irina was not the only woman to have played a significant, if perhaps slightly unsung, role in those turbulent times. Catherine J. Atwood is the author of Women Heroes of World War II, and she joins us now. There has been a particular need, perhaps, do you think, to rehabilitate or re-establish the stories of women in particular from the Second World War? When you look at

history in general. And when you look at history in a overview type of sense, and you go quickly over World War II, what you're going to see and what you're going to learn about are the battles that men, largely men, fought. But you don't really see behind the scenes. For instance, when you look at the big picture of Nazi Germany, you just assume that most of the country was behind Hitler, and they were. And they followed him

you know, literally to the death. But the story you may not know, if you don't dig a little deeper, is that there was a very active German resistance. And then when you look at that topic, I think the most fascinating and heartbreaking story in that topic, in my opinion, is that of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. So what did she do? So she was part of the White Rose. It was an anti-Nazi resistance student group.

And her brother had started it with some friends. They just got together to talk about philosophy and literature. And then when they delved into the topic of politics, they realized that they were all on the same page. And Sophie was a little younger than her brother Hans. And she found a white rose leaflet under her desk after six weeks at the University of Munich.

And she realized that he had written it. So she confronted him with it. And he said, yes, I wrote it. And welcome to The White Rose. They wanted to turn Germany from Nazism by writing these leaflets, reproducing them. And they thought if they could send them to university professors and university students, if they could convince Germany's best and brightest to

to turn from the Nazis than the rest of the nation would follow. And although Hans and a friend were considered the mind of the White Rose, that is, they wrote the leaflets, Sophie Scholl was considered the heart of the White Rose because of her passionate interest

enthusiasm for the cause. And she paid a very, very high price. Yes. Her and Hans took a suitcase, a large suitcase of leaflets, and they were putting them all around the University of Munich. And she was seen by a Nazi sympathizing caretaker called Jacob Schmidt. He followed them. He had them arrested. And after a show trial, she, Hans, and Christoph Probst were all beheaded.

So that's a story of resistance from within Germany. But throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, there are different stories from different countries relating to the exploits of women, which have become the stuff of legend, although perhaps not as many as the men.

For instance, Corrie Ten Boom, she was a middle-aged woman who was living above a clock shop with her middle-aged sister and their elderly father. And she actually was the first female licensed watchmaker in the Netherlands. And she and Betsy were deeply involved with watchmaking.

Betsy, her sister, were deeply involved with caring for mentally disabled children. And they took them in regular outings. They were deeply religious. They held special services for them. They were just quiet, middle-aged women doing the good that they knew how. And then when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in the spring of 1940, one of the first things they did in every occupied country was round up

the mentally disabled, to euthanize them. And the Ten Boom family was horrified by this. And they were being religious. They were also deeply offended that the Jewish people were being singled out and rounded up. And everyone in their neighborhood knew of their devotion. And so one thing led to another. One Jewish woman tentatively knocked on the door and the Ten Booms took her in immediately. And then soon the Ten Booms became part of this wider resistance network.

It's interesting, Corrie ten Boom, you just mentioned, and Irena Sendler and the Warsaw Ghetto that we heard about earlier. If you like, they were undertaking something of a humanitarian mission as opposed to directly fighting. No less dangerous, of course. But does that go some way to explaining why they were so underrepresented in the history books? Yes, that's possibly true. It was a very hidden effort.

They were just doing what they knew to do. For instance, Irina, she was a social worker. This was an extension of her social work. Corrie ten Boom, she was a hospitable, unmarried woman. She rescued Jewish people as an extension of her hospitality. And so wherever women found themselves in the war, when the war started, their rescue efforts or their work against the Nazis was an extension of who they were.

That's Catherine J. Atwood, author of Women Heroes of World War II. As the countries of the globe began to emerge from the horrors of the Second World War, the drive towards economic and social recovery was accompanied by significant technological advances. One such advance happened in the northwest of England, and we're all still living with the implications of that development. Jill Kersley has been looking at the birth of a very big baby.

Manchester University, where anyone who urgently wishes to know whether 2 to the power of 127 minus 1 is a prime number or not, can be given the answer by an electronic brain in 25 minutes instead of by a human brain in six months. And while you try and work out that calculation, here's more about that electronic brain, which is a very early computer.

I'd been looking through the archives to find out about this small-scale experimental machine, better known as Baby. In June 1948, the Baby became the first stored programme computer, meaning it was the first machine to work like the computers we have today. The team building it was led by Sir Freddie Williams. Although these machines can in fact do these complicated calculations at lightning speed...

They can only do them because we explain to them how they should do them, we make them do them. Left to themselves, they wouldn't even have enough sense to come in and out of the rain. The world's first programmable computer shuddered into life at Manchester University in June 1948. It created a technological revolution.

And it was a man in Manchester who wrote the world's first computer programme. It has been said of him that his mark is on every modern computer in the world today, and he's Professor Tom Kilburn. Tom Kilburn, along with Jeff Tootle, relocated to work with Sir Freddie's team at the university.

following their top secret work developing radar during the Second World War. Here's Tom talking to the BBC's Brian Redhead in 1981. Well, Freddie Williams invited me to come to continue to develop a memory system for a computer. About the middle of 46, he had an idea for storing digits on cathode ray tube. The cathode ray tube is essentially like a television tube, but signals put in by an input

stored there. By December 1946, he'd stored one digit, one single binary digit. It didn't seem that storing just that one digit on the cathode ray tube was much of an achievement at the time, but this was to be the start of something big. By the end of 1947, the team was clear about what sort of computer they were going to build. It was rather different from most of the others being...

contemplated because of this feature of the immediate access of the storage system. Funding was limited, but Tom used to work for the telecommunications research establishment known as TRE.

This was very useful. So I was able to draw on the stores of TRE and by this mechanism we got cathode ray tubes and valves. So you're really just begging bits and pieces to build it? That's right, yes. With the permission of TRE, of course. Oh, of course. You weren't pinching the stuff. The computer they built was quite ugly and it was huge. It filled a room that was just under six metres by six metres.

As babies go, it doesn't really look that attractive. Three cathode ray tubes for eyes, it weighs over one and a half tonnes and stands seven foot high. But there could be no prouder parents than the Manchester scientists. That's the BBC's Maggie Philbin. Proud parent Tom remembers it wasn't particularly comfortable working in the room. It was fairly full of...

of valve circuitry, so much so that of course we didn't have a luxury of air conditioning or anything. The temperature often got above 100 and it was quite unpleasant working in there when the room actually got full of equipment. Nor was it a thing of beauty, was it? No, it wasn't. It was completely exposed to the elements.

In fact, in order to cool the room, we opened some windows and there was a sudden summer storm and the back of two or three racks was sprayed with water and that cost us about two or three weeks of rebuilding.

Another scientist who worked with Tom on this hugely unattractive baby machine in the hot room was Geoff Tootle. The baby team built up the machine one unit at a time, making sure each unit worked before adding the next one. We would screw it into a post office rack and connect it up to all the other units and then start to find out why it wasn't working properly. We went on with this process of adding the units and

until we got to the stage when we'd made a computer. So they finally got the last unit in place, but would it work? We fed in a few binary numbers and switched it on. I can remember very, very clearly the day when the first computer came.

We'd been building up to this time. For several days, we'd loaded the programme in, but there was always something wrong. And then, as we approached one lunchtime, suddenly the thing worked. We saw the thing had done a computation. Geoff Tootill and I rushed out to find Professor Williams and dragged him into the lab, and we sat there and saw it run again. There were great cheers, and it was a very great excitement, actually. It's always...

They'd done it. Baby was born. So let's go back to that complicated calculation that baby was asked to do. Is 2 to the power of 127 minus 1 a prime number or not? Setting the machine for this kind of problem takes a week. Then the brain is switched on and impulses passing to the computer make the actual calculation. The computer itself contains 1,500 valves.

The brain at present is only in the experimental stage, the answer being read from a cathode ray tube. Later, an automatic keyboard will type the answer. As soon as the baby had demonstrated what was possible, the university developed it into a full-scale operational machine, the Manchester Mark I. We're looking down on the control desk of our Mark I computing machine. I've been looking down on it because although these machines can do the...

quite fantastic things. They are really essentially simple-minded devices. The team who created the Mark I beat competitors in Harvard and Cambridge to build the first computer that could be programmed. This is the program, written by Tom Kilburn, the world's first computer programmer. And a very important question. Now, what did the world think of this? I mean, people must have come, government people, other scientists, industrialists. Could they see the future? There were a very small number of people involved

relatively, who were interested in computers at that time. It was widely thought that two computers would serve the whole country. And there must be tens of thousands of computers in the country now, of course. In 1998, Baby hit the headlines once more.

Now, it was nicknamed Baby by its creators at Manchester University. As the very first electronic brain to store a programme, it was the forerunner of all modern computers. And as our technology correspondent Christine McGurty discovered, Baby's been reborn. Putting the final touches to a machine that bears little resemblance to the computers we use today. Just a jumble of wires and switches to the untrained eye...

But engineer Chris Burton has spent three years rebuilding this once groundbreaking computer using the same techniques as the inventors. It was Tom Kilburn who wrote the first computer programme and keyed it in himself. Fifty years on, he's been helping build the replica. The replica a baby was built and is still on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Computers have changed the way we work, the way we play, the way we shop,

and the way we socialise. And it all started with Baby. Jill Kersley with the story of Baby, a pioneering computer. I think I'm going to refer to my laptop as my computing machine from now on. It has a reassuringly historical ring about it. And if the history of inventions is your thing, do visit our website where there's a dedicated collection of first-hand stories on those magnificent men and women whose ideas have changed our world. Search for bbc.com slash witnesshistory.

World of Secrets is where untold stories are exposed. And in this new series, we investigate the dark side of the wellness industry, following the story of a woman who joined a yoga school only to uncover a world she never expected. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this. Where the hope of spiritual breakthroughs leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. You just get sucked in spiritually.

so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. World of Secrets, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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Still to come in this podcast, stories from Iran's dramatic past, including the former empress exiled in 1979 and the US embassy siege that followed the Islamic Revolution. I didn't recognize my son. His arms are like sticks.

And something happened to his eyes, his face. He's so worn out, so tortured looking. But before that, we're going to a party. In 1971, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, celebrated 2,500 years of the Persian Empire by throwing a lavish three-day event. The desert setting was transformed with luxuries imported to satisfy every whim of the dignitaries who were flown in from all over the world.

They might have had a good time, but the excess demonstrated by the event united opposition parties against the Shah and lost him public credibility. Megan Jones has been hearing about this extraordinary gathering. This cannot be called extravagant because it is unique. The world has never seen anything like that.

It's the 12th of October 1971 and we're in the middle of the desert in Shiraz, in southwest Iran. For three days, his imperial majesty, the Shah-in-Shah Ariyama of Iran, will be setting himself back some lavish £15 million or so for what's obviously going to be one of the most fantastic parties that the world's ever seen. And all of it against this Hollywood-type background. The background, well, that's Persepolis, meaning the city of Persians, one of the ancient capitals of the empire.

The Washington Post party reporter, Sally Quinn, has been flown in to cover the event. They had built a city, a tent city in the middle of the desert. The tent city itself was otherworldly. It was beyond strange.

You couldn't imagine somebody thinking this up in the first place. I mean, I've seen tents and I've been in deserts, but I'd never seen anything like this was palatial. A Parisian design firm has brought over these specially made tents, which are fit for a king. Well, more like 60 heads of state.

including an emperor, presidents, prime ministers, queens and members of the British royal family. For morning tea, all Princess Anne will have to do is give a little tinkle on her bedside bell. They've even thought of royal indigestion. On every royal bathroom shelf is a free packet of a well-known stomach powder. There were just so many celebrities and kings and queens that it was hard to even distinguish between them.

That was the other thing, is that everybody there was so used to being number one. And yet when they were there, they weren't number one. They were one of many. Before their arrival, an area of 30 kilometres has been sprayed with a special chemical to get rid of snakes and scorpions. It's also reported a golf course, airport and new road were built.

Surrounding it all, tens of thousands of trees brought him from Versailles in France, alongside flowers, shrubs and birds. I'm sure somebody got hit with bird droppings, but it was kind of like something out of a Dumb and Dumber movie, you know. The whole thing I found really funny. Although it was said the birds didn't survive for very long because of how hot it was. Ashah is a royal title historically used by leading figures of the Iranian monarchies.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was given the title in 1941. For him, this was an important event to showcase the ancient city of Iran, but also its contemporary advancements, despite growing political opposition. The situation in Iran was very unstable. The Shah was the Shah and emperor. There were a lot of underground people who were trying to overthrow him.

Despite the opposition, the party had been a year in the making, with the banqueting tent one of the main venues. Inside, rows of tables had been set for one of the official dinners. Candelabras are hanging from gold material on the ceiling. Bright blue drapes cover the walls. Guests are lining up outside, queuing to be greeted by the Shah. I can only imagine how much money was spent on clothes and

and everybody was dolled up to the hilt. Anybody who could wear a tiara and get away with it, or a crown did. And the necklaces and the bracelets and the earrings were just incredible.

And all these people in these, you know, some of the, they were all from Paris. Most of the designers were French designers. But then... It was very windy, and so the sand would blow into the tent, so everybody sort of had sand in their hair and sand in their teeth. You know, they had hairdressers and makeup people and all that, but it was pretty grim.

Inside, the famous French restaurant Maxime's is in charge of the event. They've got 18 tonnes of food to use and 180 waiters to serve dishes including stuffed quails, crayfish, lamb, as well as filet mignon and special fish dishes and all the, what the French do, soufflés and...

But the kitchens are in the desert, right? And the cooks are in the desert and they're hot and sandy and I don't know whether there was sand in the food, but I wouldn't imagine there wasn't. All the word I was getting was that there were too many sauces in the sauces. Everything was over-sauced. 25,000 bottles of wine, 2,500 bottles of champagne.

And 12,000 bottles of whiskey have been flown in to wash it all down. I don't know who did the seating, but people just were sitting at the tables not talking to each other. It just looked deadly. It wasn't fun. It should have been. If you're going to do that, you should make it fun. But it just wasn't fun. When the dinner was finished, which was more than five hours later, fireworks filled the sky.

Although Sally wasn't invited, she was given the opportunity to try some caviar. The Shah had a cache of caviar, golden caviar, which was very, very rare. And only the Shah could have the golden caviar because there wasn't enough to go around. But the Shah did not like caviar, if you can believe that. So he would pass it out to his friends as sort of bonuses. When you tried it, what did you think? It was delicious. It was unbelievable.

The banquet wasn't even the main event. That came the next day, with a huge parade involving thousands of costumed soldiers. It was really hot and the sun was baking down and it went on forever and the pomp and circumstances and trumpets and soldiers and...

It was like a sort of military parade, and we were all dying of heat and desperate to get out of there. I can only imagine how the guests felt.

Between the organised gatherings, guests could relax, as Sally explains in this 2016 BBC documentary called Decadence and Downform, the Shah of Iran's Ultimate Party. You could pull up your chair and sit outside your tent. So some of the kings and queens were kind of sitting outside their tent or some had the

Or they could rhyme around.

And I got there, and all of a sudden I heard this little, and I looked around. It sounded like a dog. It was a tiny little dog. It looked like a chihuahua. And the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was on his knees trying to get the dog to come to him. His dog had escaped from the tent and gone up in the hills, and Haile Selassie had crawled up there and was trying to get his dog back.

To mark the end of the party, a huge marble tower standing at 148 feet was unveiled. Like the party, it cost millions, although the exact figure for the whole event is unclear. For example, the British newspaper The Guardian said...

An estimated US$213 million. In the New York Times, it was reported as... US$16.6 million. The Shah wasn't offering up any answers. First of all, how do they know about what is spent? Really, the only expenses that are made for the festivities are the two official dinners. This is the least that we could do for such a gathering.

It was not a success in the sense that it did what they needed to do, the Shah needed to do, which is to solidify his position in Iran. It just enraged the Iranian people more that this was all about the Shah's power and showing off, but with all this French stuff and spending all this money when there were so many people in Iran who didn't have enough food. ♪

Sally Quinn, formerly of the Washington Post, was speaking to Megan Jones. That stark contrast between the staggering wealth of the Shah and the increasingly dire state of the economy, as it was experienced by the Iranian people, clearly played into the later events of the Islamic Revolution. In early 1979, the Shah of Iran and his wife, Farah Pahlavi, left Iran for the last time. There had been increasingly violent protests against the regime.

Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years of exile. Following a referendum, he declared an Islamic republic. In 2010, Lucy Williamson spoke to two women from very different backgrounds who were both forced to leave Iran during those times, one of them the former empress herself. It's January 1979, the first wintry days of a new year.

and in the Iranian capital, the fury of revolution is building, with protests against the king and slogans shouted into the frosty air.

Inside her house near the palace, Ruiz Shafi listens to the sounds of change and upheaval buzzing back and forth across the city sky. Just the roaring of these helicopters five, six times a day, coming and going to the airport and to the palaces, to the airport, to the palaces, you know. So what did you think was going on? Well, all we thought is that they're taking the stuff out and they're leaving. You

So this was our assumption at the time, you know. And we were on the streets all the time, you know, demonstrating against them. Iran's queen, Farah Pahlavi, watched from inside the palace as the demonstrations grew. It was like a snowball. It was, I cannot say really, maybe three, four months before it happened and we had to leave the country that day.

I was realising that it's getting out of hand, unfortunately. By mid-January, it was clear what she and her husband had to do. You know, it was very difficult, especially for my children. I felt for them. Exile is always difficult, not only for royalty, but for everybody. But, of course, we had a heavier weight on our shoulders. On January 16th, they left the palace for the last time.

Writing about that day years later, the details were still etched in her memory. We had breakfast separately that morning as the king had risen very early and gone to his office just as he would on any normal day. Did he have any idea that these were the last hours he would spend in the country he loved so much? When we were informed that the two helicopters which would take us to Mehrabad Airport were ready for take-off, the palace staff spontaneously gathered on the palace steps.

Our bags had already been taken on board. Hands were stretched out to us, and I can still see faces twisted with emotion. The king gave them all a last wave. Within minutes of the news being announced, the streets of Tehran were alive to the sound of cheering crowds, from streams of cars with their headlights on and their horns blaring.

It was, as far as the people were concerned, total victory. The man they had condemned, the man they had said must be brought down, had finally gone. And the city went delirious with joy. Listening to the radio that day, just a kilometre or two away from the palace, Ruhi Shafi heard the jubilation spread through the streets and

and went out into the city to join in the celebrations. The friends and relatives said that in downtown, it was like 15, 20 miles crowd bringing down the statues, you know, celebrating. And the headline of the newspaper on the day was, The Shah Went. We saw the photos. There were these officers crying and begging and holding the Shah's feet, you know, please don't go. And the Shah was crying.

What could I take away with me when I go in the grave? Not even a dress, maybe just a piece of white cloth, that's all. So I'm philosophical enough to know these things, and I have enough for the earthly needs. So what I've got to take with me in the grave is history.

The Shah had finally gone. Two and a half thousand years of monarchy, driven out by a population filled with expectation and tired of repression. But as the royal plane left the runway, a new question swelled in the minds of the royal couple. Where exactly were they going?

Having been driven out, the Shah, suffering from an advanced form of cancer, found he had few places to turn. Their first year of exile was spent shuttling between several different countries before Egypt stepped in to offer shelter.

Speaking to Farah Pallavi now from her home in the United States, the sense of betrayal still hangs over her words. I frankly try not to live in the past. I try to forget about the negative things that happened in those periods, the pettiness, the cowardice, the treasons, the lies, the injustices, and I want to live in the present now.

Life is a struggle for all of us no matter in what position we are. You might lose your country, your loved ones, your possessions, your position, but you should not despair, you should not lose hope and you should especially not let the negative win over you.

It was an exile that began with the death of her husband and which, 20 years later, led, she believes, to the death of her daughter, Leila. Of course, that was a very, very hard time in my life and the life of my children. And there's not one day that I don't think about her and I suffer because there is always a wound in your heart that never disappears. But I have to tell myself that I cannot come back to the past.

Since the Pahlavi's departure, time had marched on inside Iran too. The revolution had brought the Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini, to power, and with him came new restrictions, particularly for women. Inside her home in the capital, Rui Shafi was having a change of heart. The first decree that he issued, since this is going to be an Islamic state, he advised women, you know, to regard the Islamic values.

That was the first decree that totally shocked us and alerted us. But women took it very seriously from that moment, you know. And the next morning we were out on the streets. And the slogan was, we didn't make the revolution to go back into the veil. When was the first time that you actually put the veil on? Three years later. How did it feel to put this veil on when you didn't really want to? You know, the humiliation.

and the feeling that you're forced to do something. The restrictions increased, and several years after she celebrated the royal's flight from Iran, Rui decided the time had come to follow them into exile. Together with her daughter and husband, she boarded a plane for the UK. And we came out, because she said, colours, and I looked, colours. And we were just looking around as if we had come to another planet.

Because over there, all you could see, grey, black, grey, black, you know, all the time, because the colours had vanished from Iran at the time. Iran has moved on again since then. But Rui and Farah both still live in exile, one in the UK, the other in America. Lucy Williamson.

One of the most dramatic moments from the Iranian revolution took place late in 1979. Young Islamic radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans captive. They were held for 444 days. Here's Alex Last.

It's November 1979, just months after the Iranian revolution had swept the Shah from power. November 4th started out as a dreary rainy day, but it was a day like any day in Tehran. There were marches going on all the time. You hear noises in the street and you hear "Margbar Amrikar, death to America" or "down with America". Barry Rosen was press attaché at the US embassy. At about

10 in the morning, I heard noises outside, looked at the window. A group of hardline students were climbing over the fences of the embassy and before I knew it they were trying to pound on the door and they did pound on the door and my secretary, her name was Mary, told her, "No, don't open the door.

hold out as long as possible. I had no idea what my next move would be. Everything was so fast. And then more and more and more of these young men with pictures of Imam Khomeini fastened to their chests with pins. And the rain was coming down. And Mary finally opened the door. Bang! A flood of these young angry men with clubs

And they said, you're a member of the nest of spies in Farsi, Lorne Josu's son. And I said, in Farsi, I'm the press attache of the United States of America. In the United States, President Jimmy Carter was furious. It's vital to the United States and to every other nation that the lives of diplomatic personnel and other citizens abroad be protected.

and that we refuse to permit the use of terrorism and the seizure and the holding of hostages to impose political demands. The students demanded that the Shah, who was being treated for cancer in a New York hospital, be returned to Iran to stand trial. Inside the embassy, they rounded up the American staff. They stood there for a second, and then they grabbed me, they tied my hands, and then they...

brought me and the rest of my staff over to the library. They started to question me about my role in front of everybody. And all the Iranians were crying, all my people were crying. And then they pulled out a gun. And I said, wait, guys, let these people go

Do what you want with me, but let them go. You know, a lot of adrenaline was rushing through my veins. I just don't know why I was saying these things. And with some negotiations, they freed every one of them, but they took their name so that they could interrogate them some other time.

That was one of the most touching moments at that time because everybody started crying, we started to kiss each other, and I said goodbye, and I meant goodbye. I really meant that this was the end. You must have been terrified. Well, there's no word for it. Your entire body tingles. You conjure up every possible last moment of your life and possibly things that you could have done. I was absolutely more than terrified. I don't even know if there's a term...

that can be used. On the streets, there was huge support for the students. Crucially, they also got the backing of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Amid popular fears that the U.S. wanted to reinstall the Shah, the 52 American hostages were seen as insurance against any U.S. plot.

Masameh Ebtekar was spokeswoman for the students at the embassy and went on to become Iranian vice president. When the Shah was admitted to the United States, the students were quite confident that there's something going on behind the scenes. They intended to protect the integrity of their country, their independence, and I think that they achieved to some extent what they intended.

In the United States, President Carter froze Iranian assets. But months passed, negotiations failed. Pressure on Carter mounted. In March, a video emerged of the American hostages, including Barry Rosen. His mother, back in New York, was moved to speak out. I didn't recognize my son. His arms are like sticks.

And something happened to his eyes, his face. He's so worn out, so tortured looking, and so thin. President Carter, my husband is gone, but I want my son back. Barry is fading away. Please help me. President Carter did finally launch a rescue bid. Late yesterday, I cancelled a carefully planned operation

It had ended in failure. Rescue helicopters had broken down en route, aircraft collided over the Iranian desert, killing eight US servicemen. Back in Tehran, the interrogations had not stopped. I was brought downstairs and they, in a theatrical manner, had everybody standing there, about six or seven guards, all armed.

with masks on and automatic weapons. And my interrogator said, "I want you to sign this admitting to your spying." And I said, "No." And he said, "I'm gonna count from 10 to 1, and if you don't sign it, I'm gonna blow your head off. 10 seconds is a long, long time." And they counted and counted, and I said to myself as they got to 5,

I don't want to die. I can't see how the government's going to hold this against me. I wanted to be perceived as being as patriotic as possible for whatever reason. But by the time they got to, I certainly...

said, yep, I'm signing. That drained the hell out of me. When they brought me back to my cell, I was out of it for a long time. But, he says, the worst part of his ordeal was that there was no end in sight. It was just a certain sense of agony, and I think somewhere in my brain I gave up. I couldn't sleep. My entire nervous system was on an alarm system.

Every time I tried to sleep, something would wake me up and say, stay alert, stay alert. And that was my head saying to me, you're going to die. But if you're up, they can't kill you. How do you cope? You know, to be perfectly truthful, I would have liked to have killed myself. There were some of my colleagues who tried to bang their heads against cement walls in the prison or even cut their wrists. I wanted to die. Every day I woke up,

The sun rose. I said, oh, no, another day here. I could remember that every day a little spot of light would come into this dark cell and it would move, move from the top of the ceiling all the way to the bottom. So that was about two hours just watching that spot move. Sounds silly, but, you know, you had to take anything you could get.

After 444 days in captivity, Barry Rosen and the other 51 hostages were released, just hours after Jimmy Carter was succeeded as president by Ronald Reagan. The Shah himself had died months earlier in July 1980. Years later, Barry Rosen agreed to meet one of his captors as he tried to come to terms with his experience in the war.

It was worth it, he said. We saw each other as humans. Alex Last was speaking to Barry Rosen in 2009. That American embassy siege in Tehran, which lasted a staggering 444 days, was just one of the many dramatic events which have unfolded in Iran, so much so that we have a dedicated collection of Iranian history stories on our website, which will take you to the heart of stories, including that disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages and the

and the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected government and installed the Shah, as ever. Find them by searching for bbc.com slash witnesshistory. And we'll be back with more first-hand stories from the past when the History Hour podcast returns next week. Until then, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye.

From the brilliant and bizarre... It was really surreal. It was a surreal kind of atmosphere there. You couldn't really see anybody. ...to the shocking and unexpected... I'm just wondering, what are we going to do now? This was really my worst fear. He found 100% horse meat that was labelled as beef. Witness the stories that have shaped our world...

told by the people who were there. When he went to the factory, the poodle went in front of him. So the workers only, oh, the boss is here. Many people had many things to lose by our victory. The future was not so bright.

When you're young, it feels like anything is possible. Maybe you're a little hot-headed, but your optimism lifts you up.

And your righteous fury can be rocket fuel, propelling you to fight for what's right. You might make choices that put you in danger. You might even make history. I'm Nicola Coughlan. This is History's Youngest Heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. Being young, maybe she didn't think too much. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.

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India's warrior queen. She was a small woman, leading her troops astride a horse, sword in each hand, taking on the might of the entire British Empire. History is lit up by young people who act on instinct and stick to their principles. Like Julian of Norwich, one of the first women to write in the English language. A trailblazer, but

but at a cost. Why would somebody choose to have themselves blocked up into a tiny little cell with limited contact with the outside world, out of choice? And Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days, who refused to give up her faith and chose to face the executioner's axe. You have someone who is guilty

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A Soviet naval officer whose extraordinary courage helped save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Well, sticking to your guns on that submarine in that heat, that take guts. That really takes guts. History made by young people. Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

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