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There were celebrations in Auckland after the Rugby union Test match was | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
drawn. In the meantime, let's bring you a programme called Witness. | :00:07. | :00:25. | |
Hello and welcome to Witness, with me, Rebecca Jones, | :00:26. | :00:30. | |
here at the British Library in London. | :00:31. | :00:33. | |
We've got another five people who've experienced extraordinary moments | :00:34. | :00:35. | |
This month on the programme, a mother who took on Argentina's | :00:36. | :00:41. | |
military rulers to find her daughter. | :00:42. | :00:45. | |
Paul McCartney's brother who remembers one of the Beatles' | :00:46. | :00:49. | |
And an astronaut who survived a collision in space. | :00:50. | :00:59. | |
But first, back in 1953, American husband and wife, | :01:00. | :01:02. | |
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electric chair | :01:03. | :01:05. | |
after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. | :01:06. | :01:11. | |
Our first witness is the Rosenberg's son Robert. | :01:12. | :01:16. | |
ARCHIVE: One of the greatest peacetime spy dramas in the nation's | :01:17. | :01:20. | |
history reaches its climax as Julius Rosenberg | :01:21. | :01:24. | |
and Mrs Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of transmitting secrets | :01:25. | :01:28. | |
to Russia entered the federal building in New York | :01:29. | :01:30. | |
The last time I saw my parents was in Sing Sing prison, | :01:31. | :01:35. | |
just a couple of days before they were executed in June 1953. | :01:36. | :01:42. | |
I have this very strong visceral sense of a warm and loving family. | :01:43. | :01:45. | |
My father played word games with my brother. | :01:46. | :01:52. | |
They were pretending like nothing was wrong, | :01:53. | :01:59. | |
that we'd see them, like we'd see them in another few weeks. | :02:00. | :02:03. | |
And he wanted them to acknowledge the terrible situation | :02:04. | :02:10. | |
And so he started wailing, "one more day to live." | :02:11. | :02:20. | |
Both my parents were children of the depression. | :02:21. | :02:23. | |
They grew up in poverty on the lower East side of Manhattan. | :02:24. | :02:27. | |
My father, Julius, was an electrical engineer. | :02:28. | :02:31. | |
He was a member of the American Communist Party. | :02:32. | :02:34. | |
My father was arrested in July of 1950, in New York City | :02:35. | :02:44. | |
Both were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. | :02:45. | :02:54. | |
The government said Julius Rosenberg was a master spy who led an spiring | :02:55. | :03:00. | |
The government said Julius Rosenberg was a master spy who led an spy ring | :03:01. | :03:04. | |
that stole the secret of the atomic bomb and gave it to | :03:05. | :03:07. | |
Julius was guilty of espionage, but it didn't have anything to do | :03:08. | :03:11. | |
It's hard for me to believe that my mother didn't know | :03:12. | :03:16. | |
But there is no credible evidence that my mother | :03:17. | :03:22. | |
This was the great red scare, the McCarthy period. | :03:23. | :03:28. | |
The government was saying there was this international | :03:29. | :03:32. | |
Communist conspiracy that was out to destroy our way of life. | :03:33. | :03:35. | |
Fear makes powerful people do very dangerous things. | :03:36. | :03:40. | |
The trial at which they were convicted was a travesty. | :03:41. | :03:45. | |
We now know the judge secretly communicated with the prosecution, | :03:46. | :03:48. | |
The chief prosecution witnesses perjured themselves. | :03:49. | :03:55. | |
The government of the United States use the death penalty, | :03:56. | :03:58. | |
The government of the United States used the death penalty, | :03:59. | :04:01. | |
The purpose, as one of the FBI agents put it, | :04:02. | :04:05. | |
we didn't want them to die, we wanted them to talk. | :04:06. | :04:10. | |
There was a worldwide movement and mass movement, | :04:11. | :04:12. | |
even within the United States at the height of the McCarthy | :04:13. | :04:15. | |
They were executed on June the 19th, a month after my sixth birthday. | :04:16. | :04:29. | |
My brother just kind of hung his head. | :04:30. | :04:33. | |
And I came in and I knew something was wrong, | :04:34. | :04:36. | |
Even a month after the execution, I was saying, "when are we going | :04:37. | :04:49. | |
And he'd have to remind me they were dead. | :04:50. | :04:53. | |
My parents should not have been executed and we took | :04:54. | :04:55. | |
My brother and I, we are marathoners. | :04:56. | :05:09. | |
Robert Meeropol, remembering his parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. | :05:10. | :05:13. | |
Now, back in 1967, the BBC organised a live international television | :05:14. | :05:16. | |
They invited The Beatles to play and they came up with a new song | :05:17. | :05:28. | |
Paul McCartney's brother Mike was in the studio | :05:29. | :05:31. | |
This is Steve Race in The Beatles recording studio in London, | :05:32. | :05:44. | |
where the latest Beatles record is at this moment being built up. | :05:45. | :05:47. | |
Not just a single performance, but the whole montage of performances. | :05:48. | :05:53. | |
None of us knew what the hell was going on, but everyone went | :05:54. | :05:56. | |
along with it and it was just a magic thing. | :05:57. | :05:59. | |
It was that ridiculous three, two, one... | :06:00. | :06:08. | |
In 1967, I was in a comedy group, it was a satirical comedy, | :06:09. | :06:27. | |
poetic word imagery group called The Scaffolds. | :06:28. | :06:30. | |
And I used to stay with my brother in his house. | :06:31. | :06:34. | |
So he said, there's this big thing coming up, | :06:35. | :06:36. | |
The Our World broadcast was this extraordinary idea to link | :06:37. | :06:42. | |
For the first time we can see right round our world from sunset | :06:43. | :06:48. | |
In 43 control rooms all around the world, production teams | :06:49. | :06:54. | |
are monitoring and selecting the hundreds of pictures and sounds | :06:55. | :06:56. | |
from five continents which will combine to make | :06:57. | :07:00. | |
And so, how do you wrap up what was happening in London | :07:01. | :07:10. | |
John had written this thing called All You Need Is Love, | :07:11. | :07:21. | |
We'd had the Vietnam War, Kennedy had been shot and it seemed | :07:22. | :07:26. | |
to sum up the hopes and positive thinking of that era. | :07:27. | :07:28. | |
That will do for the vocal backing, very nicely. | :07:29. | :07:36. | |
Everyone was rather polite, very quiet because it was such a big | :07:37. | :07:45. | |
Here then is final mix track take one of the song | :07:46. | :07:50. | |
And then to actually experience the slow and the format of the song, | :07:51. | :08:08. | |
you heard all the little bits fitting in and then | :08:09. | :08:10. | |
It was getting better, and better and people | :08:11. | :08:20. | |
# Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. | :08:21. | :08:28. | |
The whole thing built slowly, slow and apprehensive at first. | :08:29. | :08:31. | |
And then into it and then John and our kid delivering the harmonies | :08:32. | :08:34. | |
and delivering the song and then building up to the crescendo | :08:35. | :08:36. | |
All our friends are there, Mick Jagger from the Stones, | :08:37. | :08:48. | |
Marianne Faithfull, his girlfriend, all the cream of pop society. | :08:49. | :08:56. | |
Everyone is on such a high, the placards are going round, | :08:57. | :08:59. | |
the balloons, the confetti is like snow, you are | :09:00. | :09:01. | |
And this atmosphere was electric and beautiful. | :09:02. | :09:11. | |
And it goes to another country and then this beautiful | :09:12. | :09:18. | |
Mike McCartney in the Beatles home town of Liverpool. | :09:19. | :09:31. | |
For almost 20 years, the Nobel prize-winning author, | :09:32. | :09:33. | |
Ernest Hemingway, had a house on the Caribbean island of Cuba, | :09:34. | :09:36. | |
where he wrote some of his bestselling novels. | :09:37. | :09:38. | |
As a young boy, Alberto Ramos worked on the estate and he later | :09:39. | :09:42. | |
Alberto Ramos, speaking to us from Hemingway's house. | :09:43. | :13:05. | |
Remember, you can watch Witness every month on the BBC News channel | :13:06. | :13:09. | |
or you can catch up on all of films along with more than 1000 radio | :13:10. | :13:25. | |
In the late 1970s, thousands of young men and women were detained | :13:26. | :13:31. | |
in Argentina for their opposition to military rule. | :13:32. | :13:32. | |
Among those who went missing was Ana Maria Borivali. | :13:33. | :13:35. | |
ARCHIVE: They are called the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, | :13:36. | :13:42. | |
the square in the centre of Buenos Aires where | :13:43. | :13:44. | |
they hold the same sad demonstration every week. | :13:45. | :13:46. | |
They've all had at least one relative who's disappeared. | :13:47. | :17:24. | |
Merta, in the offices of The Mothers Of The Disappeared. | :17:25. | :17:27. | |
And finally, in June 1997, an unmanned supply vessel crashed | :17:28. | :17:29. | |
The station quickly began to leak air and the astronauts on board | :17:30. | :17:35. | |
He spoke to Witness about surviving a crash in space. | :17:36. | :17:49. | |
Mir was a space station built by the Russians. | :17:50. | :17:52. | |
The impression you got when you opened up the hatch | :17:53. | :17:58. | |
and went into Mir for the first time were two fold. | :17:59. | :18:00. | |
It was a smell, a bit like an oily garage. | :18:01. | :18:07. | |
Maybe a little bit of must, because we did have mould on the Mir. | :18:08. | :18:11. | |
And then the other impression is clutter. | :18:12. | :18:12. | |
As you go through, it's basically like going into the oesophagus | :18:13. | :18:15. | |
After about six weeks of being on the station, | :18:16. | :18:19. | |
I'd been doing my experiments, I'm very happy, I get up on June 25. | :18:20. | :18:25. | |
The commander and the flight engineer had been using radio | :18:26. | :18:33. | |
control equipment to fly a cargo ship called Progress that | :18:34. | :18:36. | |
weighs about seven tonnes into the Mir station using a TV, | :18:37. | :18:39. | |
As I look at the TV screen, I can see the orientation | :18:40. | :18:45. | |
is all wrong for a proper docking to take place. | :18:46. | :18:49. | |
And Sasha, the flight engineer, says to me... | :18:50. | :19:02. | |
And he means, the spacecraft which was joined on to the end | :19:03. | :19:05. | |
of the station, which was at that point our lifeboat. | :19:06. | :19:07. | |
But I understood because of the emergency in which he said it, | :19:08. | :19:11. | |
that he meant go there to save your life. | :19:12. | :19:16. | |
And as I float through, I feel the whole space station | :19:17. | :19:20. | |
I'm pretty sure this may be my last breath, | :19:21. | :19:32. | |
because I'm looking at the thin three millimetre thick | :19:33. | :19:34. | |
aluminium walls, just waiting for them to pass. | :19:35. | :19:41. | |
aluminium walls, just waiting for them to part. | :19:42. | :19:43. | |
Klaxons go off when there is a pressure leak. | :19:44. | :19:45. | |
Then I felt my ears popping, which meant in this case, | :19:46. | :19:47. | |
the air was leaving the space station and there was a whistling | :19:48. | :19:50. | |
After 23 minutes, if we did not think we would start | :19:51. | :19:54. | |
Sasha comes to me and doesn't say a word. | :19:55. | :20:01. | |
He just starts trying to remove cables | :20:02. | :20:03. | |
Sasha looked around for a large hatch that could be put in place. As | :20:04. | :20:16. | |
it went on, it sucked in. Because the station had been hit by the | :20:17. | :20:25. | |
Progress, we were rolling. The batteries had given out, none of the | :20:26. | :20:31. | |
carbon dioxide removal was working, no auction regeneration and no | :20:32. | :20:37. | |
communication with Moscow. It was a totally dead station. This is not | :20:38. | :20:41. | |
something you see in the movies where it gets solved instantly by | :20:42. | :20:47. | |
some brainy chap. It probably took about six hours. We use the | :20:48. | :20:54. | |
spacecraft fibre jets to stop the space station tumbling and rolling | :20:55. | :20:58. | |
wonderfully, somehow after this, all of sudden the fans started to come | :20:59. | :21:07. | |
on and the lights came on. And I said, we'd done it. How ever, the | :21:08. | :21:15. | |
next month, the station was inoperable in any normal sense. It | :21:16. | :21:20. | |
could just sustain our lives and nothing else. When finally the | :21:21. | :21:24. | |
shuttle came in October, I was really, quite happy to see them. As | :21:25. | :21:30. | |
we backed away from the Mir station, I looked at it and thought, I don't | :21:31. | :21:36. | |
really mind if I don't ever see that again. Michael Foale, safely back on | :21:37. | :21:42. | |
Earth. That is it from Witness this month. , Lucy will be here at the | :21:43. | :21:47. | |
British library to guide you through another five moments in history. But | :21:48. | :21:54. | |
from me, Rebecca Jones and the rest of the Witness team, thanks for | :21:55. | :21:55. | |
watching and goodbye. The latest live upstate will take | :21:56. | :22:21. | |
you to the rest of the weekend, give you a look at the start of next week | :22:22. | :22:25. | |
which is looking unsettled, which means if you want rain on the | :22:26. | :22:27. | |
garden, there is | :22:28. | :22:28. |