Introduction

I have never, as it happens, had an overwhelming desire to talk about my experiences. The reasons for this are complex and varied, but I have certainly not had any desire to forget. However, there seems to be a taboo on the subject of the Holocaust.

When we first came to England, Renate and I badly wanted to talk, but no one asked us any questions. I know very well that, on the whole, people want to protect themselves from too much knowledge. Under the pretext of not wanting to bring back memories – in case they should be upsetting – they allow silence to prevail. There is actually no way that such memories can be brought back. Apart from certain details, there is nothing to bring back, since your experiences have never left you in the first place. When you have seen and gone through what we have, those experiences become an integral part of you, and they inevitably colour your whole make-up.

We were aware that we were a bit of a disappointment in some ways. We had ceased to look like ex-Belsen internees and we definitely did not need any medical attention. It had taken us eleven months to get permission to come to England. (We were liberated on 15th April 1945; we finally left Belsen on 27th December; we got stuck in Brussels; and we ultimately reached England on 18th March 1946.) It is not surprising that we looked like reasonably normal people by then. Very probably it would have been easier to ply us with food than listen to our stories. I don’t mean to criticize, but I would just like to tell it as it was. Soon the magic moment passed. We no longer felt like talking and settled for a kind of isolation which in time became second nature.

There have of course been occasions when people have had the courage to ask questions. I have always answered them willingly, usually by relating some amusing episode or telling them about one of those strange coincidences with which my life seems to have been so richly endowed.

Much has been written about concentration camps and the atrocities committed by the Germans. There is little that I can add. I don’t know how to describe hunger, not the type everybody is familiar with when a meal has been skipped but hunger that causes actual pain; or what it is like to be cold without any prospect of ever becoming warm again; or the sensation of real fear and total misery.

One of the reasons for my reticence is the acute humiliation I feel when, trying to put into words some of the unspeakable things that have happened, I encounter boredom or disbelief. I feel humiliated on behalf of the millions of the dead, and I also feel guilty. It is the age-old guilt of survivors who wonder why they should be in a position to talk at all.

So if you have been a witness to this twentieth-century outrage of sophisticated cruelty of man to man, you will inevitably live in some kind of limbo, cut off from the rest of the world. I have accepted the reality that there are those who ‘know’ and those who ‘don’t know’; and there the story seems to end.

It was something that happened in Rome a few years ago when I was there on a concert tour that prompted me to make my first attempt at recording some of the absurd coincidences and adventures that have coloured my life. On returning to my hotel late one night, I met two young colleagues at the bar, and they asked me how I had spent the evening. I told them I had spent it with somebody I had not seen since the liberation of Belsen, and related the circumstances under which I had originally met him. I was amazed at the impact the story made on my young friends, and at their genuine interest. I had to promise them to try to put something down on paper. It led me to wonder whether I might be able to make some contribution, however insignificant, to help commemorate an era.

My book will not be an account of the horrors themselves, nor mainly an historical document. The subject of the Holocaust has been treated many times with varying degrees of success. I merely want to put on paper how my life has been affected by having lived in Germany at the time of the Third Reich, as a Jew.