Not that he was always so willing to tell this story. For most of his adult life, it remained largely unmentioned. He would talk about it when he met up with his older brother, Alec; they would reminisce about life in the old country, in the Hungarian town of Makó, where they played in the snow in winter and swam in the Maros river in summer, and remember the family that was taken from them – their mother, their father, their four sisters and three brothers, all murdered by the Nazis.
meant solely for his family. That text has now been published as a slim, memorable volume of Holocaust testimony: Chicken Soup Under the Tree. In Kaufering, he would be worked hard, building an underground bunker and tasked with carrying bags of cement that were too heavy for his 12-year-old back. But, in Auschwitz, the hard labour had mostly dried up by the time he was there. He remembers it as a holding camp, where prisoners would wait until an order came from another camp, or factory, demanding a fresh supply of slaves.
He then tells me something remarkable. About a decade after his arrival in England, in the 1950s, he seriously considered getting the tattoo done himself. “Many, many times. I’m ashamed of myself. I was going to put my number on there. Because I felt I hadn’t paid the price.” Without a tattoo, he felt as if he wasn’t “a fully fledged survivor”.
been in there for two days when Alec, helped by a Polish Jewish prisoner, came to rescue him. His brother carried him out over his shoulder. “We supported each other. I mean, I’m alive for a number of times that he saved me literally from the jaws of death.”