The race that had to be won (From Gazette & Herald)

The race that had to be won

THE present confrontation with the unspeakably evil regime presided over by Saddam Hussein, his sons and his henchmen reminds me of the first time I had a sniff of another regime of the same unsavoury kind.

I was in Berlin in the 30s and saw Jesse Owens storm through to his record run. The whole of the vast stadium rose to its feet to acclaim him - all but the people in the presidential seats, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels who sat firmly on their bottoms. A black man beating the pure Aryans was too much to stomach. Outside the stadium, blond, blue-eyed Hitler youth in their lederhosens carried trays of toffee apples made with dark treacle and sold on a stick. They were called "Niggers' Kisses".

But to begin, as Dickens might say, at the beginning.

My good parents, in their wisdom, thought that their 16-year-old son, soon to enter Liverpool University to study medicine, would benefit from seeing a little bit of the world and they arranged an 'au pair' exchange with a boy from Berlin called Gert Vogel who was to come and stay with us for six weeks before I returned with him to Berlin for the same period. He was an only child and I soon came to the conclusion he was pretty spoilt and selfish. But I did my best to get along with him. After all, I was soon to receive his hospitality.

At that time, I lived at our family hotel in Blackpool. Gert was a Jew with dark black hair and a pronounced Semitic nose. In those days, I knew very little about the persecution the Jews were beginning to suffer, but I was soon to experience something of the fear that gripped that long-suffering race long before the outbreak of war.

Gert's father was an architect and, judging by the opulence of their flat near the Unter den Linden, was a successful one. Gert inherited his race and religion, as all Jews do, from his mother and because of it, I was to discover to my dismay, hated her for it. It was soon clear to me that I was about to join a highly disfunctional family.

But, at home in Blackpool, we spent a satisfactory summer holiday. There was the sand and the sea and the Pleasure Beach to divert us and soon it was time to sail on a ship called the Bremenhaven for Germany.

I couldn't join Gert in second class accommodation because no cabin was available and my father, with some annoyance, had to buy a first class ticket. This meant that Gert and I had to eat in different dining rooms.

On the evening of embarkation, I took myself down to the dining room and was conducted to my table by a steward. I was trying to make sense of the menu (in French and starting off with caviar in a dish made of ice) and wondering whether I could order sausage and mash when a tall, stiffly-erect German man with close-cropped iron-grey hair, deep blue eyes and immaculately dressed arrived at my table. He clicked his heels together (in the German fashion), smiled a charming smile, bowed and said: "I see you are alone. So am I. May I join you?"

He spoke with hardly a trace of accent. I said: "Of course. Do sit down." He sat down and clipped his fingers to the steward who immediately laid another place. He introduced himself as Herr von Baedeker and said: "I hope you will allow me to buy the wine. If you are having meat, may I suggest a Chateau Neuf?" I didn't know one wine from another and said I thought that would be very acceptable.

He could scarcely have been more amiable and, as the meal went on, I felt all my awkwardness and suspicion disappear. He asked me about my school (all the while addressing me as Herr Rickards), my parents and my hobbies and then he said: "I observed from the deck that you had come with a friend, where is he?"

I told him about my difficulty getting a cabin in the same class and that we were temporarily separated. He pressed me further about Gert, wanting to know who were his parents and what his father did and where did they live in Berlin.

During all these questions, he was refilling my glass with wine and I was feeling quite chatty and answered all his questions as openly as I could. He seemed to have a genuine interest in us and hoped he would meet us in Berlin. He even asked where our cabins were and said if we were feeling a little seasick on the journey, he had some very effective pills which he would gladly share with us.

Then he said: "I have greatly enjoyed your company but I must go now to send a cable to my firm." He stood up, clipped his heels, bowed and was off. I though, what a delightful chap.

When I reached the great glass doors leading out of the dining room, to my great surprise Gert was there waiting for me. He took my arm and drew me aside. He was clearly anxious and said: "What was that man at your table talking about?"

I said: "He was talking in general about you and me and about your parents and what your father did and where you lived."

Gert said: "Come down to your cabin."

When we reached the cabin, he carefully closed the door and in a quiet voice asked me again exactly what information I had given him.

I was getting rather annoyed and said: "What are you so bothered about. Shouldn't I have told him who you were and where you came from, and why not?"

Gert suddenly put his finger to his lips and went to the cabin door and flung it open. Herr von Baedeker was bent down to the keyhole.

Gert told me on the following morning that his mother had been taken to prison for three months following a conversation she had had in her hairdresser's when she had criticised the regime and its increasing discrimination against the Jews. He made me solemnly promise that I would not disclose to his parents that I knew anything about the incident or about the conversation I had had with Herr von Baedeker.

I began to feel distinctly uneasy about my approaching holiday.

A few days later, Herr and Frau Vogel and I were seated round the dinner table. Gert had gone to play tennis but his mother said he was very worried because there was some difficulty about him remaining a member.

When I asked why, she pointed to the chimney and shook her head, clearly indicating that she thought it may be bugged. Then she pointed to the park outside, as though that was the only place where anything that involved politics could be safely discussed.

I was beginning to feel acutely homesick for England.

Few things upset me more than Gert's relationship with his mother. Because he had inherited her Semitic features, his race and religion from her and because he had endured so much contumely from his peers because he was a Jew, he was intensely bitter towards her and treated her with open contempt. This made me treat her with more than ordinary respect and courtesy. But I reflected I had several weeks to endure in this hate-filled house (so different from my own!) and I was determined to make the best of it.

Herr Vogel was a short, stocky, middle-aged man, even-tempered and of exquisite courtesy, but as he had hardly any English and my German was rudimentary in the extreme there was little commerce between us. I had the impression he was miserably torn between his wife and his son and had given up trying to keep the peace between them.

Frau Vogel was a beautiful woman with the same raven-black hair and deep brown eyes as her son. Truth to tell, she fussed over me too much but I understood the source of her loneliness and her need for affection.

One evening, she took me to the opera house to see Rosenkavalier. Both her husband and Gert had no interest in opera and were relieved that I had offered to escort Frau Vogel. She took my hand in the taxi and held it all the way to the theatre and told me she had not felt so happy for years.

I wondered with some confusion that if Herr Vogel got to know we had held hands, could he cite it as grounds for divorce?

Halfway through the overture, there was a disturbance in the royal box on our left and in came Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, several high-ranking German officers and a rather lovely woman with swept-back corn-coloured hair, who I heard later was his mistress. The conductor brought the orchestra to a sudden stop and swung round and gave the Hitler salute. Most of the men in the audience rose to their feet and did the same. I thought to myself that in England only a fire in the orchestra pit could prevail on the orchestra to stop halfway through an overture.

On another occasion, I was taken to a huge stadium, which I think was called Deutchland Halle, and heard Hitler in full flow. I understood very little of what he said, but it was clear to me he had a mesmeric effect on his audience. There were many brown and black shirts and Hitler Youth there and they reacted rather like those great flocks of dunlins I used to watch from my bedroom window at Blackpool, wheeling in dark clouds over the sea and all reacting to a change of direction at the same time... moving almost as one organism as though all individuality, all particularity was lost and the mass took over.

I felt deeply the danger of it and have retained a healthy distrust of crowds ever since.

I heard that poor Frau Vogel had ended up in one of the many camps of mass murder and had been gassed to death.

And I heard from my father, who had tried to keep in touch with the family, that Herr Vogel was last seen after the war walking up and down Unter den Linden with a sandwich board on his back asking if anyone knew of the whereabouts of his son Gert who had served in some ambulance unit but who had, like so many with Jewish blood, simply disappeared.

When I reached home after my unnerving experience in Germany, I remember standing on the sea wall at Blackpool taking in great gulps of fresh air and knowing with a conviction that went down to the crimson chambers of my heart that there is nothing sweeter in life than to live in a free land. But it has to be guarded. And fought for.

Updated: 16:47 Wednesday, April 02, 2003