My earliest memories are even before the ghetto, when I was a very young child in Hungary.

Things happened that seemed  harmless in themselves but were very much the tip of an iceberg. The Hungarian flag was hanging in the air and I jumped up to reach it just for fun.Somebody saw this happen and my father was taken to court and heavily fined because his Jewish son had insulted the Hungarian nation.

My father knew if we had got on the trains taking people to Auschwitz it would not have been a good thing. So he bribed a Hungarian policeman. We got out of the ghetto and took a train to Budapest, where the Holocaust was not yet going on. It was very dangerous but a kind doctor hid us in his clinic. Then we joined a Kasztner group. Kasztner was bribing Eichmann to take people to Palestine but he went back on his word. We ended up in Belsen.

It was not an extermination camp. But they crammed so many people in that tens of thousands died.

I got there on June 9, 1944 and we got out in December 44 because Kasztner’s negotiations reached a point where we were able to leave. Two months longer and I wouldn’t have survived.

I remember being frightened — but I also remember playing games. The food was terrible — a kind of soup with vegetables we didn’t know. That came once a day and twice a day came black water they called coffee. Once a week there was bread that looked and tasted like brick. We were always hungry. There were up to 100 people squeezed into one room and it was always dark and smelly. Anne Frank died only a few metres from us. Only nobody then knew who she was.

In Switzerland [after the war] I tried to fit in. I lived there for 17 years. I was good at languages. I offered my services to universities and someone came to me from Sussex. I got a job and I stayed.

Some people say it’s strange I became a professor of German. There is a German culture that is not the Nazi culture. I have no anti-German feelings. I find it less easy to be open minded to Hungarians.