The Outrage: a true story

‘Some people have ingrown toenails. This guy has an ingrown soul,’ Thomas grumbled. It was 1960, and he had just returned from an interview about his final-year project with a professor he wholeheartedly disliked. ‘He talked to me as if I was subhuman,’ he fumed.

Thomas was an English-speaking European, born in Sri Lanka. His parents had a penchant for Eastern meditation. His mother was a Spanish artist, who had a disconcerting habit of  leaving the table in the middle of a meal to stand on her head in a corner. His father was a Swedish architect, who would go out for a short walk and forget to return for several days. Unsurprisingly, Thomas too was an unconventional character. From the mid-1950s he was studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of  Technology in Zurich. When he decided to apply for permanent residence in Switzerland he began his CV with the words: ‘My father and mother met on an adventurous journey to India.’ I warned him that this would not predispose the Swiss authorities in his favour, but he insisted and was duly turned down.

I was born in Transylvania, a territory that has been shunted to and fro between Hungary and Romania as long as I can remember. When one of my daughters mentioned this at her English school, the teacher corrected her: ‘Transylvania exists only in horror films.’ In fact there was enough real horror, and for the Jews the worst came in the last year of World War II, in March 1944, when German troops invaded Hungary to prevent it defecting to the Allies. They were accompanied by Adolf Eichmann, and within two months half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. I was lucky enough to be rescued from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and taken to Switzerland with nearly 1,700 others, thanks to a deal between Eichmann and a Jewish leader called Rezsö Kasztner, who was later wrongly accused of collaboration and assassinated in Israel. In the mid-1950s I started studying English and German at the University of Zurich.

As foreigners surrounded by Swiss people, Thomas and I spent a lot of time together. Thomas had a gift for coining phrases. When I suffered a setback of some sort he comforted me with a cheerful ‘Never mind, things are never as bad as they’re going to be.’ To deter time wasters, his door carried a notice: ‘If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here’.

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