I arrived in Warsaw in the deadliest of March frosts, but with a thaw shimmering on the eastern horizon. Stalin had died the week before and, while Poles queued in their thousands to pay respects under duress, a whiff of relief was in the air. I was allowed to choose the places I wanted to visit, rather than follow a rigid itinerary. Only one request – Treblinka – was declined, on the grounds that ‘there is nothing to see there’.

Not that there was much more in Warsaw, where my guide diligently droned out the official history. The Germans had forced the city’s three hundred and fifty thousand Jews into a ghetto. Then, they crammed in evacuees from other towns, reducing numbers by means of starvation, slave labour and random shootings. Deportations to Treblinka and Majdanek began in 1941. In the summer of 1942, three hundred and ten thousand men, women and children were herded to a central Umschlagplatz and on to cattle trucks. A last-ditch Jewish uprising in April 1943 was ruthlessly crushed and the ghetto was razed to the ground. Other parts of the city were flattened by German artillery when the Poles attempted an uprising in late 1944. What the guide did not add was that the Russians stood by on the outskirts of the town while the Nazis crushed the Poles, just as the Poles had stood by while they put down the Jewish rebellion.

Rampant in rubble, the Soviets redesigned central Warsaw as a proletarian housing barracks, mile upon mile of identical tower-blocks, divided by wide avenues for easy tank access. I could hear the wind howl between these concrete edifices, an inhuman noise.

The Warsaw I saw in March 1953 was a city without character, its flatness aped by the slab-eyed, snub-nosed features of a homogeneously fair-haired citizenry. Where, I wondered, were the black curls, flared nostrils, kiss-me mouths and deep-set eyes of Dovidl’s people? Gone to the smokestacks, from which none returned.

Breaking off the tour for lemon tea and sugar-dusted apple strudel in the gilded Hotel Bristol, I was apprised by the guide that it was in a room just above my head that the opera-loving Nazi governor, Hans Frank, sealed the fate of Warsaw’s Jews with a whispering pen on a sheet of hotel paper. I have never been able to eat apple strudel since that sick-sweet day.

I returned to find London, still bomb-gapped, in the grip of Coronation fever. A new Queen had come to the throne, fostering roseate dreams of a second Elizabethan Age. Aunt Mabel bought a television set to watch the ceremony, and it was on her sofa during the singing of Zadok the Priest that I was introduced to Myrtle, whom she and Mother had selected for me as a suitable life-partner.

‘She’s got good Medola breeding and a good head on her shoulders,’ said Mother, her eyes briefly reanimated.

‘Lovely teeth,’ confirmed Uncle Kenneth.

‘Nice hips,’ nudged Aunt Mabel.