The scores, obtained at a fraction of union-inflated UK printing costs, paid off instantly and for decades to come. They gave me a competitive advantage in music sales that lasted as long as the demand for my product. Forty years later, I was down to my last ten dozen Polish-pressed scores, falsely stamped ‘Printed in the British Empire’ and selling at six pounds each, two hundred and forty times their manufacturing cost, bribes included.

The Communists in Warsaw were delighted at the deal, so much so that they promoted my embassy contact to Berlin, world capital of Cold War dirty deals. But leather-jacketed Jaček did not leave without fulfilling his part of our bargain, which was to procure me a trip to Warsaw – ostensibly to sign the contract and raise toasts for world peace, actually to see for myself what remained of Dovidl’s world, and if he was to be found anywhere within it.

To ease my conscience and cover my back, I told the Foreign Office that I was crossing the Iron Curtain in search of musical talent and offered my services as a contact and courier. Independent travellers were rare in those days between London and Warsaw. Under the Official Secrets Act, I am unable to discuss the operational aspects of my trip.

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.