‘What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so,’ wrote George Orwell, my father’s night-watch commander. ‘Sometimes the Jews make it very difficult to be as much pro-Semite as I am,’ yawned the critic James Agate, a theatrical sybarite who used to drop in on my mother for tea, en route from his Swiss Cottage apartment to a night in the West End. Orwell blithely acknowledged in one of his essays that anti-Semitism had increased during the war, blaming it on the tendency of Jews to congregate in cities. The Times warned that the Jews would forfeit all sympathy unless they dissociated themselves from Zionism. The Catholic Herald, which took its line from a collaborationist Pope in Rome, called for a ‘solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’ in the form of mass baptism. As Hitler faced defeat, his cultural victims contemplated a gloomy future.

Stefan Zweig fled from Britain to Brazil, where he took his own life – ‘all too impatient’, as he put it, ‘to await the dawn’. Oscar Kokoschka, interned as an enemy alien, painted a series of political allegories, ‘inspired less by anger than by despair’. Elias Canetti, the future Nobel Laureate, burned a hole in a table at Cosmo’s Continental Restaurant, composing the epic Auto-da-fé in his head without yet setting a word on paper.

Creative artists could, at worst, inhabit a world of imagination. Performers had nowhere to hide. Ida Haendel had won, before the war, the loyalty of Sir Henry Wood and his Proms audience. She played on at the Albert Hall, through bombs and doodlebugs, growing all the while in confidence and expressiveness. Josef Hassid was less fortunate. The boy who had been billed as ‘the most fantastic talent to hit London’ grew alarmingly introspective until, one day, he went blazing mad, beat up his father and was picked up by police, stark naked, beside a pond on Hampstead Heath. Dozens of lesser talents dropped silently out of art, never to be heard again. My father was right: this was not the time to present a foreign Jewish débutant on the London concert stage.

There were also personal considerations. With the war nearing its end, the fate of Dovidl’s family filled our minds. There had been reports of mass killings in eastern Europe. A million Jews, said the Manchester Guardian in April 1942, had been wiped out. The Daily Telegraph, in June that year, carried a report about mobile gas chambers that cleansed whole villages of Jews. In November, an American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, brought forth a State Department document indicating that two million Jews had been murdered in an ‘extermination campaign’. A place called Auschwitz was mentioned.