When the ghastly truth came to light, it did so disjointedly. A week after the war ended, Dovidl and I sat in a news cinema near Oxford Circus watching cadaverous scenes of Belsen’s liberation. No words could describe what we saw. Nouns like atrocity, barbarity, cruelty, enormity, inhumanity had been rendered meaningless by wartime propaganda. We stumbled out into a mockingly promising spring dusk, the lights twinkling after years of blackout.

‘They said they found many prisoners still alive,’ I assured him.

‘We’d better go home,’ said Dovidl.

There was nothing more to say: incoherence bred incomprehension, then shock fatigue set in. What the mind could not grasp, it did not want to know. The statistic of six million was embalmed as a cliché, collectively eulogised, individually unidentified. At Dr Steiner’s lonely funeral, in a Jewish cemetery in Edmonton with a bare quorum of ten mourners, I choked back my tears on seeing Dovidl dry-eyed. He had been excised of the ability to grieve.

Months passed before we were able to establish what had happened to his family. My parents embarked on a whirl of activity. Father posted the Rapoports’ names at displaced-persons camps and took out boxed advertisements in the Jewish Chronicle and Palestine Post, in pages that heaved with lost souls forlornly seeking loved ones. Mother activated her refugee networks, distributing search tasks to those she had assisted. Father went to see the Chief Rabbi, specifically to meet his red-bearded son-in-law, Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was running in and out of Poland in search of Jewish orphans. Dr Schonfeld took the particulars, made no promises. We met him weeks later at Victoria station, heading a convoy of bewildered child survivors. When immigration officials blocked entry, he blazed through the barriers with eyes of blue fire. Catching my father’s eye, he shook his head slowly with a look of sorrowing exhaustion.

Mortimer Simmonds was not a man to give up. Donning his wartime uniform for the very last time, he descended on the Foreign Office and demanded permission to reopen cultural exchanges with Poland. To his surprise, both governments welcomed the idea. The British hoped a musical overture might offset Soviet dominance in Warsaw, while the Poles were subtly seeking gaps in a descending Iron Curtain. In May 1946, on Dovidl’s sixteenth birthday, Father set out for Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz with the Parry Quartet, the soprano Elaine Fielding, reams of scores to be given away to music colleges and an eccentric, diplomatic programme of Britten, Schoenberg, Purcell and Szymanowski. He returned two weeks later, unable to speak through a streptococcal throat and a shattered spirit. ‘All I can tell you, David,’ he croaked, ‘is that not one brick stands of your parental home, or of your family’s last address before their deportation. There was no neighbour, no caretaker, no shopkeeper, no eye-witness of any kind who could tell me what had happened. Both streets have vanished from the map.’

‘Do you know when they left Warsaw?’ asked Dovidl.