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Objects of the Holocaust explores personal testimonies across generations through single objects, uncovering lesser-known histories of the Holocaust and telling incredible stories of family, loss, and survival. Hosted by Professor Tim Cole from the University of Bristol and actress and member of the second generation Louisa Clein, the series features a new guest each week who joins to offer a deeply human perspective on one of history’s darkest chapters.
Objects of the Holocaust is brought to you by the Holocaust Educational Trust, a charity that works across the UK to ensure that the horrors of the past are never forgotten. Find out more and support them at www.het.org.uk.
Nick Robinson: I remember opening this box, a removal man's box from my grandmother's apartment after she died and going through these papers and old photos and finding a letter.
Louisa Clein: Nick Robinson is our guest today. Nick is one of Britain's leading journalists and broadcasters. His story begins in 1930s Berlin.
Nick Robinson: And the letter had been sent to my grandfather when he was a doctor in Berlin. Handwritten, written by someone who clearly knew him, explaining in a calm and quiet way something important that he had to say about the way in which Germany had changed, the way in which his relationship with his doctor now had to change.
Louisa Clein: I'm Louisa Clein. I'm an actress and have worked in television and theatre for the past twenty five years. I'm also the daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust. My mother was a hidden child in Amsterdam.
Tim Cole: And I'm Tim Cole, a historian at the University of Bristol specializing in the history of the Holocaust. My most recent book, Holocaust Landscapes, is about where the Holocaust happened and where and how it's been remembered and forgotten.
Louisa Clein: From the Holocaust Educational Trust, this is Objects of the Holocaust.
Tim Cole: A new podcast exploring the Holocaust through a single object to tell wider stories of family, loss and survival. Thanks so much for joining us Nick, it's great to have you here. So your grandad was a doctor, is that right? Can you tell us a little bit about him and your grandmother as well?
Nick Robinson: Bernard Rosenberg was what we call a GP, a family doctor, in other words, in Berlin. He was married to Susan Rosenberg who was a kindergarten teacher. They were fairly prosperous living in Berlin. Her family, I think, had owned a department store actually there. So they were comfortably off family like many young Germans, like many German Jews.
He'd fought in the first world war. I've still got the document that shows his status as a soldier fighting in the First World War. So I'm sure they grew up believing this was home, this was a country they were proud in, this was a country that he had fought for.
Louisa Clein: Were they practicing Jews? Were they religious?
Nick Robinson: Not particularly religious. I mean, by the time I discovered, maybe we'll talk about how this, and it was a discovery that they were Jewish, they certainly didn't practice. There were no Friday night dinners.
Louisa Clein: Saw themselves as German more than Jewish.
Nick Robinson: They saw themselves as German more than Jewish.
Tim Cole: Which I think is really typical, isn't it? Especially of middle class Jews, professionals like your grandad living in a place like Berlin.
Nick Robinson: Yes. Crucial to their identity. Not in any sense embarrassed or wearing it lightly, but not religious.
Tim Cole: And how old were they in the 1930s? Were they in their twenties, thirties at that point? So they're kind of young, starting out in life, setting up a successful doctor's practice.
Nick Robinson: Yeah. Looking to the future, quite optimistically looking to the future, I think, and a life in Berlin. A place which, of course, as we all now know, not just from reading our history but from watching movies like Cabaret, was a pretty lively place to be in the twenties and the early thirties.
Tim Cole: So nineteen thirties, Germany, Berlin, where your grandparents are growing up, it's a moment of kind of crisis and chaos as this new political party come to power, the Nazis, and start enacting a series of laws, starting to push Jews out of the professions and out of the civil service, but not really attacking doctors yet in a kind of central way. So I think they they stopped Jewish doctors practicing in 1938, so relatively late. Although there is a little bit of a sense, I think, of Germans not wanting to go to Jewish shops or not wanting to go to Jewish doctors. There's a sense of Germans, ordinary Germans, kind of starting to withdraw from Jewish businesses prior to the Nazis enacting this kind of dramatic change. But in '33, it still feels like this is a very young, new regime.
Like, will it stay or will it go? I mean, I think that's one of the debates that's taking place in German Jewish homes is, you know, will this just be another flash in the pan? Sit it out.
Nick Robinson: My grandparents weren't political with a capital p. They weren't involved in politics. They certainly weren't involved in what I'm now involved in news or journalism, but they were interested. I think my grandfather would have described himself as a socialist then, but he was interested enough. In one of the stories I vividly remember my grandmother telling me that when the Nazis came to power, he said to her, we better get a sense of who these people are really.
So he took her to a Nazi rally. I start to laugh because the idea of two people called Rosenberg going to a Nazi rally in 1933 doesn't strike you as all that wise really. But in an era in which let's remember, if you wanted to find out what someone was about, you couldn't surf online, you couldn’t watch a TV program. You pretty much did have to ask around, read the newspaper, of course, but the newspapers were less and less reliable. He took the view that he needed to go and see for himself.
Louisa Clein: I think it's really interesting because it proves even more so that they saw themselves as German, that their Jewish identity was far more in the background for them. And they felt legitimately they could absolutely go to a Nazi rally and find out what was going on. Yeah.
Nick Robinson: Go to a rally of a political party in Germany that was doing well and try to understand, try to get a sense of what was going on.
Louisa Clein: Did your grandparents ever describe what that rally must have been like?
Nick Robinson: Well, think the thing that's worth remembering is that we can't project onto what their experience was, but we now know.
Louisa Clein: Yeah, it's true.
Nick Robinson: We see imagery of a Nazi rally. First of all, we're often seeing Nazi rallies years later once they're really established in power, not right at the beginning. Second of all, we're seeing it with all that knowledge we've got of what would follow, not just the Holocaust but war and the end, of course, for the Nazis. For my grandparents to walk to a place they would have been very familiar with in their own home city, to see a political party. And bear in mind that in Germany at that time in the Weimar Republic, there were multiple political parties.
Politics was chaotic at that stage. In itself, wouldn't have seemed that remarkable for interested people. Now for us now we go, two people called Rosenberg go to a Nazi rally, woah. To them, I think it would have been as much about curiosity, as much about not curious in the sense of wanting to support them, let me stress, but look, I'm hearing some bad things about these people. Let's see them for ourselves.
I think for a younger generation, for people who know all that we know, it's very easy to imagine that we go from normality to this fascist dictatorship overnight. But it wasn't like that at all. I mean, my grandmother's main memory of that period was comic. I mean, darkly comic now. She used to say to me as a child that the first moment she thought something was up was when she went to the greengrocers.
And she travelled to the greengrocers as ever, thinking nothing about it and would ask for a kilogram of potatoes. And the woman before her, she said to me, said, A kilo of apples, heil Hitler. And then did what I'm not going to do, which is raised their arm. And my grandmother started to laugh. I mean, she's like, it's just ordering fruit, vegetables.
What are you doing? But the reaction in the grocers was not comic. And I think in a way that we now know, there was a moment for my grandmother of like, hello, there's something kind of really odd here. The Germany I know, the Germany that is my country, is changing.
Tim Cole: So your grandfather's practicing as a doctor in Germany and receives a letter from one of his patients, and I guess he probably got lots of letters from lots of patients, but it feels like this letter is particularly significant or it's certainly significant enough for him to keep and for you to inherit.
Nick Robinson: That's the key though. This letter mattered enough that he kept it. It mattered enough that my grandmother kept it after he died. It mattered enough that it was in the box of her possessions after she died and that I found it. It didn't matter enough for him to tell me the story of it or for her.
So when I opened the letter, it was a complete surprise to me.
Tim Cole: So they never spoke about the letter at all or the man who wrote it?
Nick Robinson: No. But it speaks for itself.
Louisa Clein: How long was the letter?
Nick Robinson: Couple of pages, couple of pages. So it's not just dear Dr Rosenberg, there's more to it than that because this is someone, a patient who's taken a big decision and clearly a decision he knows is freighted with significance. Because if it was just a letter saying, I'm terribly sorry, I'm not coming, I mean, think you wouldn't write it at all or it would be just one line.
But this is a letter seeking, I think, reading it now, a sort of approval, certainly understanding for a decision to say, I think you'll understand in these circumstances. These are not exact quotes, the sentiment of the letter, that I really can't walk through the front door of a surgery with the heading Doctor Rosenberg, a Jew's surgery. And I think you'll understand that it's just going to be easier for me if I come in a different way, which is less visible. And I remember reading that letter for the first time and thinking, oh my God, that's it. That for me suddenly shone a light on everything.
Here is a guy who will trust a Jew to save his life, will trust a Jew to be his doctor, who still wants a Jew to be his doctor even after the rise of the Nazis and isn't willing to walk through the front door. So the deal he wants is you look after me, I won't look after you. And it was like a light bulb going on over my head when I saw that letter. Suddenly thought, good god. I've read so much about how the holocaust came about. In a funny way, I thought, I've got it. It's in that letter.
Tim Cole: I think the letter is fascinating because in some ways it's written just by one person, but in a sense it could be written by anyone of this category we call the bystander, you know, who are, I suppose, the most populous bunch of people in Europe. There's relatively few Nazis in some ways, aren't there? There's relatively few Jews, certainly in Germany, but there's tons of people like that letter writer who are just neighbours, people who live next door to a Jew or have a Jewish doctor or go to a Jewish lawyer or go to a shop that's owned by a Jew or play in a school yard where a bunch of Jewish kids are part of that school. The letter, in a sense, feels like this kind of thing that we almost know the least about with the Holocaust, that we have a lot of German documentation. We have a lot of testimony of survivors, but we have relatively few traces from the majority of people - the sort of silent bystanders.
Nick Robinson: That's right. And trying to get into the mind of the letter writer, trying to understand what could allow you to write that. Again, you mustn't do what we do, which is, don't you know about the Holocaust? Because the answer is he didn't.
Tim Cole: Yeah.
Nick Robinson: course he didn't. Don't you know what they might've done? No, well, he didn't. At the time, the decision, that's not the decision. The decision is I'm living in Berlin. It's a very uncomfortable time to be a friend or even someone who deals with Jewish people. You know, life's going to be a bit more comfortable if I don't do that. I don't need to abandon it completely, but I can just do it in a lower key way. That's the decision. The decision is yes to be a bystander while there's political hatred, but what we mustn't do is project onto the letter or our knowledge that this is a man choosing to be a bystander to the slaughter of millions of people.
Tim Cole: Yeah, because in a sense, it's interesting if you think about that letter writer that you can see the sort of rationalisation process, can't you, which is that I'm not I'm not a Nazi who says I won't go to a Jewish doctor. Like that's not the decision I'm making. I'll still go to the Jewish doctor but I'll just make sure no one sees me going to the Jewish doctor. I'll make sure that no one around me thinks I'm a Jew lover or in some ways someone who has some kind of positive.
Louisa Clein: And the purpose of writing the letter is almost to justify it but also to seek some form of understanding as you say. There's no real guilt but just an acceptance.
Nick Robinson: Yes, I think that's exactly right. It's a plea, the letter. It's a plea to say, look, I know this is bit awkward but, you know, you'll get it, won't you? Is the implicit question.
Louisa Clein: And the expectation is that your grandfather would say, of course, that's fine.
Nick Robinson: Yeah. Naturally would be there. Yeah. And it's how very awkward for you.
Tim Cole: And do you think it's a light bulb moment for your grandfather as well? I mean, in a sense, he doesn't talk about it, but he keeps it.
Nick Robinson: He keeps it. It must have had that significance. My grandfather continued to practice and they made preparations to leave and making preparations to leave involved getting as much money out of the country as you could. You couldn't get any of your possessions out. So my grandmother, they cashed in as much as they could and then they had to just think, how do you smuggle that across a border in order to make sure that you can be reunited with at least some of your money a bit later on.
And she came up with the idea, I don't know if it's common, but she came up with the idea of sewing the Deutsche marks into one of those padded coat hangers. So there was a coat hanger filled not with cotton wool or something else , but with as much money as she could get in. That went into a suitcase. She got onto a train and travelled to Italy where she knew that there was somebody who was willing to act effectively as a banker for German Jewish money. And she used to tell the story of sitting on that train and the whole time thinking, what happens if my bag searched?
What happens if this train is stopped? What happens if I'm asked to show my papers, which made clear with the name like Rosenberg that I'm Jewish? And to try, I think partly to comfort herself and to look as normal as possible. She strikes up a conversation with a youngish girl who's next to her. This girl was late teens, early twenties, who started to talk about the boyfriend she was obviously fantastically in love with. She told my grandmother, she regarded him as my hot water bottle. And after my grandmother smiled, they began the conversation and my grandmother said, what does he do? She said, he's in the SS. Oh my god.
Tim Cole: And they travel alone then or separate. So grandmother goes first and then grandfather follows. So she gets to Italy with all these Deutsche Mark. What does she do then in Italy with the money?
Nick Robinson: Well, goes to see someone who effectively has a large ledger and takes the money in. I mean, it's not a formal bank but it's someone who'd been recommended who would do this. And as he writes down in the ledger the amount of Deutsche marks that had been handed over, my grandmother said, Well, can I have some sort of receipt? And he said, in a way you may be familiar with, what are you gonna do if I take your money? You don't need a receipt, I'm here.
And if frankly, I give you a receipt and I don't give your money back, you've lost it. So just trust me. So at that moment she realised she was operating under refugee rules, if you like. Because that idea that there's some formal banking system that you can be sure that your money will be safe. Your life becomes a series of transactions based on trust. And she had to trust this total stranger would look after her money and give her back what she'd handed in.
Tim Cole: Do you have a sense of where your grandparents were headed? I mean, did they know where they were going? I mean, it's one thing to leave, but do they have a kind of clear plan worked out of saying this is where we're going to go next?
Nick Robinson: Yeah. They start to go to Palestine.
Tim Cole: From Italy to Palestine by boats.
Nick Robinson: That's right. And that doesn't last very long. So the stories of their time there are really quite limited. I mean, almost limited to a single joke, which is when I asked them as a child, why didn't you stay? Why didn't you help build what became the state of Israel? They recalled the old joke, I think, although reflected quite a lot of truth, that all that was needed was people to build at that time, and so there was one of those lines where you hand buckets along a line, and my grandfather used to say to me, I stood in the line and he went, Thank you, head doctor, thank you, head professor, thank you, head doctor, thank you, head professor. As the bucket was passed down the line. And I think after a while, he thought, you know what? And bricklaying is very important, but it's not kind of what I'm trained to do. I think I quite like to be a doctor if that's okay.
Tim Cole: So where does head doctor end up? Where does where do they go from here? So they kind of give up on the deserts and they head somewhere.
Nick Robinson: They end up in Shanghai. I mean initially, my grandfather has a job offer in Manchuria. So another German says to him, I think there's a vacancy here. I can get you a job in Manchuria. Why don't you head to Manchuria? Which is made slightly awkward by the Japanese invading Manchuria. And my grandparents, without a plan as I understand it, end up on a boat and while they're on the boat, the decision is made that Shanghai is where they'll get off.
Tim Cole: And Shanghai is this odd place, isn't it, in the world at that time? It's this odd oddity in the world because it's one of the very few places that's accepting German Jews, Austrian Jews later, it's accepting Jews in the way that most countries are closed. But you've got this kind of oddity in Shanghai of this international settlement, like this kind of curious quasi international territorial entity in this port city which keeps its doors open to Jews in a way that nowhere else is doing aside from the Dominican Republic in the late 1930s? And is that where they settled? So do they end up in the international settlement in Shanghai?
Nick Robinson: Yeah, Shanghai becomes their home. I mean, the memory that they used to describe is how when they get off the boat at the Port of Shanghai, there's a guy with a placard saying German Jews this way. Now I'm pretty sure that was actually someone working for Lord Sassoon. The Sassoon family had made fast fortune in Bombay, they then made a fortune again, a wing of the family in Shanghai, and the Sassoon family made it their responsibility to take care for Jews who were arriving, who were fleeing from Europe. And that meant that at least for the first week or two, someone would find you some basic accommodation, would take a note in a ledger of what your job was and what you could do.
Now, the great luck that my grandparents had was that Shanghai wasn't only open to German Jews, but it was open to people with professional qualifications. Again, something we forget now is that if you travel around the world now, your qualification in most jobs would apply pretty much wherever you are. Not then, if you as a German doctor had come to Britain, if they'd let you in or to America or to Australia, you would have had to requalify, I mean, from scratch. Whereas arriving in Shanghai, you could put a placard up on the wall saying, German doctor, put up your German doctor certificate, and off you went. And there were enough Germans already in Shanghai that that made it feasible to do.
Tim Cole: So that's what he does. He sets up as a doctor again. But weirdly, he's moved from Berlin to Shanghai. You can't imagine I mean, did they talk about that? That's such a vast different culture. I mean, it's almost unimaginable.
Louisa Clein: Did they socialise with other German Jews or did they assimilate into the
Nick Robinson: Well, this city was in the cliche, a melting pot. So Shanghai was this extraordinary international city, a bit like, I think the Hong Kong of my youth in a way. There were people from all over the world and partly because it was a place to which people could flee. White Russians, people who'd escaped the Russian revolution came to Shanghai. Lots of people escaped the British empire to go to Shanghai.
So peoples whose behaviour had been slightly, should we say, questionable. Someone who'd had an affair maybe that they shouldn't have had. Someone who'd stolen the petty cash. Someone whose behaviour meant that, you know, maybe some minor corruption or they've done a small prison sentence which would make it difficult for them to resume their career. The talk in Shanghai was nobody asked where you've come from.
Your past is your past. Shanghai is about the future. People in Shanghai look forward, they don't look back. And that made it a place where yes, everyone was there it felt, but also you socialise. Cause remember we're talking not about a national health service, if you want to be a successful doctor, you have to get patients and the patients have to pay and that means you have to know people. And so quite quickly the stories come of my grandparents living quite a glamorous lifestyle actually of, you know, putting on dinner suit and going to big balls and dinners and elsewhere to meet people who they needed to meet. My grandmother told me one story that always amused me about how she was laying on these dinners in order to try and attract people who might then become patients to my grandfather. And at one dinner, my grandfather kind of makes his excuse and leaves the room and then she looks away, doesn't come back, he doesn't come back. She thinks, where's Bernard gone?
Eventually starts to hunt around the house, goes upstairs, he's in bed in his pyjamas and said, you invited these bloody people, make them go. He's reading a book.
Tim Cole: Do they have fond memories of that time in Shanghai?
Nick Robinson: They loved it.
Tim Cole: Yeah. Because it's a chance to re in a sense, are they rebuilding a life? Yes. They've forgotten about Berlin in some ways. That's gone.
Nick Robinson: I'm sure they hadn't forgotten, but it but but it was an exciting place to to to build.
Tim Cole: And it's where your mother is born. They have their kids.
Nick Robinson: That's right. The only one. My mom's the only child. So my mother is born in in Shanghai. So, yes, it is, in many ways, the beginning of their full adult certainly of their family life in Shanghai.
And it's such a cosmopolitan place. And the need to get to know it culturally and to get to know people for commercial reasons to make life just means you instantly are consumed by the place. And looking now as I quite often do is the old path in newsreels or my mother has memories of not wanting to use her tram money so that she put roller skates on and she would hang on to the back of the tram in order to save the fare and then would use her money to go and buy things in the market, food and treats.
Louisa Clein: You speak about their life in Shanghai with sort of colour and vibrancy and happiness. I'm interested, I'm sure, Tim, the idea of Shanghai certainly in the late thirties, the Jewish community was slightly ghettoized, weren't they?
Tim Cole: Yeah, 1943. I mean, I think the big thing that happens in Shanghai is that you've got this relatively small group of German Jews that arrive early. I think by the end of thirty eight, there's about 1,500 German Jews living in Shanghai, so it's a relatively small community. And then a year later, it's about 17,000. So you suddenly get this rapid influx of German Jews in 1939 after Kristallnacht, where I think in in a sense the writing is on the wall, there's acts of violence against Jews, homes are being invaded by Nazi stormtroopers, German Jewish men are being rounded up and put into the concentration camps and said, you need to leave Germany.
So there's a sense of a a real change, and suddenly there's a a a rush of of Jews to Shanghai. And I think that's an interesting moment in some ways for someone like your grandparents because they're kind of part of the old German Jewish community, maybe a little bit more bourgeois, maybe a kind of slightly more affluent set who have kind of really made a life there. And then suddenly there's this crowd of of new Jews, maybe some of whom are poorer, who suddenly arrive in Shanghai.
Nick Robinson: You know, when I heard my grandparents describe that lifestyle, mean, this was a very prosperous lifestyle, I mean, for them. Having successfully managed to set up this German doctor's practice, they had a cook, they had a driver, they went to smart I mean, they dressed up most nights to go out. I mean, this was the lifestyle of relatively prosperous people. And then there is, as you say, this vast influx of people who are much, much poorer who can't instantly get jobs and then are discriminated against and put into a ghetto by the Japanese who by then are occupying the city as well.
Tim Cole: But your grandparents don't end up in the ghetto then. Are they spared from that?
Nick Robinson: No. The curiosity is that this ghetto, Hongkew, I
Tim Cole: think Yeah. Hongkew. That's right.
Nick Robinson: It was called, is in in a weirdly Japanese and bureaucratic way, is reserved for arrivals after a certain date. And my grandparents had arrived before, so they were treated as it were original residents of Shanghai rather than as recent Jewish arrivals. So the curiosity then is that this is a ghetto in the traditional sense. People are forced to live there, but it's not a death camp. I mean, the conditions are really tough.
But people are allowed in and out, but with a pass. And in the box of things that came from my grandparents' apartment is a pass of one of their friends and the story I remember them telling is that they gave him work as a gardener for them. I mean, I don't think they wanted the garden done, it was a way of getting him out, giving him a decent meal, but then having to send him back again.
Tim Cole: Do they play any role, do you know, in the German Jewish community in Shanghai at this period of time? So they kind of arrive early. There's this big influx. Are they at all involved in kind of German Jewish life?
Nick Robinson: I’m just beginning to learn this because there have been one or two academic studies done in the German Jewish population in Shanghai. And having read it about it on and off over the years, somehow this didn't come up, but it cropped up the other day in something I was looking at. That my grandfather was actually head of the German Jewish community for a while. Don't ask me the year. I don't know the year yet, but that's something, Tim, I've got to I've got to look for.
Tim Cole: Oh, so they really do make a new home. I mean, genuinely, Shanghai becomes home for them. And a place where they have a family, start to build a new successful career as a doctor and also play a role within the community.
Nick Robinson: That's right. And plan, from what I can tell, to stay.
Louisa Clein: How long did they stay in Shanghai?
Nick Robinson: So they leave in 1949 after the communist come because the communist are clear that they want foreigners to leave. They're not welcome to stay.
Louisa Clein: And where did they move to?
Nick Robinson: They moved surprisingly, you might think, to Tokyo because the Japanese had occupied Shanghai. And they moved and I now think, but obviously can't ask them, that the appeal was being at the beginning of something again. Effectively, Tokyo was being reborn and and also there were huge opportunities as there were large numbers of people moving into Tokyo from outside, Americans, British, the victorious allied countries, to rebuild that city and rebuild that country, and my grandfather became a doctor there.
Tim Cole: It's amazing to reinvent yourself a second time over in some ways. I mean, I think are they the kind of perpetual refugees and kind of starters or something and rebuilders? Like, is that a part of who they they are and were?
Nick Robinson: It's so interesting that you asked that because I remember vividly my grandmother was at one of her favourite sayings. I would say when I went to visit her, which I usually did when they eventually retired to Switzerland, should we go home? And she went, where's home? I don't have home. Where's home?
Tim Cole: So they move finally from Tokyo to Switzerland, and this is their last new beginning, a new kind of home. Can you tell us a bit about the home they create in Switzerland?
Nick Robinson: Yeah. So that becomes a that's a retirement home. They move to Switzerland. Not actually, interestingly, to German speaking Switzerland, they move to Lausanne which is in the French part of Switzerland. And for me as a child, visiting them, and in my teens, visiting them occasionally, once, maybe twice a year, what always fascinated me was the people who came through.
Now I don't know now whether they were engineering that these people come through or whether they're coming through all the time, but part of that Far East diaspora, people who'd made their lives, Jews like them, who'd made their lives in the Far East in Shanghai or in Tokyo would would come through.
Louisa Clein: You speak so beautifully and fondly of your grandmother and the way she talks of these stories. I'm really interested in how you, as a teenage boy or as younger, when you go and visit your grandparents, when did you first learn these stories? When did she talk about them?
Nick Robinson: It's interesting because I can't put my finger on a date. It's only as I get a little bit older, approach my teens and in my teens, that I choose to go and visit them. And I become more and more fascinated by going to see them, and I become fascinated by the bookshelf filled with all these books about the holocaust. And I see my grandfather's reverence for news about what's happening in the world.
Whenever I would arrive, we would sit down for lunch, cold cuts, of course, what else? And then he would sit in his armchair, he would take out a big old Roberts radio and he had, by then glaucoma, had quite clouded vision, great big glasses to try and help him. And he would turn the dial on the Roberts Radio and going through the stations on shortwave radio, and you get that white noise that kept ‘pssshhh’ and you get the click. One minute's Russian, one minute's French, then it'd be Voice of America. And he would always go to the BBC. And we would sit and listen in total silence to that voice saying, ‘This is London’.
Then I knew what job I wanted to do. I think part of the reason I ended up at the job I am in is that he was interested in my opinions as if I'd been 51, not 11. At the end of the World Service News Bulletin one day, I remember I must have been all of like 13. He said, ‘What do you think about the situation in The Middle East?’ So instead of - I suppose I would never have done this job if I'd actually said what you should have said, which is like ‘search me! I don't know’. I came up with some kind of theory for after he would pause and say to me ‘No! I don't think so.’ And that became an expression he would always and it wasn't dismissive. I just mean, that's very interesting. I don't don't think you're right, but thank you for telling me. ‘No. I don't think so’.
Tim Cole: So I'm imagining you as a teenage boy, you fly on your own to Switzerland, you press the buzzer and you enter, you're greeted by your grandmother warmly and by your grandfather in a more hysterical manner, and then you spend a few days with them. What's it like for you to suddenly start putting the pieces of the puzzle together about the fact that your family isn't just a German refugee family, but a German Jewish refugee family? Like what does that mean for you as a teenage boy?
Nick Robinson: Well, it's a puzzle to start with. I mean, I live in a little Cheshire village. I go to a Church of England school. My father was lapsed C of E like most people in the Church of England, British Army, you know, public school. My mother at this stage working as a secretary in the parish church. This is a tiny village with a Norman church, you know, a population of less than 2,000. So to start with, it's just a puzzle but a fascinating puzzle. And of course, you begin to then put the pieces together, German accent, Japanese and Chinese kit. But the religion then starts to relate to the fact that I'm at a school in South Manchester where there's quite a big Jewish population.
As it happens, open and close brackets, all Jews listening will say not as it happens, but inevitably quite a lot of my good friends are Jewish. And then I recognized that curiously, although my grandparents are Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I am therefore Jewish. I've been synagogue much more many more times than my mother. They were not religious in any way. So this was a sort of gradual realisation.
Tim Cole: I'm intrigued about how your parents met. So you've got this British father kind of from a kind of classic British background, and then you've got a mother who's from this really extraordinary background of through born in Shanghai, ends up in Tokyo. Like, how does the British army guy meet the German refugee who's living in the Far East?
Nick Robinson: In a cafe in Geneva. Bizarrely, they're both at university. My mother training to be a simultaneous translator for the UN, something that she didn't then pursue because she came to England and got married. My father is on a business refresher course and there is amongst my grandparents' papers a very moving letter that is written by my paternal grandfather who was a colonel in the British Army, Ernest O'Brien Robinson, who wrote a letter to my grandfather, Bernard Rosenberg, to say that he realised that this was a dramatic thing for him to agree for his daughter to do and that he wanted Bernard to understand that for him as a Brit who had fought in the first world war and in the second world war, he had no worries at all about his son marrying a German and certainly no worries about marrying a Jew. And that was quite a letter to write.
Tim Cole: And so then your mom in a sense reinvents herself for another time. She follows in her parents' tradition of reinvention and becomes a British woman.
Nick Robinson: Yes. And I think to almost all but her very close friends, that's as it were all she was. Her closest friends knew the story.
Louisa Clein: And she settled happily into sort of English country life.
Nick Robinson: She did and I think because finally where my grandmother would always say, where's home? She had a home and she's still in it. In the same village.
Louisa Clein: Wow she's still there. And yet you were inevitably drawn to a Jewish culture in South Manchester, you talk about Jewish friends and becoming the story holder for your grandparents.
Nick Robinson: I was drawn, I think, firstly, if I'm honest, not so much to the Judaism but to the history. I was a very political kid, you know, that's why I end up as political editor of the BBC, I guess. I was fascinated in the news, in the history. And so I'm first drawn into that story and then from there into the Jewishness, if you like, and then connect it with my friends and then the dots join. And after they join, I've felt ever since a huge responsibility to keep it alive and to tell it and in the cliche to say never again.
Tim Cole: One final question about the history, Nick. If you think of the historiography, all of the kind of vast shelves of books, many of which were in your grandparents' home and many are in libraries around the world, in some ways, think they've all been driven by this question, why? Like in a sense, you know, early on the history is asking like, how did this take place? But fundamentally at a more kind of deep level, everyone's asking like, why did this take place? You know, why does a entire state mobilise to murder an entire ethnic population, you know, across the European continent?
And it feels like that's a question that also you've been grappling with in some ways that you start to encounter as a teenager. Is the letter for you the answer to that question why? Is that what you latch onto the letter that it feels like it's the best answer you have to that kind of existential question of why?
Nick Robinson: The letter in a sense asks for me a slightly different question, which is how, not why. I mean, historians can do why. Historians can talk about Versailles. They can talk about German unemployment. My grandfather talked endlessly about the terror of that. They can talk about the chaos of Weimar. They can talk about the conditions in other words. They can talk about historic German antisemitism. The how is what fascinates me. How did people let this happen?
How did they, to use your language, how did so many people decide to be bystanders? How did that man decide, I am prepared to let a Jew treat me in the most intimate of ways as a doctor to save my life but I will not put myself out to save him? So the question I grapple with every day really, how do people morally make the decision that they don't stand up for their friend, don't stand up for their neighbour, don't stand up for someone they know as a patient of a doctor and say no, no, I defend this person. I don't care if they're Jewish. I'm willing to stand up for them.
Louisa Clein: Nick, thank you so much for coming to talk us today. We could talk for hours. It's an extraordinary story. Thank you.
Nick Robinson: Thank you very much. Thanks. And you've given me the prod I need to go and ask some more questions.
Louisa Clein: Objects of the Holocaust is hosted by me, Louisa Clein.
Tim Cole: And me, Tim Cole. And the producer is Sarah Peters from Tuning Fork Productions. With thanks to Beth Lloyd, Annabel Pattle, Kirsty Young and Karen Pollock from the Holocaust Educational Trust.
Louisa Clein: The Holocaust Educational Trust is a charity that works across The UK to ensure that the horrors of the past are never forgotten. Details of the charity can be found in the show notes.