Abstract
I often wondered why my fellow education correspondent John Izbicki, while he spoke clearly and audibly, did so in what sometimes seemed a loud whisper, as though suffering a persistent sore throat. Now I know. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the day after Izbicki's eighth birthday, he screamed so much as his parents' shop was attacked in Berlin that he damaged his vocal chords. The specialist who treated him – and refused payment because, he said, “you people have paid quite enough already” – had previously operated on Adolf Hitler, who had over-shouted his speeches.
As a five-year-old, Izbicki once shouted “Ich bin ein Jude!” (“I am a Jew”) in the street. He soon learned to keep quiet. He left Berlin with his parents on September 1, 1939, as Germany invaded Poland. Holding U.S. visas, they were bound for New York. With all air transport suspended, however, the family swapped their flight tickets (without a refund) for boat tickets to Britain. They arrived in London virtually penniless, their only possessions crammed into the suitcases they carried.
The Nazis bookend this memoir. Izbicki learns that nearly all his mother's family – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – were murdered in the gas chambers or died of starvation. Studying in Berlin while taking his Nottingham University degree in German, he meets a young Jewish man who recalls that, aged 12, he rolled steel cylinders from a central store in Auschwitz to the shower-rooms. The last time the boy saw his parents, they were queing for a shower. Only later did he understand that the cylinders contained Zyklon B, the lethal gas dropped from the roof. Towards the end of his journalistic career, Izbicki covers the trial of Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon” who sent several thousand Jews to their deaths. By chance, while pursuing another story, he visits a house where Barbie tortured his victims in the cellar.
Such stories lift this book above the usual “street of adventure” (or “street of shame”) memoirs. Izbicki's account is all the more gripping for its lack of literary frills. He is not what editors call a “flashy” writer. His style is simple and sometimes clunky, with dates, names and events meticulously listed, in the style of the old Daily Telegraph where Izbicki spent the largest part of his journalistic career.
That career was as meandering as most others in journalism. While studying in Berlin, Izbicki sent five features on post-war German theatre to his home-town paper, the Kemsley-owned Manchester Evening Chronicle. It is hard now to imagine a regional paper showing interest, but the pieces were published in the Chronicle and six other Kemsley papers, and won him a graduate traineeship. Later, he became a Kemsley group correspondent in Paris, reporting to Denis Hamilton, then Kemsley's editorial director, later The Sunday Times editor. Like many senior newspapermen in those days, Hamilton seemed to regard foreign correspondents as personal servants and asked Izbicki to take his two young sons to holiday with a French family. The boys proved too ill-mannered for French tastes. Izbicki sent them back to England.
That, he suggests (in what may be a journalist's characteristic self-delusion), explains why he never got a job on The Sunday Times. Instead, via several other publications, he wound up on the Telegraph and spent 18 of his 23 years there as a notably successful education correspondent. His proudest moments were taking a moonlit walk with Margaret Thatcher in Scarborough when she was shadow education secretary, and being complimented publicly by Harold Wilson for “saving” the Open University, which the Tories intended to close before Izbicki revealed their plans and provoked protests. He returned to Paris in his mid-50s, only to be eased out as bureau chief, probably because the Telegraph wanted more stylish, feature-led coverage.
Alongside the usual journalists' anecdotes – about expenses sheets, great figures interviewed, and proprietors who invite you to lunch and then leave you with the bill – Izbicki offers some waspish comments on former colleagues and rivals. Witty, charming and generous, his appearance in a bar or restaurant invariably brightened dull evenings at teachers' union conferences. A gifted mime artist, he also elevated the cabaret that education correspondents annually put on for union leaders in return for dinner with ample wine. But he was too competitive and full of himself to be an entirely comfortable companion: I once visited an Arab bazaar with him and he spent the journey home boasting that the garment he bought for his wife was superior to the one I bought, more expensively, for mine.
At times in this memoir, that last characteristic overshadows his better qualities, with no academic, theatrical, sporting or professional achievement unmentioned, and even the pre-16 loss of his virginity noted. But the journey from refugee who spoke no English to acclaimed Telegraph journalist – commanding an introduction to this book from the former editor Charles Moore – was a remarkable one, and it deserves recording.