My mother put me on a train to freedom (From Echo)

My mother put me on a train to freedom

8:00am Friday 11th December 2009

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TIME, the ultimate leveller, has reduced John Demjanjuk, 89, to a senile husk of a man, but he is still deemed fit to stand trial in Germany for the wartime murder of 27,900 Jews.

This is almost certainly the last time an alleged war criminal from Hitler’s era will face justice.

Here in Southend, another octogenarian is also keenly aware of the passing of time. Otto Deutsch is 81, and growing tireder and frailer. He should be putting his feet up.

Instead, Otto has chosen to spend his twilight years on an urgent, exhausting mission, as he pounds Europe, talking to any audience who will give him an ear.

For most of his life, Otto has been an ordinary working man. But passing time has cast him in a new and increasingly significant role. The term living witness now defines his whole being.

Otto, the son of a pastry cook, spent his early childhood in Vienna. German was his language, Austria his country. His very surname meant German. But Otto is Jewish, and the years of his childhood were also the years in which the Nazi party grew to power. He saw at first hand some of the atrocities inflicted on fellow Jews.

In July 1939, his mother queued all night to get him a place on a train out of Vienna. He left for England, and never saw his father, mother or beloved older sister again. They perished in the extermination camp of Maly Trostinec.

Otto was a player in the greatest tragedy of 20th century Europe.

“I don’t necessarily remember what happened last week,” he says, “but what I saw 70 years ago – it’s as if I can see it in front of me now.

“The signs going up in our district in Vienna, reading Juden Verboten (Jews forbidden). Jewish people being made to scrub the streets, being rolled in horse dung.”

Photographs record that era, but the events were also observed by the eyes of a small boy who watched from the sidelines. No photographic record can match the power of his words as he recalls what he saw.

One incident in particular still gnaws at him. Otto’s father had a close friend, Kurt Fillip.

He says: “They came from the same place. They shared a trench together in the First World War. They came to Vienna together, they married at the same time, they chose to live as neighbours, their wives cooked together. His son was my best friend.

“But my father was Jewish, and Kurt wasn’t. It was Kurt who smashed down our door, dragged my father out of bed, and took him away.

“That was the last time I ever saw my father. His oldest, closest friend did that to him. Why? How?”

That was the nature of those times.

Yet not all Otto’s tales are about human depravity. He talks fondly about the kindness of the Ferguson family “Uncle Jim and Auntie Nell”, who adopted him in England.

“They were strong Christians, and taking me into their home was a way of expressing their Christian faith. Yet they never tried to convert me from my own Jewish faith.”

Otto’s years in Morpeth, Northumberland, were happy, despite the war. He has his own way of paying tribute to the people who looked after him. The boy raised in the German language, who thought that English was “an impossible blather, blather” when he first heard it spoken, can now deliver English sentences in a perfect Geordie accent.

Otto enjoyed his school days in Morpeth. When he left school, his foster parents found him a job at the local newspaper, the Morpeth Herald.

Then came the day when Uncle Jim called him into the front parlour.

Otto remembers: “I knew this was something big. The front parlour was out of bounds except for times like funerals, weddings, or visits from the vicar.”

Uncle Jim showed him a letter from the International Red Cross.

“Until then, I had always dreamt of going back to Europe after the war, and finding my family. But that letter ended all hope,” he says.

His father, mother and sister had all been shipped east to Maly Trostinec, on the last trainload of Jewish people out of Vienna.

Maly Trostinec wasn’t even a prison camp. It existed simply as a slaughter machine. “They didn’t bother with gas chambers. My family would have just got off the train, and been shot,” says Otto.

“The ditches had already been dug.”

Soon after this dispatch from hell, Otto, having lost his blood parents, had to say goodbye to his adoptive parents as well. The fostering period only extended to the age of 15.

He returned to London where he worked as a printer. After the war he took advantage of his fluent German, and became a courier, guiding tourist parties in his old homeland.

Then, in 1972, came what Otto regards as his second great break, his arrival in Southend after a long period of personal unhappiness in London.

The idea of the sea has always enticed him. “In Vienna, we were in the middle of a landlocked country. When my mother told me I was going to England, I was very excited. England was an island. I was going to see the sea for the first time.”

Now he was finally living in a seaside town, even if “you had to stand on a ladder on the balcony of my flat with a pair of binoculars to see the sea.”

He has remained in the same flat in Southchurch ever since. Although he has never married, “I was wedded to my work”, he also developed an extended family of friends through the Southend synagogue.

“It’s funny,” he says, “because when I first landed in England, it was at Harwich. I was an Essex man from the start.”

Outwardly, it looks like a quiet life and career, at least since he arrived in England. But quiet is not a word that will appear in Otto’s obituary.

Parallel to his ordinary working life, at first almost imperceptibly, Otto started to embark on a cause.

he explained: “I’ve talked to schools, Townswomens’ guilds and university students. Public speaking was something that came quite easily to me.”

Invitations to speak have risen steadily, but Otto is keen to stress “I am not on an ego trip.”

He has, he says, just got “a story to tell”, and “a simple message about tolerance and equality”.

But perhaps these endeavours have done something for him, personally, as well. This mission has helped to reaccommodate him with his past. At the age of 75, he finally made the full, ceremonial commitment to the Jewish faith when he was bar-mitzvahed, normally a ceremony conducted at age 13.

Over in Germany, John Demjanjuk remains in denial of his past, and will almost certainly go to his grave in that state. Some have questioned the value of prosecuting a decrepit 89-year-old, on the edge of death, for crimes committed almost 70 years ago, but Otto Deutsch has no doubt that the trial should proceed.

“Justice has to be done, however long it takes,” he says.

“There has to be a verdict. What Demjanjuk did has to be proved in a court of law, and go on the record.”

In any case, why should John Demjanjuk be allowed to rest in peace? To judge from Otto Deutsch, it’s not a privilege bestowed on the surviving victims of the Nazi era.

If Demjanjuk bears a burden of heavy guilt, these blameless survivors carry a corresponding mantle of duty. They have to tell our children what happened, so that it never happens again.

It is why, in his eighties, the sweet-natured Otto Deutsch has become a driven man: “I must continue. Sometimes it’s a strain. I feel tired. I don’t walk well. It’s becomes a great effort. But I have to remember that I am one of the youngest of the survivors.

“Soon there’ll come a time when there are none of us left. There will be books and videos to record what happened, but nobody who saw these things with their own eyes. As long as we’re alive we are on a mission and we must fulfil it, we must.”

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