Doppelganger. David Finchley

said. ‘He somehow managed to find me in Częstochowa and asked me to join him.’

      Mietek, my father’s cousin lived in Waiblingen, which is where my parents finally arrived after two weeks of travelling. Mietek had a job in a textile factory and arranged a job for my father in the same factory.

      ‘I was a butcher, Arnold. What did I know about textiles or machines? Nothing, but I learned, I had to. I was a good worker and after a year I was promoted to foreman.’

      My mother was by then heavily pregnant and could not work. She gave birth to me the next July.

      Once they settled in Germany, my father began his quest to go to America. It was not to be. Fear of Communism was sweeping the United States and my father’s membership of the Communist Party, brief as it was and unavoidable as it was, meant that a visa to the United States was denied, over and over. I was much too young at the time to be aware of any of this. When I was older, he told me what he had to go through.

      ‘I went to one interview after another. I explained why I had to join the Communist Party. I explained that I had no choice, that I wasn’t a Communist, I never was, but it all fell on deaf ears. Every answer was the same – no.’

      His brother, Avraham, in New York tried to intercede on his behalf but to no avail. The door to the United States was closed to my father.

      Those experiences hurt my father deeply and continued to have an impact on him for the rest of his life.

      So, at the age of four years and eleven months, I boarded a ship in Hamburg with my parents, for the long voyage to Australia, a country I’d never heard of and knew nothing about. A childhood friend of my father’s lived in Melbourne and acted as our sponsor. That is how we managed to get a visa to Australia. My father had mixed emotions. He was happy to get out of Germany, excited at the prospect of starting a new life in a country so far away. At the same time he was also disappointed. He would never get to America, never see his surviving siblings.

      For me, it turned out to be the best decision my parents ever made.