ABSTRACT
My father was not just a historian but himself a fragment of history, an eyewitness to and participant in crucial events in the 1930s, which determined his world outlook and his later approach to history. As a boy in Vienna, he experienced the after-effects of World War I and the impact of the Depression; he witnessed the battles between the communists and Nazis in 1934 and the Anschluss in 1938; he attended one of the most unusual of schools — a Zionist Gymnasium, the only Jewish high school in Austria that was allowed to remain open under Nazi rule, in 1938–9; he saw the twilight of European Jewry and experienced its rich culture, which nourished him all his life; and through his parents, both Hebrew teachers, he became a bearer of this culture after he escaped to England in a Kindertransport in 1938.
