Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  I was on the BBC’s ‘Mandela list’, meaning that I would be one of a limited number of reporters dispatched from London if it looked as if death was approaching. Conscious that there was a risk of unwelcome criticism if too many BBC people were flown out to South Africa to boost the local bureau, a rota was drawn up so that some of us would be part of the first wave, but would then be withdrawn after a few days to make way for a second wave who would cover the state funeral. It was a long way to go for a false alarm, but I did make the long flight to Johannesburg once in the expectation of being needed there, only to learn after a few days of anxious waiting that the great man was rallying and would cheat death yet again.

  Mandela died almost exactly a year after I left the BBC. His death was announced at about 9.45 p.m. London time, and I knew that my former colleagues at The World Tonight, with just fifteen minutes to go before they went on air, would be severely stretched. I sent a quick text message to the editor – ‘I’m at home if you need me’ – and by seven minutes past ten, as soon as the news bulletin was over, I was on air, recounting my memories of my one encounter with Mandela more than a decade previously. When I had flown to Johannesburg, I had been in the right place at the wrong time; on the day he died, I was in the wrong place at the right time.

  News, by definition, is unpredictable. So it follows logically that when you plan ahead, your plans always risk being upended by real news, the sort that was not in the planning diary. And a news presenter who has been dispatched overseas as part of some carefully thoughtout plan risks being left looking like a total prat. Wrong place, wrong time. Never a good look for a reporter.

  Gdansk, Poland, 4 June 2009: it is the twentieth anniversary of the elections in Poland that marked the beginning of the end of Communism in Europe. It is also the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I am in Gdansk, the crucible of Poland’s anti-Communist movement, to present a special anniversary programme, and we also have a major report planned from China to mark the moment when Communism on two continents took two very different paths. It was the sort of intellectually ambitious programme that The World Tonight loved.

  At one minute to ten, there was a news flash from Westminster: the Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell had quit and called for the resignation of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. It was a huge political story and had come totally out of the blue. As I tried to make sense of what I was being told from London by a less than coherent producer, I scribbled a new headline with the pips of the Greenwich Time Signal ringing in my headphones. There are six pips, one per second: that’s how long we had to rethink the programme. And, in the chaos, I entirely forgot which job Purnell had just resigned from.

  If Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman wondered why I was interviewing her from northern Poland, she was far too polite to ask. But the programme as broadcast bore little resemblance to what we had so carefully planned. As Harold Macmillan (allegedly) said when asked what a Prime Minister fears most: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

  Those same events should be the lifeblood for any self-respecting reporter – events, after all, are what we live for, they are what make our hearts beat faster and the adrenalin flow. Except when we are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  A perennial problem for anyone who has to make radio programmes in hotel rooms is how to find a way to get the acoustics sounding acceptable. So, for the benefit of generations of broadcasters yet to come, here are a few tips.

  Close the curtains and turn off the air conditioning. You do not want to sound as if you are reporting from the bathroom, so record your scripts while buried under a duvet or at least with your head wrapped in a couple of pillows. My producer colleague Beth McLeod once made me crouch under a table with a low-hanging tablecloth; it was surprisingly effective. Kneeling on the floor in front of a well-upholstered armchair and speaking directly into the back of the chair will also usually work. Needless to say, none of this should be attempted if anyone other than your producer is in the room. There are limits to the indignities that even presenters can be expected to tolerate.

  If you feel that you need to liven things up with a bit of street noise, do not be tempted to broadcast live from the street, where police sirens and clanging shop shutters will drown out everything you say. Far better to stay in your hotel room and dangle a second microphone out of an open window. If it gets too noisy, you can simply adjust the volume control. (Once, I dangled myself out of the open window because we did not have a second mic, but this is not a technique I would recommend.)

  If you have to broadcast from the roof of your hotel, because that is the only place from which you can get a signal, make sure that you are nowhere near a lift shaft or an emergency generator. And always take an umbrella. If you are relying on the hotel Wi-Fi, be prepared for it to crash at precisely the wrong moment. In the early days of Wi-Fi, I sometimes looked for a local internet café and asked to plug into their network with an ethernet cable. It even worked in Medellín, Colombia, which used to have a reputation as the murder capital of the world.

  If there were no internet cafés available, any café or coffee shop that offered Wi-Fi would sometimes have to do. In Istanbul, where gridlocked traffic had left us on the wrong side of the Bosphorus with no time to get back to our hotel, we ended up in a Wi-Fi-equipped cake shop at closing time, munching cream buns while preparing to go on air.

  And, on the subject of food, I always tried to think ahead. My backpack usually contained nuts, dried fruit and a couple of boxes of cereal bars. No BBC correspondent should ever be tempted to rely on the hotel minibar for sustenance unless they are prepared for months of arguments with the BBC finance department. They will refuse to believe that you were munching stale peanuts to stave off starvation rather than swigging back mini-bottles of gin.

  At one time, the BBC provided military-style cook-in-a-bag rations along with the flak jackets and helmets. They seemed like a good idea, until Craig Swan and I opened a couple of them outside our tent in eastern Kenya, close to the Somali border, in temperatures approaching forty degrees Celsius, and discovered that our dining options were either Lancashire hotpot or bangers and mash.

  When in doubt, order a pizza.

  CHAPTER 16

  EN ROUTE TO MY ROOTS

  Like a hot mug of cocoa and warm bedtime hug rolled into one.

  PEOPLE TEND TO SAY nice things when you leave a job that you have been doing for a very long time – it is like being a guest at your own funeral. And if I am going to choose my own epitaph, the comment above, from an anonymous listener after I announced that I would be leaving the BBC at the end of 2012, will serve well enough.

  My friend and fellow broadcaster Deb Amos once described what we radio reporters do as ‘walking around inside listeners’ heads’. It is a perfect description, and it helps to explain why many people feel that they have got to know quite intimately the broadcasters whose voices have become so familiar to them.

  I decided to leave the BBC because I was beginning to get bored – and that is fatal for any news person. It was getting ever harder for me to maintain the energy and curiosity levels that I knew were essential to do the job properly and, with money ever tighter at the BBC, the chances of me being sent on the kind of overseas assignments that I most valued were becoming ever slimmer. It would be much better, I thought, to leave at a time of my own choosing than to wait for some embarrassed new editor to call me into their office to tell me that my time was up.

  I also thought it was high time that I finally tried to kick my unhealthy addiction to news. I had already had an epiphany in the mid-1990s when the office phoned me while I was on holiday in Italy to ask if I could get to Turkey to cover an earthquake disaster. I said I didn’t think I could, and when I put the phone down, Ruth remarked that it was the first time that she had ever heard me say no to the office.

  A decade later, the World Service wanted to send me to Baghdad, just as Hannah was about to sit her A-levels. She was de
eply unhappy at the prospect of having to deal with both the stress of the exams and worrying about my safety in a warzone, so, after much thought, I told my colleagues that I would rather not go. A friend gave me some good advice: ‘If you do go, the BBC will remember for a maximum of three months. Hannah will remember for the rest of her life.’ But I was shocked with myself that I found it such a hard decision to make.

  I presented my last edition of The World Tonight on 13 December 2012. The top story was that the government had agreed to pay nearly £2.25 million to a Libyan dissident, Sami al-Saadi, who claimed that MI6 had been involved in handing him over to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi. At the end of the programme, my colleagues played a montage of some of my reporting over the past two decades, over a musical accompaniment of ‘Rockin’ Robin’. If they had hoped to embarrass me, they succeeded.

  My closing words were borrowed from the World War II American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: ‘Good night, and good luck.’

  Five days later, I presented my last Newshour, and then it was all over: drinks and hugs all round, and out into the piazza outside Broadcasting House clutching my farewell gifts. A few weeks later, arriving for my formal farewell party in the wood-panelled Council Chamber of Broadcasting House, I was stopped at the door. My electronic pass had been disabled and my name was not on the guest list. ‘Terribly sorry, sir, but I can’t let you in,’ said the security man.

  One of my guests kindly came to my rescue, and all was well. If you thought the BBC TV series W1A was a comedy, I can assure you that it was nothing of the sort. Like all good satire, it got closer to the truth than the most rigorous of documentaries.

  I had wondered how I would feel, after so many years in the grip of the daily news cycle, once I was free. I felt liberated, not only from the tyranny of the headlines, but also from the straitjacket into which BBC presenters are bound by their obligation to be impartial on all matters of public controversy. I had had plenty of opinions since I was old enough to voice them, and to have been prevented from sharing them for nearly twenty-five years had been a bigger strain than I realised at the time. For a quarter of a century, not even my family and friends knew how I voted or what I thought.

  So once I was free, I felt as if I could suddenly unlock a prison cell in which all those opinions had been held for so long. They rushed out, gulping the fresh air, yelling at the tops of their voices, channelling Martin Luther King.

  ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.’

  My blog, Lustig’s Letter, which had tiptoed along carefully impartial paths for so long, burst into opinionated life. Some readers commented – to my delight – that they had never imagined I held such outlandish views. When I wrote a particularly angry piece about the British government’s reluctance to help with refugee rescue operations in the Mediterranean, the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams commented on Twitter: ‘I actually didn’t have Robin Lustig down as a leftie particularly, even though I loved his voice.’

  It felt like a small victory, and I was relieved that my twenty-three years of trying so hard to say nothing publicly that would even hint at my personal views had not been in vain.

  Three months after I left the BBC, my mother died at the age of ninety-one. Her death enabled me to undertake a project that I could not even have contemplated during her lifetime – a journey to her roots: to the Polish city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau, where she had been born and grew up – and to Kaunas in Lithuania, to visit the place where her mother had been shot by a Nazi death squad in one of the first mass executions of 1941. My mother preferred not to dwell on memories from that time and had always been adamant that she had no wish to return to her birthplace. I, on the other hand, was irresistibly curious.

  Fortunately, one of my oldest friends, Stu Seidel, who had worked for many years for the US National Public Radio network in Washington DC, was similarly curious to trace his own family’s roots, and we devised a joint reporting project that we called In the Footsteps of Our Families. Stu’s family had its origins in Belarus and Lithuania, so we started there, and then made our way by train through Poland and Germany, ending up in New Jersey and New York, where his grandparents and my uncle had eventually settled.

  We started in the small Belarusian town of Pastavy, about 150 miles north of Minsk, from which Stu’s grandfather Julius had set off almost exactly a hundred years previously. We created a website124 on which we posted our photographs and audio interviews, and each of us wrote a diary as we journeyed through our families’ histories.

  In my mind’s eye, I see [Stu’s grandfather] on that day in 1914, just months before the outbreak of the First World War, in his too-long trousers and flat cap, sixteen years old, with a battered suitcase containing all he owns at his feet. He is standing, embarrassed, as his mother, aunts and cousins surround him with love and anxiety, dabbing at their eyes with outsize handkerchiefs.

  Our next stop was the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, where Stu’s grandmother Sara had been born and where my direct ancestor Joshua Höschel ben Joseph had been born in 1578. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, he was one of the most eminent Talmudic scholars of the age, ending up as the head of a religious school in Krakow, where he died in 1648.

  The main reason I wanted to visit Lithuania, however, was that my maternal grandmother, Ilse, had been murdered there by a Nazi death squad in 1941. It was only in the early 2000s that my mother found out what had happened: she knew that her mother had been arrested in November 1941 and deported with thousands of other Jews, but she never made any further inquiries because she was terrified of learning that she had died in a gas chamber.

  All she knew was what she had been told in a letter from a non-Jewish aunt who had stayed in Breslau throughout the war and who wrote to her in 1946.

  Your mother was picked up by two Gestapo men on the morning of 21 November. The bell rang, she opened the door, still in her dressing gown, and then she had to get dressed in their presence … Herr Metzner, the chemist, who had rented your dining room, immediately called on me to tell me the terrible news … They were told they were going to Kovno [Kaunas] … We tried to find out what was going to happen to all these people, and where they were going to be sent, but we couldn’t find out anything. Once they had gone, there was never any sign of life from them again. However cruel it was that your mother had to be included in this first transport, at least she and the others with her were unaware that they were being taken to their deaths.

  Over the next three years, there were to be sixteen further deportations of Breslau’s Jews, most of them to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, where they perished. The deportees were told they were to be part of ‘resettlement’ or ‘work duty’ programmes; among them was the grandmother of a friend of my father’s, the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived both Auschwitz and Belsen. (Anita and my father had shared the same cello teacher in Berlin, although she was originally from Breslau and had returned there before her grandmother was arrested.)

  A Gestapo man sat at a table reading out names, and the people who were called had to walk past the table to the other side of the yard. When he called ‘Lasker’, my grandmother walked past the table, but not without stopping in front of the Gestapo man. She looked him straight in the face, and said very loudly: ‘Frau Lasker to you.’ I thought he would hit her there and then, but not a bit of it. He just said simply: ‘Frau Lasker’. I was extremely proud of her.125

  I would love to think that my own grandmother displayed similar fortitude.

  The Nazis had invaded Lithuania in June 1941, and over the next six months, they murdered nearly all of the country’s 200,000 Jews. In Kaunas, a nineteenth-century fort that had been used as the city’s prison became the site of the mass murder of Jews, under the command of a Swiss-born SS colonel, Karl Jäger. (He escaped capture at the end of the war and was arrested only in 1959. He had been living in Germany under an assumed name and committed suicide in jail w
hile awaiting trial.)

  The Ninth Fort at Kaunas is now a grim, Soviet-era memorial and museum to the 30,000 people who were killed there. I took with me on my visit some of the last letters that my grandmother had written to my mother in the months before her death. They were all carefully written, probably not only because my grandmother feared that they would be read by Nazi censors but also because she may well have wanted to put on as brave a face as she could when writing to her only child.

  March 1941: ‘Unfortunately things are not going the way I had hoped. I have to be extremely patient, but I am not losing courage. I am still hoping that one fine day, we shall all meet again.’

  June 1941: ‘My journey to Uncle Ulle [her brother living in Chicago] seems to be impossible. Everything is upside down at the moment – all the work and all the money that has been spent seems to have been in vain.’

  September 1941, shortly after her forty-fourth birthday: ‘My mood was below zero. I hope next year I will feel happier.’

  It was a glorious summer’s day when I visited Kaunas, and it took an immense effort of imagination, as I stood on the edge of a field dotted with wild flowers, to conjure up an image of what it must have been like in November 1941 as thousands of terrified people were herded towards mass graves and shot.

  Journalists get used to reporting atrocities dispassionately, and on my visit to the Ninth Fort, I slip into my journalist’s coat of armour all too easily. I compose images in the viewfinder of my camera, I record interviews and make notes. But then I stop and force myself to take off the armour. ‘Ilse,’ I say, as I stand at the edge of the killing field, ‘I was here today. You are not forgotten.’