I came to Britain in December 1938 from Vienna when I was 14. I was on the second of the Kindertransport trains organised by people in Britain, who persuaded the Home Office to allow 10,000 children to be brought to this country.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of the CRE's Connections magazine

I can still remember feeling terribly disturbed, but, as a 14-year-old, to some extent the excitement of going to a different country outweighed the sense of foreboding. Some 65% of the so-called Kinder transportees lost their parents. I was one of those, although I had lost my father when I was 10, and I had no brothers or sisters either.

We arrived at Harwich from the Hook of Holland. When we trooped onto the deck, there were immigration officials waiting to deal with us. Hundreds of us were put on a train to a disused holiday camp near Lowestoft. It was December, and we were in these wooden chalets, with the North Sea wind howling at us. Scarlet fever broke out and, of course, I caught it. So, I spent the next six weeks in an isolation hospital in Colchester. Then I was sent to a convalescence home in Walton-on-the-Naze, and from there to another refugee childrens home in Clacton. Eventually, I landed up in Dovercourt, just outside Harwich. I had been on the move for five months, with a different roof over my head continuously, so I decided to try and get a job.

I had a grounding in English because I had been to a grammar school in Vienna. There was a job advertised which said someone with a fair knowledge of English could be trained as a chauffeur, to look after the car and work as a handyman around the house and garden. I took the job, but it was a disaster. The man's name was Eden, a cousin of Sir Anthony, who later became prime minister. I was 15, thrown in the deep end, and I didn't make a good job of it. Within three weeks, I was kicked out. I was described to the refugee committee as indolent and insolent a nice alliteration, but not very pleasant.

The one good thing was that I was told about a house where a Zionist committee had established a training farm. I used to go there to relax and meet fellow refugees. One Sunday, they had an open day for wellwishers and supporters, and I got talking to some people from London. They were very kind, working-class East Enders, Jewish people, called Friede. When they heard my story, they took me in, and I lived with them in Hackney for the next eight years. That was a real stroke of luck, otherwise God knows what would have happened to me, psychologically.

In our police books it said refugee from Nazi oppression. But when war broke out we were reclassified as enemy aliens. I had to report to the police, every six weeks, and whenever I changed jobs, I had to get a countersignature from the local police station.

The Friedes had a large network of cousins, and practically everyone was in the tailoring trade. So I went into that. But I wasnt very good at it, and in the war I retrained as an engineer, working for two firms making products for aircraft.

In those days I was very left wing and when I went into my second engineering job I discovered that the labour force wasn't unionised. I tried to persuade them to join the AEU, but made no headway whatever. Oddly enough, my best friend in the firm was my employer, one of three brothers who owned the firm. I had gone in there to organise the labour force against the bosses, and the boss was my only friend.

I encountered some anti-Semitism there. One of the women kept referring to me as the re-fuggee, and the guy who was store keeper always said, My name is Smyth, covering up his nose, S-M-Y-T-H, whatever that may mean. I was a member of an organisation of left-wing migrants, called Young Austria. We were all indoctrinated with Marxism, so I just put it down to ignorance inculcated in the proletariat by the ruling class.

After the war I returned to the rag trade, and somehow seemed to earn a living wage. I got married at 23, and we lived in a sort of slum near Stamford Hill there was a grievous housing shortage. Eventually, I decided to study and I went to Birkbeck, and then to Kings College, London, to take a history degree. I became a teacher and, after several years, a writer of history books. One of them called A Social History of the Third Reich became a Penguin, sold 54,000 copies, and has just gone out of print. In my early 60s I came here to the AJR, and have been here for 15 years, editing the Journal.

I became a British citizen in 1949 or 50. I don't feel like an immigrant at all now. But, because I was a communist as a teenager, being an immigrant didnt bother me communism overrode all those other questions, so one simply pushed them aside.

I had some friends who went back to Austria, but I never really thought about going back, because I discovered how the Austrians had behaved during the war. I did think about going to Israel at one point, but I am too much of a well, I wouldn't say coward, but it would take such an effort to take root again in a totally strange environment, and learn a new language.

I'm not sure how much at home or settled I feel here, even now. Although I am hugely interested in British literature, history and politics, there are parts of the British way of life that are barriers. I am not at all interested in sport, and I hate drinking beer, so they are two fairly huge social handicaps.

Then there is also the fact that I have retained strong Zionist sympathies, whereas my left-wing idealism has totally deserted me. I am very agitated by the anti-Americanism in this country now, too. So it's still a moot point how integrated I feel.

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