Isolation forces us to work out what really matters

When times are hard it helps to remember those who’ve endured far harder times. I remember my friend Manfred Alexander, who escaped from a concentration camp and hid in my grandfather’s flat in Berlin during the second world war. The month he spent alone in that apartment was far harder than any self-isolation I’ll ever face, yet he survived and prospered.

Manfred Alexander was born in 1920, into a bourgeois German-Jewish family, and became friends with my Gentile German grandfather in Berlin in the 1930s. Growing up in Berlin, Judaism wasn’t a big part of Manfred’s identity. It was only when he was expelled from school for being Jewish that he learnt who his Jewish classmates were. Cut off from respectable society, he drifted into more bohemian circles, where he met my grandfather, Werner von Biel. Werner grew up in a schloss on the Baltic Coast, but as the youngest son he had no claim on the estate. He lived beyond his means and sank his yacht for the insurance money and was caught and went to prison. His wife, my grandmother, left him, and took their children with her. Ostensibly he had nothing in common with Manfred, but they were both outcasts in Hitler’s Reich.

In 1941 Manfred and his parents were arrested, and transported to a concentration camp in Minsk. After he’d been expelled from school Manfred had retrained as a brick-layer, so in Minsk he was put to work rebuilding the railway station. There he befriended a German railwayman, who smuggled him on to a troop train taking wounded German soldiers back to Berlin. He had to leave his parents behind. He never saw them again. Back in Berlin he met up with Werner, who offered to put him up in his apartment, on Grolmanstrasse, opposite the police station.