Brief encounter
Esther Freud Author
ILLUSTRATION BY NICK TAYLOR
What is the first news event you can recall?
I grew up in the country as part of a Rudolf Steiner community—no television, very little modern history— and although we must have had a radio I don’t remember ever hearing the news. But I was 15, in London visiting my father (the painter, Lucian) who bought every newspaper every day, and there, splashed across the pages of a colour supplement, were photographs of the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. I was stunned. How could such atrocities take place? How was it possible for human beings to behave with such brutality? I had no idea then about what had taken place in Europe during the Second World War, and that members of my own family had died at Auschwitz.