Tribute to former Lancashire Telegraph assistant editor Keith Fort

HOW many people do you suppose a reporter interviews in the course of half a century in journalism? More than 50,000? Perhaps 100,000?

Probably somewhere in between an average of between three and five a day.

Why, then, does one particular interview, or rather, one particular interviewee stick in the mind? It was one of the briefest interviews I ever conducted. Yet I remember the time, I clearly remember the subject. I remember his name (though it was not an English name) and I can still see his face, particularly his eyes.

And though the interview took place a quarter of a century ago, and lasted barely five minutes, hardly a year has gone by without the intensity and detail of that meeting returning to my mind many times.

I never saw him again although I did try to find him because I knew he had an incredible – probably an unbelievable – story to tell. So why, among all those countless interviews with subjects from Prime Ministers to paupers, from sporting heroes to murderers, from world champions to pop stars, do I remember above them all a brief interview with a small, insignificant man you would barely give a second glance to in the street.

Here is why.

I was working at this newspaper’s Burnley office at the time. We got a message that a man at the front counter was asking to see a reporter. I was free so I went down to see him.

I was confronted by a remarkably small, wiry man. At a glance I could tell he was extremely agitated.

His whole body was shaking and when I asked him how I could help him, he replied by holding out a newspaper in a hand he was incapable of keeping still and with great effort, gasped out in a foreign accent: “Read that!”

It turned out to be one of those religious newspapers which get pushed through your letter box and what had caught his eye was a story about Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp.

Well, not so much about Auschwitz, but about some of the inmates in the camp where, among others, thousands of Jews were exterminated.

The article claimed that inmates who were Jehovah's Witnesses were sustained by their faith, never lost their dignity and never sank to the depths of human degradation to which the thousands of other prisoners were forced.

When I had finished reading it I looked up at my diminutive visitor. Tears were pouring down his face but his eyes had an incredible intensity. “My name,” he said, “is Jan Kostilek.”

I will never forget what happened next. Slowly, he rolled up his sleeve and showed me a blue inscription on his arm. I had seen pictures of them before but never expected to see one in the flesh.

It was the Auschwitz number the SS had tattooed on his arm when he arrived at the camp as a young man bound for the gas chambers.

And here he was, still a broken man, standing before me more than 30 years later in an office in Burnley, able to speak briefly about those horrendous times for the very first time to put right what was, in his mind, a terrible and spurious wrong.

“I was there”, he sobbed. “And I can tell you that no one – NO ONE – was left with any dignity. We lived and died like rats.

“We all behaved like animals just to survive. No one was any different from his neighbour. This article is a downright lie! I just cannot let it go unanswered.”

His eyes blazed and his strength of feeling got to me. This small, incredibly thin man, who clearly had never recovered from extreme starvation and mistreatment, seemed to develop an aura.

He exuded an emotion and a strength of passion and feeling I never experienced before or since.

It was as if emotions of revulsion, horror and shame over what he had been reduced to and guilt over his survival had all burst from him at once.

It overwhelmed him and he was unable to go on. So he left, refusing any help or comfort. I am a cynical old journalist but I’m afraid to admit that, later, I felt as though I had met a saint. I never could forget him. I never will.

It was the nearest I came to the holocaust. It brought home to me what it did to those we regarded as fortunate enough to survive.

Last weekend I watched a filmed re-enactment of a two hour meeting at which the Nazi leadership, over a rich lunch, decided the fate of millions of Jan Kostileks.

It was shown to commemorate Holocaust Day.

I will never need a special day to remember Jan Kostilek. I knew that, if he was prepared, he had a terrible story to tell – a special message for the world.

I left three months for him to recover and knocked on his door. He had died three days earlier.