Nick Danziger

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Presenter0:08

The program was originally broadcast in two thousand

Speaker 20:11

Three, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:23

My castaway this week is a photojournalist. He doesn't stand back from the pictures he takes, but involves himself in the lives of those whom his camera captures. He was born with a sense of adventure. At the age of 22, he won a travelling bursary and spent the money on an 18-month journey through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet and China. He was held hostage, he was robbed, and later he recorded his experiences in a best-selling book.

Presenter0:49

Since then, he's returned frequently to Afghanistan to make television documentaries about the country and its people. He's also turned his stills camera on his native country, Britain, picturing the lives of its dispossessed and its privileged. These days, he lives in Monaco with children from Afghanistan, whom he's adopted. I've gone to dangerous areas because I wanted to, he says. I love photography and I love teaching. It's an exchange. He is Nick Danziger. You're very difficult to categorise, as it were, Nick, because I say photojournalist, which implies journalism, which implies objectivity, and yet you cross that line all of the time, don't you? Involvement is what you do.

Nick Danziger1:29

Absolutely. I think it's very difficult to be objective, certainly when you get involved in these very difficult areas of the world. And for me, the most important thing is people's lives, how they're trying to get on in very difficult circumstances.

Presenter1:41

So you're always focusing on the individual story.

Nick Danziger1:44

Always individuals. For me it's very much about how people are getting on in in the face of usually terrible odds.

Presenter1:51

But is that because individual stories, human interest stories as we call them, are always fascinating? Or is it because also you believe they reflect the whole? You know, they are a microcosm of the whole?

Nick Danziger2:01

I think it's a bit of both. I think it's very important to give people a voice, people who usually go unheard. We hear the politicians, they have a platform, whereas most of the people that I focus on don't have that platform.

Presenter2:13

But you've therefore photographed some terrible thing, you know, mutilated children in Kabul and Kosovo, gassed Kurds crossing the border into Turkey. Have you ever found a picture so painful that you've turned away from it?

Nick Danziger2:28

Sometimes I I actually want to give up taking the pictures, for example in Sierra Leone where men, women and children were deliberately mutilated, had their arms and hands hacked off. Taking portraits of some of those victims I found incredibly difficult, difficult particularly because of probably reviving in them the memories of those terrible moments that took place for themselves. And so I suppose I'm driven back and back again because voices go unheard.

Presenter2:59

One sees that obviously in those kinds of places, as you say, where voices can't be heard. But what about this picture here? We have this is one that you took going round Britain, and this is in a hospital. This is a mother in a hospital bed, two children sitting at the end of the bed, heads bowed. I presume she's either dying or dead.

Nick Danziger3:17

That was the last moment that uh Rosemary was conscious. She was going in for a a heart and lung transplant and her children were waiting outside. I didn't want to take the picture. I was in the corridor with them outside the intensive care unit and they looked up and they said, Mother, you know, Rosemary wanted you to document her life. Do what you have to do.

Presenter3:39

But Nick, that is something that we know happens every day. Why it's it's not like communicating something that we can't see because it's happening thousands of miles away. Why do we need that?

Nick Danziger3:50

Because I think that people aren't always aware of what people are going through even in this country. I mean, one of the reasons that I turned the the camera lens on Britain is that I think lots of aspects of British life today do go unnoticed.

Presenter4:04

So it's it's concern, it's storytelling, it's what you do, and travel in the main is how you've achieved it. I want to talk to you a lot more about it, but let's pause for your first record because we're traveling you off to a desert island. What's it to be?

Nick Danziger4:16

Crosby Stilsnash and Young with Carry On, I think they really opened up for me that there is another world out there. I came from a a a privileged, if not very privileged, background. Certainly what appealed to me was having my eyes opened to other parts of the world.

Speaker 14:33

Uh

Presenter4:34

Uh

Speaker 24:41

Two days!

Speaker 24:44

Do I

Presenter4:58

Cosby Stills and Nash and Young with Carry On. So your family history, Nick, relates that you always wanted to travel, you always had this kind of adventurous spirit. What was your first big adventure?

Nick Danziger5:09

My first adventure was at the age of thirteen when I announced to my parents that I was going to Paris for a week.

Nick Danziger5:14

And they didn't believe me, and I set off. I had no passport tickets or anything, and I managed to get to Paris. This was from.

Presenter5:22

This was from Switzerland. We lived in Switzerland.

Nick Danziger5:22

From Switzerland. We lived in Switzerland at the time. For some reason I was always inspired to go off, I think partly by the adventures of Tintin and some of the the books that I used to read at that age.

Presenter5:35

Tint in the cartoon.

Nick Danziger5:36

Yeah, the Belgian cartoon car right.

Presenter5:37

Okay, yes.

Nick Danziger5:38

And so off I went, sent a postcard to my parents saying that I was having a wonderful time. But what did you do? The first few days I was at I was able to find a room near the Gare Saint-Lazare, had some money to feed myself, and then I found myself kind of wandering the streets. I didn't quite understand at the time when I was being propositioned what the women were actually offering. And then I lived rough. And then subsequently I carried on travelling throughout Europe and my parents got increasingly nervous that I would get arrested because they had reduced my pocket money and I would then save up whatever I could manage to save and would set off for different parts of Europe.

Presenter5:43

But what

Speaker 25:44

Did you do?

Presenter6:18

So what was the mot I mean can you remember the motive then? Was it just you wanted to put yourself alone in an unknown place and just seeking?

Nick Danziger6:24

No, I was really curious about other cultures, languages. Living in Switzerland, you hear many different languages, and I wondered where all of these people came from. And I was also inspired by art. I was very keen to either become an architect or an artist, a painter. So part of it was.

Nick Danziger6:40

People and places, and to see the kind of great monuments and works of art.

Presenter6:44

But you didn't always do it legitimately. I think you sort of nipped on trains and didn't.

Nick Danziger6:48

Trains and aeroplanes.

Presenter6:50

On aeroplanes without a ticket.

Nick Danziger6:51

Yeah, yeah.

Nick Danziger6:53

I used to turn up at Geneva Airport and then literally on the spur of the moment decide where would I travel to. And I would fall in with a family. So as they went through immigration, passport control and indeed straight onto the plane, I would follow in talking to one of their children.

Presenter7:10

You couldn't do that.

Nick Danziger7:10

Carried very little.

Presenter7:13

And then at some point you ended up selling necklaces on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Nick Danziger7:17

At age seventeen, I just started art school and I had this idea which anyone who remembers them, glowing necklaces, you can still see them in the streets, but it was a new idea then. I was the first to to catch onto the potential of what this chemical could produce.

Presenter7:34

But your parents must have been terrified for you.

Nick Danziger7:36

Uh they were. I mean, but when I was sixteen uh my father wanted me to stop this'cause he said you could be arrested and thrown into jail. So he actually gave me a URL purse and a hundred dollars.

Nick Danziger7:46

And I said, How am I going to manage on a hundred dollars? He said, Well, if you've managed on nothing, you'll do very well on a hundred dollars. But Rio Rio was a business idea, it was to go there and sell these necklaces.

Presenter7:56

But this was mid-seventies. This was not well, you know, the gap year was not fashionable then. You were kind of ahead of your time, really.

Nick Danziger8:02

Yeah. I mean, I just I I was very motivated about art and and I by then decided to become an artist. So that was actually during art school. It was during the art school term. I thought of the carnival great place to sell necklaces.

Presenter8:15

Oh my

Presenter8:15

So it it wasn't for you uh opting out just for a period and then coming back and f this was exactly what you intended to do with your eye.

Nick Danziger8:21

Yeah.

Nick Danziger8:22

Yeah, I was very serious about what I was doing, although I have to say going to the carnival was a kind of enjoyable experience. That's what led me there.

Presenter8:30

Good proposition there too, actually. Tell me about record number two.

Nick Danziger8:34

Well, it relates completely to that experience, which is Stan gets his version of the girl from Ipanema, the original one, and really brings back to me everything that sums up the Rio and Brazil.

Speaker 28:45

Olia qui koiza magelinda, machia de grasa, E la minina qui vein qui pasa, nundo si balanso camio doma.

Speaker 19:00

And then and young and lovely The girl from Ibanima goes walking And when she passes he smiles but she doesn't see

Presenter9:13

Carlos Antonio Jabim and Astri Gilberto and the girl from Ipanema. Your background, Nick Danziger, sounds, you know, incredibly glamorous, really. A American film producer, father, actress, mother, living in the south of France and in Switzerland. I mean

Presenter9:29

It would be easy for people to think this is just a sort of well-heeled young man indulging his travelling fantasies.

Nick Danziger9:36

Well when I started I was very keen, possibly because of my background, to do it on my own. So it was summer jobs, earning a living whilst I was travelling by sketching the tourist sites and was determined not to take anything from my father. Partly also because my father didn't want me to become an artist. So I thought well if this is what I want to do then I should sever the the links.

Presenter9:58

But had you been always interested in international politics or in geography at school or?

Nick Danziger10:03

Geography fascinated me and I suppose again partly because of my uh upbringing. I mean I I tended to read for example the International Herald Tribune so foreign affairs was very much always prominent in terms of what I was looking at.

Presenter10:18

But you saw yourself becoming an artist, really. That was just something you were interested in. And you came to the Chelsea School of Art.

Nick Danziger10:22

Yes.

Nick Danziger10:24

Well, I was passionate about painting. That's all I did from my earliest memories.

Presenter10:29

And what sort of things did you paint when you got to art school?

Nick Danziger10:32

very geometrical, very mathematical, abstract works. They weren't just paintings, they were sculptures, reliefs. And I had chosen Chelsea School of Art because they left you alone and over the course of the three years probably saw half a dozen tutors and was very happy just to get on with

Presenter10:49

So, being solitary, it's all mirrored, isn't it, in your travelling and so on? It is what you like doing.

Nick Danziger10:55

Yeah, but I think the the thing that uh the painting is very or was extremely different insofar as it was very solitary. I enjoyed teaching. I also went back to to lecture at art schools and universities and really enjoyed the interaction.

Presenter11:09

But apparently you got taken up by a West End gallery. You mean you could have had this career and you turned your back on it.

Nick Danziger11:16

Yeah, one of the things that actually turned me against it partly was'cause I felt it was a very small world and I think I wanted to maybe communicate something else, not the kind of gallery opening nights in Cork Street and

Presenter11:28

Yeah.

Presenter11:29

But very fortunate to have so much choice in life.

Nick Danziger11:32

Well, I didn't I mean, then I don't think I necessarily saw the choices. It's because life suddenly took a dramatic turn. I d I think I originally, before setting off on on my travels, thought that I would return to painting. And I still I still have this incredible urge. There's just not enough time, hours in the day, to go back to the kind of works that I was producing.

Presenter11:50

But the dramatic turn was that you won this travel bursary, which was life-changing. Let's hear about that in a minute. But pause for record number three.

Nick Danziger11:57

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Jury.

Presenter12:00

The block Chelsea Art School.

Nick Danziger12:01

Well he wasn't at Chelsea, he was an art school graduate, but a true artist, I think, lived with incredible passion, his disability, everything I he's a sort of hero with incredible energy.

Speaker 112:16

In the deserts

Speaker 112:18

Of Sudan

Speaker 112:20

And the gardens

Speaker 112:23

Of Japan.

Speaker 112:25

From the land

Speaker 112:28

Uh

Presenter12:30

Yeah.

Speaker 112:30

Every woman

Speaker 112:32

Every male.

Speaker 112:35

Hit me with your rhythm sticking Hit me

Speaker 112:38

Hit me.

Speaker 112:39

Shit off, it's me beneath me the f ⁇

Presenter12:44

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury and the Blockheads. So it was in 1984, Nick, um, when you set out on the ancient trade route from Turkey to China going through I mean I think the Iran-Iraq war was on

Nick Danziger12:56

There were several wars on at that point in time. I had this wonderful fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to follow these routes across Asia to China.

Presenter13:05

You were twenty-six years old.

Nick Danziger13:06

Twenty-six years old. I left with no visas or I mean no permissions whatsoever, but I felt very confident because of my previous travels that I could get across all the borders.

Presenter13:15

And also if you'd waited for them they might never have come, I suppose.

Nick Danziger13:17

They definitely wouldn't have come. I mean, for example, Iran, Iraq, they were at that point in the Gulf War. I visited with the Kurdish rebels up in the mountains between Turkey, Iran and Iraq, and then went on into Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation.

Presenter13:18

Come on.

Presenter13:32

That would have been the height of it, of course. And you were, as it were, inverted commas on the side of the Mujahideen. You were taking the same thing.

Nick Danziger13:32

That was good.

Nick Danziger13:38

That's right. I mean, I had to dress up in the turban and robes. I had to pray. I learnt the prayers in Arabic because otherwise they would have been suspicious.

Nick Danziger13:45

And

Presenter13:45

You had to carry a Kalashnikov.

Nick Danziger13:47

Well, I was only forced to carry it once and the reason they forced me'cause I am a complete pacifist, wouldn't harm anything. But they said if I didn't I was putting them in danger. We actually entered into a Soviet controlled city, right into the heart of the city, with a a group of mujahideen. It was Herat, the second largest city of Afghanistan, which then was coming under the heaviest aerial bombardment of the war.

Presenter14:02

People

Presenter14:07

You were taken hostage at one point.

Nick Danziger14:09

On the border I thought I'd been taken hostage. I spent a week in a tiny room.

Nick Danziger14:14

wasn't allowed out wasn't allowed to speak loudly because of uh the danger they said of someone overhearing.

Presenter14:20

I think that is being taken, Hostan. You lost your luggage.

Nick Danziger14:24

Everything. I love, I mean, I ended up walking into Afghanistan with nothing other than the Shalwar Kameez and turban that they had given me.

Presenter14:31

Was your life really in danger? That sounds like a facile question after everything you said.

Nick Danziger14:35

Well, I I always look at what the people are suffering and I think on a daily basis their lives were in danger. But they were not it wasn't danger from close quarters, it was danger from the shelling, the rocketing, the aerial bombardment on every single day. I spent three weeks in Herraton, and every single one of those days, dozens and dozens of civilians were killed and injured from the fighting.

Presenter15:00

But why were you there?

Nick Danziger15:03

Trying to get to China.

Presenter15:04

Because but it's you know, it's it's it's a self-created goal.

Presenter15:09

Part of it obviously must be enjoyment. It's the friendships. It's the unpredictable friendships, I suppose.

Nick Danziger15:13

Well, that's part of it. I mean, I wanted to know what was happening. I mean, it was a journey of discovery in the sense that this was an area of Afghanistan that hadn't then been visited during the Soviet occupation. And again, it was this idea of trying to give voice to people who otherwise would not have been heard about.

Presenter15:31

So, is that what changed? That's what gave you focus for the traveling. In the beginning, it was just that you wanted to travel and to see and to experience. Absolutely, I mean, now it's.

Nick Danziger15:38

Absolutely. I mean now it's very, very focussed in on how people live. Whereas before it was maybe a romantic notion of going to these wonderful distant places where you knew you were alive every day'cause you didn't know whether you'd survive the day. Very romantic vision.

Presenter15:54

I want to go back to Afghanistan later on in our discussion, but just tell me one thing. You said when you did a tour of Britain, that that we the British are most like the people of Afghanistan in your view. What do you mean by

Nick Danziger16:04

Great sense of humour, this incredible sense of humour in the worst situations, I think it's an incredible trait.

Presenter16:11

More music.

Nick Danziger16:13

This um really sums up Afghanistan because it's a love song, but deeply rooted in every love song in Afghanistan, there is some tragedy and it's called Lehli Kwadam as Binoi Bamast, which is music from Herat, the first city that I ever visited in Afghanistan.

Presenter16:55

I think you're gonna have to do the back announcement to this one, Nick. What was that? Tell me.

Nick Danziger16:58

That was a the song from Herat, a very traditional Afghan love song.

Presenter17:04

Call down

Nick Danziger17:05

Leyli Khodam asked Benoi Bamast.

Presenter17:08

So you learned the language and you've spoken it ever since.

Nick Danziger17:10

Come, come, a little.

Presenter17:13

So you came back from uh your travels looking, I think, a bit like an Afghan with the turban and uh you'd left the Kalashnikov behind, but you've got the beard and the

Nick Danziger17:18

Yeah, we actually

Nick Danziger17:21

Very sadly, I was racially abused, and then I realized what other would be migrants, immigrants to Britain must suffer on a daily basis. And it was so sad given the incredible hospitality that I'd received everywhere I'd been.

Presenter17:36

But this again was the moment because you wrote the book about those travels. It sold well and you got commissions, I presume, off the back of it from New South Wales. Well, I did. I mean, I want.

Nick Danziger17:44

Well, I did. I mean, I wanted to actually go back to painting, but the lure of foreign travel again was just always there, I suppose. And when Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, the Kurdish population in the north, I was asked whether I was interested in going. And because there was so little news, that really

Nick Danziger18:01

was as it were the the matchstick.

Presenter18:03

This was late eighties. Uh

Nick Danziger18:04

Yeah.

Presenter18:04

What did you see?

Nick Danziger18:05

In Afghanistan and Central America, I'd seen terrible atrocities, but seeing what had taken place as a result of chemicals being dropped on civilian population was just horrific.

Presenter18:19

And many of them were shot, were they not?

Nick Danziger18:20

They were shot in the security, as it were, quote unquote, of a Turkish refugee camp, a camp that had been set up by the Turkish military.

Presenter18:29

Shot in cold blood.

Nick Danziger18:30

Yes, I heard uh gunshots ring out and there were the men dropping uh down dead, some of them, from the gunshots fired by Turkish soldiers who were there to protect them.

Presenter18:43

How does having witnessed such scenes affect your view of the situation today and when you see the West squaring up the war?

Nick Danziger18:49

Well, I think again we don't hear enough from ordinary Iraqis. It's impossible for ordinary Iraqis to voice their opinions. I still have contacts with Kurds in the north of the country, and they certainly want this regime to end. They want a quick change of regime now. And it brings me to think of what happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, that it was a vile regime, and the only way that they were going to be removed was by force.

Presenter19:14

So you believe in regime change, you believe in regime change by force, the problem is what then happens in the vacuum that's created?

Nick Danziger19:21

Well that this is always the case. I mean, so often it's the case that the victims then become the perpetrators. It's a terrible thing that I've witnessed over and over again. Those that were persecuted have now become the perpetrators of the same sorts of horrors.

Presenter19:36

So it's interesting hearing from someone who is so concerned about the individual.

Presenter19:42

And of course it's the individuals who suffer so much if war.

Nick Danziger19:45

Trauma, I think what we don't see is the terrible trauma for everyone who lives through violence, whatever violence, it can be violence within our own societies.

Presenter19:53

But that doesn't make you anti-war.

Nick Danziger19:54

I think there comes a point, and I mean, I wasn't around during the Second World War, but clearly Britain had to take up arms. And my personal experience of many of the countries that I have traveled to, the only way that people can put their lives back together again is for these vile dictatorial regimes to be removed, and they can only be removed by force.

Presenter20:18

Record number five.

Nick Danziger20:20

Completely different. Cuales la idia by Tito Puente and I would like to add that this is a song that basically reminds me that my nomadic life isn't just one aspect. I'm now very much in love with a woman that I met in Colombia who in fact was negotiating with paramilitaries and guerrilla factions on the conduct of war, that there are rules and conventions that apply to people who take up arms.

Presenter20:48

But this is music to fall in love to.

Nick Danziger20:50

Uh this is music to fall in love to and to dance to in particular.

Speaker 121:07

Lime quequier mulada, li me cuadas tuidea, li me que quier mulada, dime cuades tuidea, li me que quier mulada, dime cuades tuidea, li me que quier mulada, li me cuades tuidea.

Presenter21:24

Tito Puente and what's the idea? That's sort of salsa dancing.

Nick Danziger21:28

Uh

Presenter21:29

Hello.

Nick Danziger21:29

Very much so.

Presenter21:30

Uh

Presenter21:30

Um, you went a couple of years ago, uh, Nick, with your video camera to make a a television documentary in Kosovo. Again, it was a personal route. You'd been there in nineteen ninety nine with the Stills camera and you went back looking, didn't you, for people you'd seen in refugee camps.

Nick Danziger21:44

Yeah, I mean I I still went back with the Stills camera working with the same camera woman that I worked with for many years and clearly it's a team we're very driven to find out what happened to the subjects of of previous commissions.

Presenter21:57

But one guy in particular, it seemed, summed up again, this is the individual reflecting the broader picture, one Albanian. Tell me about it.

Nick Danziger22:05

Well Ali Rekka I think really to my mind really sticks out as being very representative of what can take place. He lived for 50 years with the same neighbours. He had protected them during the Second World War. And when the conflict started his neighbours came to him and said, don't worry, you saved our lives during the Second World War. We will look after you. And a week later, that man's children came and murdered Ali Rekka's children.

Nick Danziger22:32

It would seem very emblematic of what was happening, their neighbours turning against neighbours, houses being painted with a mark so that they knew who should be removed forcibly or even killed.

Presenter22:44

But then because the peacekeepers went in, then the Albanians come back and continue to live next door to the people who shut their southern.

Nick Danziger22:51

Well, that's the terrible thing about this little village is a microcosm of Kosovo as a result of the war, whereby people who had perpetrated those murders were still there. They were the men who'd given the orders to carry out the killing. They told the paramilitaries who were the Albanian neighbours.

Presenter23:10

And K4 is there, as we know, and keeps this uneasy peace. And again, we hear currently that the NATO forces.

Presenter23:19

Holding the ring, as it were, in Afghanistan, and the Afghan is terrified what will happen when they leave.

Nick Danziger23:23

But they'll go. Oh, absolutely. I think that I mean, they are only in Kabul, but there's no question of a doubt that the presence of American bombers has kept a lid on on the fighting.

Presenter23:35

And if they go?

Nick Danziger23:37

I think undoubtedly them.

Nick Danziger23:39

The conflict would be reignited.

Presenter23:42

I got number six.

Nick Danziger23:43

My documentary work took me to Zambia to focus on the problems of HIV AIDS, and it was mind-destroying, to say the least, what I found there. I mean, literally, it was the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every month. Nevertheless, there's this incredible spirit and soul about people living in sub-Saharan Africa, and this song for me reminds me of my nights in Livingston, where every evening everyone gathered to dance and drink, and particularly to listen to this song.

Speaker 224:14

No mind, we're charging one.

Presenter24:36

With the undoubted mouth.

Speaker 124:37

No.

Speaker 224:38

Um Time to

Presenter24:40

Yeah.

Speaker 124:40

Hello.

Presenter24:40

Namakanjani, sung by the South African artist Brenda Fasse. It's been the orphans of Afghanistan, the subject of your first television documentary back in 1991, Nick, who've touched you most deeply. When you found them, they were living in a mental asylum, weren't they? And horribly beginning to imitate the behaviour of the mentally disturbed.

Nick Danziger24:59

Well they were slowly being socialized into the insanity around them quite naturally because that's what they saw on a daily basis. So um I then decided to try and get them out.

Presenter25:11

This is when you really cross the line, if you like, isn't it?

Nick Danziger25:13

I think this was the first time, absolutely. I mean, I felt, you know.

Presenter25:15

I mean I

Nick Danziger25:17

What I did was unimportant. The most important thing I had to do was find those children some

Presenter25:22

How many children were there?

Nick Danziger25:22

There were sixteen originally.

Nick Danziger25:25

And then when the orphanage actually opened, other children came to the orphanage.

Presenter25:29

So you raised the money, you pestered all these international agencies, you got the money, you found a derelict house, you set it up. People would say that of course you had a television camera turning at the time, you know, was there a sort of degree of ulterior motive or exploitation?

Nick Danziger25:45

Well, it was one of the first videodaras, so it wasn't, I mean, it was purely documenting something that I had to do.

Nick Danziger25:52

And I think that can be an accusation made at anyone who does anything in the documentary world, but for me the important thing was getting the orphanage started.

Presenter26:00

What about those children? Because something very special happened following them.

Nick Danziger26:04

Well, I mean, incredibly, two of the children who featured in that first film have become my children because year after year I would go back several times a year. In fact, at one point took the children on holiday in Afghanistan during the war. And eventually, during the course of all the various different wars that took place in Kabul, only three children were left. And by the time the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, I decided that the only future for those children was to take them on myself, to adopt the children.

Nick Danziger26:35

And they are now three young or not so young adolescents.

Presenter26:39

How old are

Nick Danziger26:40

They are now sixteen, eighteen and nineteen.

Presenter26:43

You took them on as a single parent in the first instance?

Nick Danziger26:45

There was no choice. I mean, I knew what was going to happen to the two girls. They were going to be taken back to the mental asylum with the boy. And I felt there was no choice besides which uh women and girls under the Taliban were being sold.

Presenter27:02

Yeah.

Nick Danziger27:02

forced into prostitution and I couldn't I just couldn't let that happen.

Presenter27:07

And how much do they remember of everything that went before? Is it what sort of mark has it?

Nick Danziger27:11

I think no, I think there are marks. I mean, it's impossible, everything that they lived through, not to have been marked by those very traumatic events.

Presenter27:20

We should have this record. This is all about them, isn't it?

Nick Danziger27:24

Well, the reason I've chosen this is is my children, when initially I taught them English and subsequently French, it was a song that they enjoyed singing. And still today, occasionally at mealtimes, we might break into song. But the remarkable thing is that they can sing this both in English and French.

Presenter27:28

Yeah.

Nick Danziger27:41

Yeah.

Presenter27:41

Uh

Speaker 227:41

Doe, a deer, a female deer, Ray, a drop of golden sun.

Speaker 227:49

Me a name I call myself Far a long long way to run

Speaker 227:56

Sew, a needle pulling thread La, a note to follow sew Tea, a drink with jam and bread

Presenter28:07

And that will bring us back to Danny. Um people will want to know, Nick Danziger, how you cope financially, how you can afford to keep these three teenage children and yourself and body and soul together in the South.

Nick Danziger28:27

Well I have to say remarkably because I think people will find this quite astonishing but unbelievably Monaco has council housing and housing association and I qualified for housing association apartment and state education for two of them and not just people in Monaco and the government but in fact many people who come and visit they come and stay. Afghans including people that again we knew there who've also gone into exile have come to stay and visit. So it's been quite unique situation really and they have a past which I think is quite unusual as well because I used to take pictures of them as they were growing up in Afghanistan and when they saw the family albums it was good for them to realize that they also had their own family album.

Speaker 128:49

Yeah.

Presenter29:14

But even that great sense of family and happiness doesn't stop you from wanting to travel, I presume.

Nick Danziger29:20

No, and I mean, they're not very keen on traveling, although my son has been back to Kabul to work for a summer job. You know, I'm still very curious and very passionate about what I do. And

Presenter29:33

Whiso, where are you going now? You're forty four, you've still got

Nick Danziger29:36

Well, I've just come back from Angola and I will be off to follow the Sierra Leonean Olympic, hopeful. So it's not all kind of very difficult stories. There are some extraordinary stories out there that also need to be told that hopefully will have very positive endings. And I'd like my children to come and travel with me at times. I think that they're now of an age where I think that they could understand and would actually enjoy maybe seeing something very different and also to realize that Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the world which they thought for a long time was going through the problems that they went through. But as I've always explained, there's good and bad everywhere.

Presenter30:11

In the meantime, a desert island would um beckon, but hold no fears, I presume, because you know, it's kind of what you do, cope with life whatever it throws at you.

Nick Danziger30:17

Well I I

Nick Danziger30:21

I have to say that in some of my travels I've often wanted to be alone because, for example, my first journey to Afghanistan where they hadn't ever seen a foreigner, everyone would stare at me and you'd end up in someone's home in a front room and you'd have thirty people squashed into the room all staring at you and I'd say, Excuse me, would you mind? I'd like to have a rest, thinking that everyone would disappear and I'd lie down on the floor because there are no beds and I'd just open my eyes slightly and they'd all still be there. So in fact, points like that, I was dreaming of a desert island.

Presenter30:54

Last record.

Nick Danziger30:55

Koolia, Gangster's Paradise. This is a song that originally was written by Stevie Wonder. More optimistic when he composed the song, I feel, than the days when this song was around in the mid-90s when I basically came back to Britain because I didn't really know anything about Britain. I'd rarely travelled out of London and I wanted to discover something of my own roots, but found a very different Britain to the one that I'd expected to find because I ended up finding maybe a Britain that was very similar to my foreign travels, people who are marginalised, and often their aspirations were to go into, as it were, illegal activities. And this song in a sense represents those days.

Speaker 231:37

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I take a look at my life and realize there's nothing left I'm twenty-three now but will I live to see 24 the way things is going, I don't know. Tell me why I am

Presenter31:51

We so blind to see that the ones we hurt are you and me?

Presenter32:02

Been staying most ready now, filling in the cases

Presenter32:07

Kolya with Gangster's Paradise. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Nick, which one would you choose? It gets worse.

Nick Danziger32:15

It always does and I and I think um I would have to go for the girl from Ipanyema.

Presenter32:20

Hmm, just wonderful, isn't it? Um what about your book? You get, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Um hundred years.

Nick Danziger32:27

The solitude.

Presenter32:28

Eight.

Nick Danziger32:29

Uh

Presenter32:29

Yeah.

Nick Danziger32:29

I think the first really big journeys that I made were through Latin America, and it conjures up all the kind of rich aspects of life in Latin America, very complex interweaving of so many different stories.

Presenter32:43

Yeah.

Nick Danziger32:43

What about your luxury? I think without any question of a doubt, pencils and watercolours with the paper. It's something that at the moment I'm very frustrated because I don't have the time to go back to my first love. So there would be very little hesitation in being allowed to have that.

Presenter33:00

Nick Danziger, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Nick Danziger33:04

Thank you.

Presenter33:11

You've been listening to a

Speaker 233:13

Podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.