Hella Pick

Tell me what happened to your family when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Well, my father emigrated to America. And I never saw him again because he died in 57, 58, and he had in fact taken no interest in my existence at all. And my mother's mother, she was widowed already in 1938. She was too old to get a visa to come to England. She got as far as Prague, and in Prague she was arrested and was sent to Theresienstadt, which was obviously one of the concentration camps. And she died there. ... And my mother, she was picked up by the staple one evening, but fortunately returned.

How much do you think the experience of being uprooted at a young age has shaped your life?

One never loses a certain sense of insecurity. It stays with one one's whole life and I think it's shaped a lot of my life, often to my disadvantage, to my loss, because I've grasped for things just simply to be secure in my personal life and in my personal relationships and as distinct from my journalism, I think a lot of the mistakes that I made, and I made a lot of mistakes, were very largely due to this sort of basic sense of insecurity that I always needed to be reassured to a degree which was unreasonable.

Tell me about the Selma march experience.

Well, in many ways, unforgettable. It was such an event that March. And, you know, in retrospect, I realised that I could very well have been murdered on that day, because I was lucky enough to be able to rent a car. ... And I said, let me give you a ride back, which we did. And of course that was, you know, an invitation to be shot, because at that time, you know, people were shot because white woman, black man in the car sitting together was simply not done. But we got back. But when we got back to the hotel, when we went to the bar, they asked him to leave.