I Know Nothing

A few weeks before Kristallnacht in November 1938, Andrew Sachs looked on as Nazi officers arrested his father while the family was eating in a restaurant. The son of a Jewish father and a lapsed Catholic mother, a few days later he watched as the Nazis burned and looted Jewish shops on the streets of Berlin. The boy who witnessed these events before he and his family escaped to London would later become famous for being the butt of comic cruelties in Fawlty Towers. However, the journey to Torquay, where the iconic series was set, was a long and unexpected one. Here Sachs tells his own story.