Restricted access

One of the things I love about writing this column is the restrictions it imposes on me; that might seem counterintuitive but I like the fact that it has to be 550 words long. That’s good discipline for my undisciplined mind. These restrictions help me to think; they stop me getting lazy.

I remember years ago, as a self-imposed restriction, trying to write a column for this paper without the letter ‘e’ in it, in the manner of the great French writer Georges Perec who once wrote an entire novel without the letter ‘e’ in it (Apart from the first page, presumably, with his name on it.) I thought I’d done really well until one reader, then another, pointed out where I’d actually deposited a number of ‘e’s. Was my face red! I mean rd.

I was thinking about this the other week when I was doing some writing for a new project in Rotherham; the town has enterprisingly declared that it’s going to be Children’s Capital of Culture in 2025 and they’ve recruited a team of people as Young Producers to help make it happen. Me and the brilliant artist Patrick Murphy have been commissioned to create help the Young Producers to generate a couple of lines of charged language that can be part of a neon installation for the town. The thing about writing for neon is that you can’t have too many words. Patrick and I have created a piece for the new town square in Barnsley; it’s situated in the new library and it’s just one single line that says ‘Barnsley’s fierce love holds you forever in its heart.’ I can’t tell you how many redrafts it took us to get there!

So to start us off in Rotherham I wrote some haiku to get us thinking. A haiku, as you may know, is an old Japanese poetic form that, in English, has three lines that add up to 14 syllables. The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables and the third line has five syllables. One went ‘Rotherham sunrise/glowing like transcendent steel/made for all of us’. Another was ‘Rotherham stories/built from this town’s beginnings/illuminations.’

We all sat and made new haiku, which involved a lot of counting on fingers, punctuated by gasps of delight when someone realised that word had just enough syllables and surprise when it was revealed that a word had more syllables than you thought, like ‘illuminations’ does in the haiku above.

So have a go at some restricted writing; 550 words and not one more, or a single line that will be seen in public for ever, or 17 syllables to conjure up an image or a mood. Even if these pieces of writing only end up in your notebook, it’s well worth doing! Or, in a haiku: ‘Take just a few words/make sure they speak so clearly/they can’t be unheard’. a

are peppered with names which will be familiar to many readers, such as Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s sometime troubleshooter, who “rescued” Mussolini from captivity, the Israeli Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and his main quarry Adolf Eichmann.

In fact, the nastiest fugitive in Orbach’s story is Eichmann’s personal assistant, Alois Brunner, whose picture is used for the book’s cover.

Brunner had settled in Syria for safety. He survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1980 but was an embarrassment for the Syrian government and he finally died in a squalid Damascus prison cell in 2001.

I do have some quibbles. There is some odd phrasing in the book and some repetitions indicating the need for some robust editing, but this aside, Fugitives is an important and ground-breaking book.

Danny Orbach has had access to declassified Israeli intelligence documents and retired senior officers of Mossad,

Shin Bet and other intelligence services. This aspect is especially revealing, as it shows not only the tensions between the government and its intelligence services, but the fact that Mossad itself was prepared to buy assistance from once implacable enemies.

We see, too, how there was ebb and flow in how and when Israel was working to track down Nazi war criminals, and which particular individuals. Orbach points up the importance of North Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War, and how the Soviet Union was buying intelligence from former Nazis.

There are welcome new perspectives here, and a reminder that times move on. Fifteen or 20 years after the end of the Second World War, old Nazi intelligence was not much use in assessing the aims and intentions of the Soviet Union. Like all old soldiers, the “GehlenOrg” simply faded away.