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Learning from the past - and my survivor mother

July 2, 2013 14:08
Lord Browne at Auschwitz

BySimon Rocker, Simon Rocker

5 min read

When John Browne was eight-years-old, he returned from school one day to find his parents’ house in Cambridge filled with the aroma of goulash. His mother was entertaining a group of refugees who had fled Hungary after the 1956 uprising.

As she conversed in their native language, it was the first time he had felt she was foreign, the former BP chief executive, now Lord Browne of Madingley, recorded in his memoir Beyond Business. From a mixed Hungarian-Jewish family, Paula Browne had not only been a refugee herself a decade before — she had survived a year in Auschwitz.

But she kept a firm lid on the past. “My mother didn’t approve of looking backwards,” he recalls to the JC at his Mayfair offices. “Until about a year before she died, she really didn’t talk about it. I think that was pretty well in common with many survivors. The future was the point. We had to learn from the past, but not dwell in it.”

When asked about her wartime ordeal, she would say: “‘I had a very interesting life until 1944. In 1945 I met your father.’ When you’d ask what happened in 1944-5, she’d say: ‘That wasn’t a life.’”