WHAT I love most about being a journalist is the fact that I get to meet lots of interesting people, people who so often have fascinating tales to tell. Occasionally, I meet someone whose story touches me deeply.

I had such an encounter last week when I interviewed 81-year-old Zigi Shipper, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz as a child. I think it is because I have children around the same age Zigi was when he endured the appalling horrors of war and life in a concentration camp that his moving account had such a profound effect on me.

I told all my boys about what Zigi (short for Zygmunt) had gone through. It is something I couldn’t get out of my mind all week. The contrast between young Zigi’s life and those of my sons, growing up in rural Britain in the 21st Century, couldn’t be greater.

They all wanted to read his story.

It certainly made them think.

Zigi was nine, less than a year older than our youngest boy Albert, when war broke out and his native Poland was overrun by the German Army. He was forced to leave school, work in a munitions factory and live in appalling conditions in a ghetto where he had to step over the bodies of those who had died from malnutrition, left lying in the street.

The thought of a trusting and innocent child like Albert, who attends a delightful village primary school and spends his free time playing football and swimming, being forced to go through what Zigi did is inconceivable.

Just the thought of it makes me shudder.

Thankfully, the most that Albert ever has to worry about is how he is going to perform in his dreaded spelling test every week.

When Zigi was 12-year-old Roscoe’s age, German soldiers hurled him into a truck to take him to a labour camp. Despite the fact he knew they would shoot him in the back if they saw him do it, he jumped off and ran for his life, hiding out in an abandoned building.

Would Roscoe, I thought, a boy who spends most of his free time out on his bike or playing on his computer, demonstrate the same instinct for survival when put to the test?

Would he, in the same situation, be prepared to take such a risk?

Zigi was 14, a year younger than my next son, Patrick, when he was thrown into overcrowded cattle trucks with hundreds of others to be taken to Auschwitz. He still feels guilty about wishing some people would die during the journey to make more room, so that he, starving and dehydrated, could live.

The thought of a boy like Patrick suffering in the same cramped conditions wouldn’t leave my mind.

Wouldn’t he have ended up having the same, shameful thoughts?

Wouldn’t any young boy who was desperate to live?

Zigi was the same age as Patrick is now when he went on to work in other labour camps and, with the Russians advancing, eventually forced on a Death March, where anyone who fell was shot and killed. He was near death, suffering from typhoid and malnutrition when he was liberated by the British Army.

I try to imagine the effects of a long period of starvation on a young, growing boy of Patrick’s age.

Patrick, tall and healthy, is used to freely opening the fridge and cupboard doors and helping himself from fully-stocked shelves. After being so malnourished, many of Zigi’s friends died from over-eating within their first few days of freedom.

Zigi ate so much, so quickly, he ended up in hospital for three months.

WHEN he eventually arrived to settle in the UK, he was the same age as our 17-yearold, Charlie. He met up with his mother, who he had last seen when he was five years old, but she was a stranger to him. With no formal education, and essentially alone, he managed to establish a successful business, marry and start a family of his own.

Charlie, like the other boys, was amazed at how Zigi now felt no bitterness or hatred. His warmth and humanity is certainly an example to us all.

Later in the week, when a couple of the boys were fighting and I heard one of them shout “I hate you” to his brother, I reminded them how Zigi, after seeing young children being led to the gas chamber at Auschwitz, felt glad he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, because he couldn’t have coped with watching them being taken away to be killed.

“Never forget how important you are to each other,” I told them.

I suspect it will be some time before any of them dares utter the words: “Life’s so unfair” again.