Weekly News: Holocaust tracing centre, Neil Mullarkey, National Portrait Gellery

Morris Rosen is a remarkable man, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that he is alive at all. At 84, he still has vivid and nightmarish memories of the months he spent as a young man in Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp, before it was liberated by the Allies.

I met him at the Red Cross Holocaust Tracing Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, which has helped to reunite countless thousands of families shattered by Hitler’s cruelty. Morris showed me the yellow star he had been forced to wear before he and his family were sentenced to almost certain death in Belsen — that star now forms part of a moving patchwork, sewed by survivors.

His answer was simple when I asked him how he had defied death from starvation or disease in the camps: “I was always positive in my attitude. Still am,” he said. “I believed I would survive, and I never doubted it for an instant. But the memories are too painful for me. The rest of the world has gradually learned about the Holocaust from films like Schindler’s List, but I couldn’t bear to watch that.”

Until I started working with the Magen David Adom, the Israeli branch of the Red Cross, I had no idea that the organisation had been working since 1939 to reunite families torn apart by the Nazis. Their work received a huge boost in 1989 with the collapse of the Iron Curtain: millions of documents poured out of the Soviet Union, detailing what happened to Jewish families all over eastern Europe and Russia.

My mother and father both lost many family and friends in the Holocaust. It seems incredible to me that anyone as intelligent as the British historian David Irving could deny that it happened, but I do not believe he should be locked up in an Austrian jail cell for peddling his delusions.

Instead, he should be made to put his historian’s talents to work in the Red Cross tracing centre, tracking the ghosts of scattered families through yellowing pages.

If I could have one wish, I’d put my Cadillac on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Nelson could look down from his towering column onto the peace symbol, sculpted in spoons, that decorates the Brougham’s roof.

But if I could have two wishes, I’d walk around the corner to hang my own portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Among all those noble, lofty faces, I’d love to see my eyes burning like laser beams down the marble halls. Mine would be the one picture that made every visitor feel it was really watching them.

And I might get this horror movie wish come true, because the painter Alex Baynes spent an hour at my home today, photographing me and making preliminary sketches for my portrait. The brother of actress Hetty Baynes, a friend I’ve known for years, he is extraordinarily talented and I believe he has a great chance with his entry in this year’s BP awards.

BP invite artists under 40 to submit one — and only one — portrait, and choose three dozen or so to hang in the hallowed halls that I am
already refering to as the National Portrait 'Gellery'

Alex made me wear a velvet cape, to help focus all his attention on my face. I rather like the vampire look it created. Perhaps I should start filing my teeth.

The comedian Neil Mullarkey bounded over to me in a hotel lobby the other day to reveal he has a new career — as an inspirational speaker. The founder member of the Comedy Store, famous for the Whose Line Is It Anyway show, told me he even has an alter ego, a whole new personality, to help him deliver his lectures:
“I’m the gangsta motivator L Vaughan Spencer, but you can call me L-VO!” he gushed. “My motto is, Don’t Be Needy, Be Succeedy!”
At this point, I began to suspect he wasn’t being entirely serious. And what else would you expect from a comic who has featured in two Austin Powers movies?
“I love your positive attitude,” he said. “I’m so positive, I like to think of myself as Dr Yes! The opposite of the James Bond villain. And the most important letter of the word Yes is ‘Y’!”
He flung both his arms up in the air, stood bolt upright and shouted, “Look at me, Uri! I’m the Big Y!”
I was laughing out loud by now, but that just fired Neil up to greater heights. “I’ve travelled all over the world to learn inspirational techniques,” he insisted. “I’ve trained with sports teams, I even spent six months with the Itakabu tribe, absorbing their simple philosophy. The way they live with bows and arrows and poison darts, I teach people to apply that to their own relationships.”

And then he was gone, bounding off to inspire and terrify someone else. The strangest thing was, I felt utterly uplifted by our meeting.