Shanti Behari was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin—though he could not speak a word of German—to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before migrating to Britain, that Shanti’s path first crossed that of his future wife.

Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a cultured Jewish family. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny’s first reaction was, ‘Don’t take the black man!’ But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler’s Germany for England, just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in the country: Shanti.

Published: 2005
Pages: 503
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: McArthur & Co