My education was deepened many years later by being in Israel sometime in the, I'd say '80s, and visiting in Israel and going to the trial of John Demjanjuk – the Ukrainian guard at Sobibor and Treblinka, who was called by the inmates of Sobibor, 'Ivan the Terrible'. I... I stumbled upon that trial. I happened to be in... in Israel and saw in the papers that it was going on and so I went there every day and I sat there three or four hours a day while it lasted, and got to know Demjanjuk's lawyers. I was interested in them, one of them was an Israeli, an Israeli lawyer. He got plenty of death threats, he was the defence lawyer. I also talked to other people who were around the case. I didn't get a chance to speak to any of the survivors, partly… – who had testified against Demjanjuk – partly because they didn't speak any English, they spoke either Polish or Yiddish or Russian or in Hebrew. But their testimony was pretty, pretty powerful.

And I couldn't get it out of my mind either and so I wrote Operation Shylock. I used the real Demjanjuk case in the book. So, the holocaust has made its way into two of my books – not as the main subject of the book – but made its way into the books, and also into a third book, which would be The Ghost Writer, in which the character of Anne Frank is summoned up. She's not there, but she's summoned up. And so... so partly it was a self-education, and partly I read all the books that other people read – that we've all read. I've seen Shoah, the Lanzsmann movie documentary.