Hertfordshire author Gerd Treuhaft looks back on his life, from his time in a German concentration camp to interviewing Hollywood film stars, for his new book Goodbye Yesterday

GERD Treuhaft was a young and ambitious journalist living in 1930s Berlin when he was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into a concentration camp. He was told he wouldn't be free for at least ten years, if he survived at all.

He did, and now he has published his memoirs Goodbye Yesterday, giving a frank and open insight into his imprisonment and the stark contrast of his life after the ordeal, which saw him rub shoulders with Hollywood's top glitterati in his job as the London showbiz correspondent for the Austrian and German media.

Now in his 80s, Gerd lives with his wife Joan in Chorleywood, where he still keeps his hand in, writing regular columns for several foreign magazines.

Gerd was working in Berlin as a correspondent for both an Austrian and Czechoslovakian newspaper when he was arrested for high treason in 1938 by the Gestapo; his crime, writing articles against the Nazi regime. Despite his arrest, it is a decision Gerd doesn't regret.

"If you do something like this, you have to expect that you might get caught," says Gerd.

"I am half Jewish so it was very important for me to speak out."

Although Gerd had stopped filing any anti-Hitler correspondence since the occupation of Austria, complying with the laws that came with it, he was to find out that his legal rights meant nothing to this new dictatorship.

"I was frogmarched to prison by two men from the Gestapo," recalls Gerd.

"Two weeks after my arrest, my mother paid me a visit. For a moment, we didn't know what to say, then my mother said Gerd, don't lose your nerve. I will do everything I can to get you out of here.'"

While his mother desperately tried to get hold of emigration papers to get herson out of the country, Gerd tried his best to delay extradition to a concentration camp, as was the fate for many of his fellow prisoners.

"The doctor was coming round to see who was fit enough to be moved on, so I decided to chew on a cigarette that gave me a temperature and made me look and feel ill. But the doctor saw the patients alphabetically, and the effects had all but worn off by the time he came to me."

On a hot summer's day in June of 1938, Gerd arrived in Dachau concentration camp, where an immediate inspection of the new arrivals was carried out.

"One of the commanders stood in front of me and smirked: You can prepare yourself for ten years here in Dachau - if you survive', before slapping me hard twice around the face.

"I remember the number they gave me - 15642. Some numbers you never forget."

Gerd was put in a hut with film stars, politicians, journalists and businessmen, all arrested by the Gestapo after Hitler invaded Austria. After four months, he was moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was one of the youngest in the camp. Now his number was 8880.

He was to spend 14 months in total in the concentration camps, and endured some gruesome tasks during his imprisonment, including washing down corpses with disinfected water and loading the coffins onto a lorry.

"I kept telling myself that, having seen so much awful misery, I could not be afraid of anything more," says Gerd.

"To keep sane, I told myself that the bodies I was heaving into the coffins were now liberated; they were free and could not be tortured any more."

Then one day, Gerd's name was read out over a loudspeaker as one of the lucky few that were to be freed. However, he would be forced to leave the country, and his family, behind.

"My mother and I were crying because we knew that we would never see each other again. We hugged and hugged each other until it was time for the train to leave. I'd only been home for four weeks."

Gerd later discovered that all his Jewish relatives had been sent to the concentration camps and never returned.

His destination was Kent, arriving on June 11 1939, and by the December he had signed up to fight for his new adopted country, joining the Pioneer Corps.

"At last I had a uniform, but this time not a dishevelled one bearing the Star of David, but a proud one to do battle with the barbarians who had destroyed my youth."

While in the Pioneer Corps, Gerd served in Dunkirk and, at the same time, he began writing articles for British daily and weekly publications on propaganda, current affairs and Nazi education under the pen name Josef Geta.

In 1944, Gerd was discharged from the army, and began writing for Austrian and German film journals.

"I quickly discovered that writing about the film world was easier and better paid than political journalism," says Gerd.

It was certainly more glamorous, and Gerd found himself interviewing the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Noel Coward, Walt Disney, Albert Lieven and Anton Wahlbrook.

"By the late 1940s, British film companies were keen to get as much foreign press as they could generate in Europe so I contacted some Austrian and German film magazines that weren't represented in London and became the London correspondent."

His job would regularly see him attending cocktail parties thrown by the film companies, which proved an excellent opportunity to get to know their stars.

"I met Elizabeth Taylor at a party to promote her film Ivanhoe," recalls Gerd.

"She was there while on honeymoon with her first husband Nick Hilton. No one at the time would have thought this very pretty actress from Hampstead would survive six marriages and is still making newspaper headlines."

Gerd decided to write his memoirs after encouragement from his family and his inspirational story, a tale of survival and success against all the odds, is published by Book Guild Publishing (£16.99) and is available through all good booksellers.

Pictured from top left: Gerd Treuhaft with Eartha Kitt while making the film Chastity Belt at Elstree Studio in 1971; Gerd with Sophia Loren; Gerd himself