Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

His name was Neumann, which he changed in England to Newman. His father, my great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew also of course, had lived for a time in Vienna, and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back. You can imagine how my blood ran cold when I read this in Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, while reading about the early life of Hitler for my last novel, Making History: After their quarrel Hanisch lost sight of Hitler, but he gives a description of Hitler as he knew him in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. He wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees … Neumann … who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-Semitism.

Holy shit