It is 1975. I am 21 years old. I am sitting on the living-room sofa chatting and watching television with a genial, elderly man who calls me "mein sohn" (my son). I am not his son but because he likes to hear it and because I am warmed by his genuine affection for me (the son he never had or lost?) I call him "Vatti" (Daddy).
We are in Berlin. He is the father of my landlady and friend. We are watching a programme about unemployment. To my Irish eyes the dole queues look familiar, almost natural. For Germans it is a rude and sickening awakening from the Wirtschaftswunder of the post-war period.
"You know, my son, what is the root cause of all this joblessness? It is international finance capital." Fresh from two naive years in left-wing student politics I wholeheartedly agree. "Yes, indeed, capitalism, it is conspiracy against people, against decency and fairness."
We share several relaxed exchanges about the evils of capitalism while simultaneously watching the television programme. Then, almost as a buzz of interference, an intruding break-in noise, I begin to realise that a new word has pushed its way into our dialogue.
With a cold jolt of horror I realise that Vatti is no longer using the word Kapitalismus but the simpler, deadly substitute Die Juden.
Without consciously realising it I have partaken in an anti-Jewish tirade which has already lasted several telling, incriminating, identification-sharing minutes. My blood runs cold.
I stare unseeing at the television, no longer hearing the torrent of words which continues to flow from the other end of the sofa. I am being transported back 40 years. I am seeing life through the eyes of a jobless and hopeless man standing in a Weimar Republic soup-kitchen queue. The National Socialists have just given him a very simple and easy answer to the question he has been asking himself for months: "Why is his once-proud country and his once strong and proud self so belittled, so defeated, so hopeless and so humiliated?" It is their fault - the international finance capitalists.
My thoughts fuse with a memory of Oliver J. Flanagan's maiden speech in Dáil Éireann wherein he gave forth a torrent of anti-Semitic rhetoric. I had asked my parents did they not recall it, was it not a source of horror, revulsion and shame?
They confessed that Dáil speeches - no matter how lurid or newsworthy did not break into the world of their work, their golf and their courtship. After all they were young then and in love. But they did remember Jews.
"You must remember" my mother said pre-emptively defensive "that with censorship being what it was we did not know what was going on in England, never mind in Germany".
My father recalled, having retrospectively made sense of it, that because Jews fleeing from Germany had been forbidden to bring any money with them they had had to convert as much as possible of their wealth into portable, wearable articles. And so in the hungry 1940s streets of Dublin you would, he remembered, occasionally see "Jews and their wives" dressed up in the most expensive fur coats and "dripping with jewellery".
"It's not right, but is it any wonder they were stoned sometimes? People were poor."
Back in Berlin I am still reeling. History lessons had never been powerful in school. Almost as a veil dropping from my eyes I grasped the answer to a question which had fascinated me for years. Ever since I had first read of the evils of Nazism I had wondered how it was that the people of Germany voted to allow Adolf Hitler take power? After all he did so on the basis of his "electoral mandate", not, as one might assume, by force of arms.
I saw, and see still how easy it is with a simple, evil lie to appeal to the fears of ordinary people once you persuade these same ordinary people that there are other people - "spongers", "Untermensch", "bloody foreigners", living off their backs.
Now, every time I am in the company of friends or strangers and a black woman comes into view pushing her baby in her pram, I know that if one of those around me invites me to share his disgust at how "we are being suckered, we are being overrun", my reply is crucial. At such times I, and every one of us, are at a crossroads of history. One response leads to tolerance, the other leads to hate. We still have that choice.
It is a choice worth remembering this Friday, on Holocaust Memorial Day.