The turbulent teenage years of Jakov Lind shaped the man and informed most of his writing. On the morning of Friday, March 13, l938, a month after Lind’s eleventh birthday, Hitler marched his troops into Lind’s native Vienna. “The war against the Jews began the following day,” Lind later wrote, and while his parents went to Palestine, they left their son behind.

He joined a children’s transport to Amsterdam. When the Netherlands were occupied Lind escaped detection as a Jew, although he did not go into hiding. He returned to the truancy of his school days and found odd jobs. Audaciously he went to Germany to work as a ship’s mate on freighters on the Rhine and changed his name from Heinz Landwirth to Jan Overbeek. By the early spring of l945, as the war was drawing to its close, he was working as a courier for a branch office of Hermann Goering’s Air Ministry and its Luftwaffe.

Having been one of the few Jewish teenagers in Central Europe to survive without going into hiding or being arrested, he was marked for life. The rest of his days where characterised by rootlessness and restlessness.

After the war he changed his name again, to Jakov Chaklan, although he later used the pseudonym Lind, and made his way to Palestine to rejoin his parents. There he had many and various jobs and began to publish fiction.

After five years, he returned to Europe, first to Amsterdam and then to his native Vienna to train as an actor at the Max Reinhardt seminary. He stayed for four years, but found postwar Vienna oppressively bourgeois. In l954 he moved to London, which became his permanent home and where he devoted his time to writing. The first volume of his autobiography, Counting My Steps(l969), made his name in the English-speak-ing world. He published seven books in English, and another seven in German; three were autobiographies. All his writing was the product of a cold, unblinking eye on his surroundings — neither illusion nor flattery found any place in it.

He lectured as a visiting professor of creative writing in the US, where he bought a second home. He also became a prolific water colourist and acquired a third home in the artists colony of Deya on Majorca.

He was awarded Vienna’s main literary prize in l983, and in l997 he was given that city’s Gold Medal of Honour. On March 13 he had been due to receive the German Theodor Kramer Prize for writing about exile.

His marriage in 1955, which produced a son and a daughter, was later dissolved.

Jakov Lind, writer and artist, was born on February 10, 1927. He died on February 17, 2007, aged 80