When I first met John Izbicki, in the 1970s, he was the urbane, dapper, sophisticated education editor of the Daily Telegraph, sole owner and operator of a mordant wit and a beautiful dark brown voice. I found out decades later that part of that voice's attractive hoarse quality dated from 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht, when Nazi thugs smashed up his father's Berlin shop, along with those of 7,500 other Jewish businesses, and threw shards of glass at his parents. Watching from an upstairs window, the terrified eight-year-old Horst Izbicki (as John then was) screamed so loudly that he permanently damaged his vocal chords.

I never heard this story from Izbicki, but from a mutual friend who had also escaped the Holocaust. But it is now here for everyone to read, in this startling memoir which, if we valued our history, would have been fought over by big publishing houses. We have read before what it was like to be a Jew in Germany under Hitler, but seldom from a top-class writer who knows how to convey the colour and the texture of permanent fear.

Izbicki and his parents must have been almost the last three Jews to escape from Germany. The day Hitler invaded Poland, 1 September 1939, they boarded a train in Berlin clutching their precious British visa. They got to Harwich on 3 September, just in time to hear Neville Chamberlain declare war. Izbicki vividly conveys the terror of that train journey across Europe, when they expected every moment to be taken off the train, as many of their fellow travellers were, and sent to a concentration camp.

Those of us who first met Izbicki as a journalist find it hard to believe that when he arrived here, aged nine, he could speak virtually no English. The book morphs into a Fleet Street memoir, witty and gossipy. Izbicki the English journalist could eat, drink and tell scabrous stories with the best of them. He tells a marvellous tale about how Lady Kemsley objected to a picture of a bull appearing in her husband's Sunday Graphic, because it displayed a bull-sized penis. So the picture editor has the penis painted out. Unfortunately, "the bull's owner  who had looked forward to selling the beast at a major profit  was furious and contacted his lawyers. It cost the Kemsleys £40,000."

I liked the story of how he made friends with Margaret Thatcher while she was education secretary by flirting with her. At the National Association of Head Teachers conference in Scarborough, the education secretary had, as usual, circulated her after-dinner speech to the press in advance. But the organisers placed the press on one round table to themselves, where they proceeded to get drunk, and then had a long procession of lengthy speeches, so that Thatcher did not get to her feet until 11pm. She wisely decided to jettison great chunks of her prepared text. This infuriated the education correspondent of the Daily Express, one Bruce Kemble, who had led on the deleted passages, and approached her in a fury, refusing to be mollified by her assurance that she stood by the unspoken passages and would not deny having said them.

Izbicki rescued her. He tapped her on the shoulder and said: "Do you dance?" "Oh, yes" she said gratefully. "I'd love to." After the dance, seeing that Kemble was still on the warpath, he took her outside, promising a wonderful view over the cliffs. She was pleased and grateful. "Oh, this is absolutely heavenly. Thank you so much for showing me this, John. I may call you John?"

It was a friendship that served him well professionally. But Izbicki was never "one of us". He may have worked for the Telegraph, but he was always his own man, and was liked and trusted by the left and by the teaching unions. He may have fallen for the Thatcher charm just as much as she fell for the Izbicki charm, but "I regard it as a great pity that she lost the soul she possessed as secretary of state when she entered Number 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister." (He's sometimes credited with saving the Open University from closure under Thatcher, as well as, bizarrely, ensuring that Sesame Street came to British TV.) After education, Izbicki returned to his beloved Paris to run the Telegraph's office there. Eventually  it happens in newspapers  he went out of fashion. Gradually you get the message that your face doesn't fit any more. So he went off to handle communications for the polytechnics. He seems quite calm about it. I suppose if you've faced Nazis in Berlin, it's not that hard to dismiss the worst an editor can do to you with a weary smile.

 Francis Beckett's Gordon Brown is published by Haus.