'I taught the Dalai Lama'

In 1944, two Austrian mountaineers fled into the forbidden land of Tibet to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in India.

Heinrich Harrer and his friend Peter Aufschnaiter spent seven years there.

Harrer became a tutor to the young Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.

He later wrote a famous account of his visit called Seven Years in Tibet.

Simon Watts presented and produced this episode in 2016, using interviews with Harrer from the BBC Archive.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.

(Photo: Portrait of the young Dalai Lama. Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

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