Auschwitz survivor’s grandson who moved to Berlin after Brexit says it’s ‘more uncomfortable to be Jewish in the UK than in Germany’ because antisemitism is ‘more open, brazen and shameless’
- Simon Wallfisch decided to take out dual German nationality due to Brexit
- Mr Wallfisch’s grandmother, cellist and author Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was 18 in December 1943 when she was deported to Auschwitz
- He has said it’s ‘more uncomfortable to be Jewish in the UK than in Germany’
An Auschwitz survivor’s grandson has said it’s ‘more uncomfortable to be Jewish in the UK than in Germany’ because antisemitism is ‘more open, more brazen and more shameless’.
Classical singer Simon Wallfisch decided to take out dual German nationality due to Brexit, and now lives with his wife and children in Berlin.
Mr Wallfisch’s grandmother, cellist and author Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was 18 in December 1943 when she was deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland where more than one million Jews were murdered.
Speaking to The Times, he said: ‘I think in some ways it’s more uncomfortable to be Jewish in the UK than in Germany.
Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, left, and her grandson Simon Wallfisch
Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch holds up a portrait of herself playing the cello taken in Berlin before WWII
‘Antisemitism is more open, more brazen and more shameless in Britain, whereas in Germany it’s still there, but it’s not in public discourse.
‘And if it does raise its head, it’s very quickly shouted down by people who know what they’re talking about. In the UK we think it means nothing can touch us because we’re the good guys,’ he argued.
Mr Wallfisch spoke to the paper ahead of his performance in Total Immersion Day: Music for the End of Time, which is on January 23 at the Barbican, London.
The day-long commemorative event reflects on Theresienstadt ghetto, a labour camp and transit route to the extermination centres.
Mr Wallfisch had vowed never to return to the country that murdered his grandmother’s parents and six million other Jews.
But more than 70 years after the Holocaust, Brexit prompted Mr Wallfisch and others to apply for German citizenship.
‘In order to remain European I’ve taken the European citizenship,’ previously said Mr Wallfisch, who received his German passport in October 2018.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch after receiving her MBE in 2016. She was 18 in December 1943 when she was deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland where more than one million Jews were murdered
In November 1944, Mr Wallfisch’s grandmother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, was taken to Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where diarist Anne Frank died after also being transferred from Auschwitz at about the same time, where she was eventually liberated by the British army in April 1945.
WHAT WAS THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP?
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War Two.
The camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was made up of three main sites.
Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp and Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labour camp, with a further 45 satellite sites.
Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder more than 1.1 million Jews
Birkenau became a major part of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, where they sought to rid Europe of Jews.
An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom at least 1.1 million died – around 90 percent of which were Jews.
Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco.
Ms Lasker-Wallfisch immigrated to Britain in 1946, married and had two children.
Article 116 of the German Constitution allows the descendants of people persecuted by the Nazis to regain the citizenship that was removed between 1933 and 1945.
But Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch, who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, remained sceptical and pessimistic about her relatives’ decisions to take out dual German nationality.
‘Jewish people never feel secure,’ she said to her grandson and daughter Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch, Mr Wallfisch’s aunt, reminding them of her own past. ‘I had German nationality – it did not buy me security.’
Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch revealed in 2020 that she escaped death in Auschwitz by ‘complete fluke’ because the band in the camp needed a cellist.
Brought up in a musical family in the then-German town of Breslau but now Wroclaw in Poland, Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch survived both the notorious extermination camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In April 1942 her parents were deported to a camp near Lublin in south-east Poland, she later learned they had been killed on arrival.
Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch and her sister Renate were conscripted to work at a paper factory, but were arrested and imprisoned for helping forge documents for French prisoners of war.
‘I didn’t find it very convincing that I was going to be killed just because I happened to be Jewish, I thought I better give them a better reason to kill me,’ she said.
‘That was constantly on your mind – when and how you were going to be killed.’
After serving a year, they were put on a train to Auschwitz where she was made to play in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
The orchestra was used to help the work gangs march in time as they were sent out each morning and returned in the evening and also played whenever an SS officer wanted to hear music.
Under German law, people whose ancestors were wrongly stripped of their nationality by the Nazis can reclaim citizenship in the country. Pictured: the entrance to Auschwitz in Poland
‘It was complete fluke that there was a band in Auschwitz that needed a cellist,’ Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch said. ‘I didn’t think I would arrive in Auschwitz and play the cello there. I was prepared to go into the gas chamber.’
As the Red Army marched on Auschwitz in early 1945, Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch and her sister were loaded onto a cattle truck with 3,000 other inmates and taken to Bergen-Belsen.
After liberation, she worked as an interpreter for the British army before settling in the UK in 1946.
Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch co-founded the English Chamber Orchestra and in 1952 married musician Peter Wallfisch, her childhood friend who had left Germany in the 1930s.
She was awarded an MBE in 2016 for services to Holocaust education.
Asked how she coped with the trauma of the Holocaust, she said: ‘That I can’t answer – obviously I coped and I am here. There is no description of how you cope. I was very lucky because I am a musician, that helps as well, but you just cope.’
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