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’.
Simon Wallfisch is a classic singer who decided to get dual German citizenship in the wake of Brexit. Now he lives in Berlin, with his children and wife.
Anita Lasker Wallfisch, a cellist and author, was Mr Wallfisch’s grandmother. In December 1943, she was 18, when she was taken to Auschwitz.
According to him, it is more difficult to be Jewish in the UK as in Germany.
Anita Lasker Wallfisch (left) and Simon Wallfisch (right), were Holocaust survivors.
Anita LaskerWallfisch is a Holocaust survivor. She holds up a photo of herself performing the cello in Berlin, before WWII.
“Antisemitism in Britain is opener, bolder, and less shameless than in Germany, however, it’s not part of public discourse.
And if the head does rise, people will quickly shout it down. It’s the UK’s belief that nothing can harm us since we’re the “good guys”, he said.
Before his performance at Total Immersion Day Music for the End of Time on January 23, Mr Wallfisch talked to the newspaper.
Day-long memorial event pays tribute to Theresienstadt, which was a transit route and labour camp for the extermination centres.
Wallfisch had pledged never to go back to the country where his grandparents were murdered and six millions of other Jews.
However, more than 70 years later after the Holocaust was over, Brexit inspired Mr Wallfisch to request German citizenship.
“In order for me to be European I have taken the European citizenship,” said Wallfisch who was issued his German passport in October 2018.
After receiving her MBE, Anita LaskerWallfisch was presented with the MBE. 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
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was Mr Wallfisch’s grandmother. She was transported to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944. This is where Anne Frank, diarist, died.
Ms Lasker Wallfisch was born in Germany and immigrated to Britain with her husband, who had also two children.
Art. 116 in the German Constitution permits the descendants of Nazis persecution victims to regain their citizenship.
However, Mrs LaskerWallfisch who survived the horrors and bloodshed of the Holocaust remained skeptical and pessimistic regarding her relatives’ decision to acquire dual German nationality.
She said that Jews don’t feel secure to her granddaughter Maya Jacobs Lasker Lasker-Wallfisch and her son Maya Jacobs Lasker Lasker-Wallfisch. This was Mr Wallfisch’s aunt. I had German citizenship, it didn’t 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.
Raised in Breslau in Germany, in a musical household and living in Wroclaw now in Poland by her family, Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch escaped both the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp (now known as the Bergen-Belsen concentration prison).
After her parents were taken to Lublin in South-east Poland on April 22, 1942, she learned that their deaths had occurred upon arrival.
Renate Lasker Wallfisch and Mrs Lasker Wallfisch were conscripted as workers in a paper plant. They were then arrested and held for helping French prisoners of war to forge documents.
She stated, “I did not find it convincing that they were going to kill me just because I happened be Jewish.”
‘That was constantly on your mind – when and how you were going to be killed.’
After serving one year they were taken to Auschwitz on a train. There, she was allowed to participate in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
An orchestra was created to aid the work gangs to march on time. It was sent each morning to be returned at night. Also, it could play music whenever an SS officer needed.
German law provides that people can claim citizenship in Germany if their ancestors have been wrongly stripped by Nazis. The entrance of Auschwitz, Poland.
‘It was complete fluke that there was a band in Auschwitz that needed a cellist,’ Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch said. I didn’t expect to be allowed to perform the cello at Auschwitz. I was willing to be put in the gas chamber.
In 1945 the Red Army invaded Auschwitz. Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch, her sister and 3,000 others were taken aboard a wagon to Bergen-Belsen.
She worked for the British Army as an interpreter after liberation and settled in Britain in 1946.
The English Chamber Orchestra was co-founded by Mrs Lasker Wallfisch. In 1952, she married Peter Wallfisch (her childhood friend from Germany who left Germany in 1930s).
Her services to Holocaust education earned her an MBE in 2016.
Asked how she coped with the trauma of the Holocaust, she said: ‘That I can’t answer – obviously I coped and I am here. It is difficult to describe how you deal with it. It was a great blessing that I have a musical background. But, you can’t help but be grateful.