The 94-year-old spoke to an audience while fundraising for Jewish Care’s Green Holocaust Survivors Centre in Golders Green.
Manfred, who survived three-and-a-half years as a youngster held prisoner in five Nazi concentration camps, was interviewed on stage with his wife Shary by compère Ivor Baddiel at Finchley’s Kinloss Synagogue.
His ordeal began with Germany’s invasion of the Baltic states in 1941 when he was forced with his mother and nine-year-old brother to live in the Riga ghetto set up in Latvia before being transported to a labour camp.
“My young brother was condemned to an immediate death by the SS,” he recalls.
“I survived the selection at Stutthof concentration camp pretending I was 17, then survived a labour camp and even a death camp. It meant being forced to work as slave labour repairing damaged railway tracks bombed during Allied air raids.”
Then a miracle. He found his mother on a notorious ‘death march’ in 1945. They were rescued by British troops on March 7 — four weeks before war ended in Europe.
“All those who were murdered and those who survived had suffered from the cruelty and inhumanity inflicted by the Nazis,” he added.
And then another miracle. Manfred arrived in London as a post-war refugee in 1946 and managed to trace his father, who had escaped to Britain in 1939 just before war broke out.
Manfred rebuilt his life in north London, where he married Shary and raised a family, now with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He describes what it means to be a member of the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, which celebrates Jewish life and organises cultural talks, tea parties, outings and even language classes in Yiddish. It also arranges home deliveries of challah bread to survivors each Sabbath.
“The friendships that develop are as precious as family,” Manfred told the audience. “Many of us are now elderly, less mobile and living alone.
“But the therapy and support is unique and has made the centre what I describe as a haven.”
Jewish Care’s Holocaust fundraising organiser Linda Bogod said: “The importance of first-hand testimony becomes more crucial as time passes and living memory of the Holocaust fades. This centre has been a safe haven for survivors for 30 years, a place where they are cared for and can connect with others with similar experience to find joy in life.”
The diminishing band of survivors has become a close-knit community, finding companionship with those who understand them.
Supporters include actress and scriptwriter Tracy-Ann Oberman, who spoke at the fundraising evening. She has always retained her Jewish identity in her acting career, appearing in Eastenders, Ridley Road and Doctor Who, and campaigns against the rise in antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is a virus that mutates,” Tracy-Ann warns. “We must never forget the lessons of the Holocaust when people say it ‘never happened’ — we know it did.
“The Holocaust happened to our families and to people we know. The survivors centre looks after them in their last years and gives them an opportunity to put their stories down.”
The experience of meeting survivors inspired Oberman to write The Merchant of Venice 1936 for the West End stage.
The character Shylock is based on her great-grandmother Annie and the other tough matriarch figures in the East End’s Jewish community — the ‘balaboostas’ she grew up with.
“They escaped the pogroms of their roots,” she recalls. “The balaboostas in the East End knew how to haggle a deal and how to keep their family together. They were tough as nails — but their religion and identity was important to them.”
The Holocaust Survivors Centre gets no government cash. It relies instead on public goodwill.
Supporters donated £150,000 at the fundraising evening to keep the centre and its heritage alive.
