My mother survived the Nazis — I’m happy she can’t see Germany today

Comparisons with the 1930s are lazy, says John Kampfner. But on the anniversary of the brutal Nazi pogrom Kristallnacht, and in the shadow of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war, he travels to Berlin to talk to a Holocaust survivor’s son who is shocked by the rising tide of violent antisemitism in Germany and across Europe

A family wear the Star of David to indicate they are Jews, in 1938: a commonplace sight in Germany after Kristallnacht (Popperfoto/Getty)

I am so happy that my mother is not around to see this now.” Hermann Simon and I were talking on the eve of the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogroms of November 1938 across Germany that presaged the Holocaust. We were talking also exactly a month since Hamas carried out its massacre of 1,400 Israelis on 7 October – the largest single day of murder of Jews since the defeat of the Third Reich.

Simon’s words were not mere musings. His mother survived the war by hiding underground, one of a tiny number of Jews who submerged, literally, to stay alive. Her son says that for the first days after last month’s terrorist attack he too had the urge to hide, deciding not to go to his local synagogue on that first Friday.

Simon is one of the most exceptional figures in contemporary Berlin Jewry, his life exemplifying the terrible history of Jews in Berlin – and a certain redemption that followed. But first his mother: an orphan at the age of 19, in 1941 Marie Jalowicz Simon was sent into forced labour at a Siemens factory, going from home to home, all the time hiding, famished, often exploited, and living in unsanitary conditions. She avoided almost certain death when, in June 1942, dressed only in her petticoat and pretending to be a neighbour, she slipped past the two SS men who had been sent to pick her up. On the rare occasions she needed to venture onto the street, she would not wear the yellow star required of Jews. For a time, she stayed in a villa outside the city with a circus performer before being “sold” for 15 reichsmarks (around £70 in today’s money) to a syphilitic, ardent Nazi.