We are living in desperately worrying times, says Holocaust survivor

Manfred, now 95 years old, was deported in 1941 to the Riga Ghetto at the age of 11.

He, his younger brother and their mother spent three and a half years in labour and concentration camps where his brother disappeared presumed murdered. Manfred and his mother were liberated by British troops days before the war’s end.

When Manfred finally reached the UK in 1946, he encountered huge kindness: “It really felt like paradise. People were so kind and considerate, and there was no anti-semitism. People were saying never again. I never dreamt that ever in my life I would experience what is happening now in these last few years, that Jews are being hounded again and persecuted. I thought those days had gone forever. I feel at a loss to understand how people have lost their ability to differentiate between good and evil.”

Manfred will be in Chichester on Wednesday, July 2 at 5:30pm to offer A Holocaust Survivor’s Testimony in the Assembly Room, North Street, PO19 1LQ (tickets £12 through The Novium). And as he says, all that is happening right now, makes his talk all the more important.

“I frequently get feedback from schools. I have spoken in hundreds of schools and I get messages from young people. The messages often tell me that I changed their life when they listened to me and that they have never forgotten what I told them, that it has made them think about the type of person that they want to be.”

And yet the hatred rises: “My feeling is that the social websites are the curse of our age. There is no control. They are totally out of control. People can use false identities to spit poisonous views with no consequences, and young people get hooked on these sites. It needs a courageous politician who is not concerned with trying to win the next election, somehow or other to do something that might be unpopular but somehow to bring these websites under control and to make the owners of the websites responsible for what is happening.

“It is beginning with Jews but it will not end with Jews. I'm not saying it because I'm Jewish but unless somehow or other these websites are brought under some form of control, then I think it is western civilization that is going to be under threat.

“I know that there are millions of British people who are not Jew haters. British people have not changed. I have lived here for 80 years in this country and when I arrived people were so kind, and the majority of the population are still kind but the problem is that they are silent friends. All the noise is made by the people that hate us. We need our silent friends to speak up and not be silent anymore.”

Manfred was born on 21 April 1930 in Kassel in central Germany into an Orthodox Jewish family. He and his family suffered escalating persecution in Germany under the Nazi regime in the years before the Second World War. Manfred’s father was able to escape to Britain in August 1939, just days before the war began, but the rest of the family were unable to join him when war broke out. In 1940 Manfred’s Jewish school was closed by the Nazi authorities.

In December 1941, Manfred, his mother and younger brother were deported by train from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. Life in the ghetto was characterised by lack of food, use as slave labour and constant fear. In August 1943, just three months before the ghetto was finally liquidated, Manfred was sent to a nearby labour camp where he was forced to work laying railway tracks.

The prisoners in the camp were treated brutally and subjected to frequent selections. As the Red Army approached Riga, Manfred and the other surviving prisoners were evacuated to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. He spent more than eight months as a slave worker in Stutthof and its subcamps. Manfred was finally liberated at Neustadt in Germany on May 3 1945.