A now 93-year-old Holocaust survivor who was shuttled out of Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom when he was a boy, just before the outbreak of World War II and without his family, was honored by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president of Germany.
At the age of 7, George Shefi was whisked out of Berlin as part of the Kindertransport (“Children’s Transport”) rescue operation to evacuate Jewish children from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to the United Kingdom in the nine months leading up to the war. On Jan. 10, he received the Federal Order of Merit from Steinmeier, handed to him by Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert.
The event was held ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, which this month will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.
The child survivor last saw his mother at the train station in Berlin as he fled for safety with other youth to England in 1938, after Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) on Nov. 9-10 and the year before Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and started a global war that ended on Sept. 2, 1945. His mother was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 and murdered in the Nazi concentration and death camp.
Shefi lived in Britain for years, then in Canada and the United States before immigrating to Israel in 1949, where he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, married and started a family.
He wrote a book on his experiences published in 2016, titled A Way of Fate: A True Story From the Kindertransport.
“Holocaust survivors must tell their story because we are the last generation that can testify to things firsthand,” Shefi has said. “During my life, I have done this with thousands of German students to whom I said that they are not to blame for what happened to us, but they are responsible for it never happening again.”
The nonagenarian is slated to participate in the annual International March of the Living, an education program that brings individuals worldwide to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Shoah. This year, it will take place on April 24.
“George is responsible for creating thousands of new young witnesses to his story who take responsibility for Holocaust memory and the need to fight antisemitism,” said Revital Yakin Krakovsky, deputy CEO of the International March of the Living. “We are honored that he will march this year in the March of the Living at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It will be an emotional and meaningful closing of a circle.”
