Kristallnacht survivor George Shefi warns over antisemitism

Kristallnacht survivor George Shefi, 94, says the last living witnesses to Nazi Germany's 1938 pogroms have a duty to tell what happened as antisemitic offences rise in Germany.

"Our generation is the last generation that can tell the true story," Shefi told AFP ahead of the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass.

Shefi, born Spiegelglas in 1931, was six when the violence reached his home city of Berlin. He said his mother kept him inside their home in the Schoeneberg district for three days. When he went outside, he saw that his school had been burned and that a hat shop had been broken into, with glass and hats scattered.

Months later, before the outbreak of World War II, Shefi was sent to the United Kingdom on the Kindertransport, the rescue effort that saved almost 10,000 children. He said the last time he saw his mother was at a train station. He later learned she was deported to Auschwitz and arrived there on January 30, 1943; he said he believes she was murdered the same day.

The November 9-10, 1938 pogroms killed at least 90 Jewish people and saw 1,400 synagogues set alight across Germany. Some six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Shefi settled in Israel after the war and has travelled back to Germany over the past 25 years to speak to more than 12,000 schoolchildren. German police figures put antisemitic offences at around 1,400 in 2015 and 6,500 in 2025.

In September, an AfD-backed motion passed in the eastern town of Heidenau banned the creation of new Stolpersteine, small public inscriptions commemorating victims of Nazi persecution. Shefi said such developments must be fought "tooth and nail" and said people must act to keep Germany democratic.