Published: 18 January 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
SALLY GEPPERT, A LEGAL secretary from Cologne, was 27 when she arrived in the UK on the last day of August 1939 — one of tens of thousands of German Jews who fled the Nazis and found refuge in Britain.
The next day, September 1, Germany invaded Poland, war broke out and emigration to Britain from Nazi-controlled countries was blocked. Geppert, who married a Briton and went on to become a bookkeeper, was the only member of her immediate family to escape.
“She always said she got out on the last boat,” says her grandson, Michael Newman, who heads the UK’s Association of Jewish Refugees.
Newman, like hundreds of other descendants of Jewish refugees in Britain, is now hoping to claim German citizenship so that he can remain a European citizen after Brexit, something he describes as “a moral right.”
FULL STORY British Jews look to Germany for Brexit ‘insurance policy’ (Politico)
