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Author and comedian David Baddiel is speaking to Sophy Ridge about his family’s experience as Jewish German refugees, and what Holocaust Memorial Day means to him.

His mother was born in Germany in March 1939 and just managed to make it to the UK with her parents in August 1939, when Baddiel says the Anglo-Jewish Refugee Committee told them “if you don’t make it now, that’s it”.

“When they got here, they’d lost everything,” he tells Sophy Ridge.

“Much of their family was murdered, my grandfather was also interned on the Isle of Man, along with many other German Jewish refugees.”

My mum probably would have married an Austrian prince

Baddiel reveals how his mother, whose family had been wealthy industrialists in Germany, had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman and she “became obsessed with golf”.

“What I think is that my mum, if she had lived in Konigsberg, would have married probably some kind of Austrian sort of prince,” he says.

“And the nearest thing she could find in Cricklewood in 1970 was this kind of smooth golf guy. And that’s kind of poignant and funny at the same time, right?

“It’s like one time it’s funny and at another time, it really tears me apart to think that she talked a lot about her affair being her attempt to live an exciting life. And I think what she meant by that was the life that she had lost.”

If you’re Jewish, your history is one of fleeing and rubble

Baddiel’s father was Welsh, and his relatives were Jewish refugees who fled Russian persecution in the 19th Century.

The author went on the TV series Who Do You Think You Are? which traces people’s family tree.

“What I noticed when I did that and I went to Kaliningrad is there’s just the stumps of my grandparent’s brick factory there, and when other people trace their history it can really be intact,” he says.

“But if you’re Jewish, your history is one of fleeing and rubble.”

The Holocaust was a ‘very specific type of mass psychosis’

On why Holocaust Memorial Day is so important, Baddiel says the Holocaust was a “very specific type of mass psychosis in Germany, a politicised mass psychosis”.

“And those things are not mirrored in many, many other atrocities. And that, in a way, is why it’s worth remembering because that in a way does illustrate why it’s the kind of darkness in humanity that we need to guard against.”