Jonathan Sacerdoti

I studied English literature at university.

You know, I studied Anglo-Saxon poetry, the history of our language, the history of our

culture.

I studied the kings and queens of Britain at school.

I led a British life all my life, but it was a British Jewish life.

And I refuse to let anyone tell me those things are in conflict.

They're just not, certainly not in this body, in this mind, in this soul, in this heart.

They are absolutely, absolutely collaborative.

And if this country doesn't

changes into something where that isn't the case.

I'm distraught, not just as a Jew, but also as a Brit.

My father, who isn't with us anymore, he died seven years ago, was a five-year-old child in Italy, in Florence, whereas I mentioned his father was a rabbi.

And he lived under the racial laws, which said that Jews were to be limited in the things they could do.

And eventually his father thought it was important for him and his younger brother, who was three, to be put into hiding because we all know what was happening to Jews.

They were being rounded up and deported to concentration camps for extermination.

So my father did bring me up knowing his story, and though he was five, he remembered an extraordinary amount of it, perhaps because he had a great memory generally, unlike me, and perhaps because it was a traumatic experience that really burnt itself into his mind.

And I know that what he remembered was from personal first-hand experience because when I later went back with him, many, many years later, obviously, to Italy to meet some of the people who we could trace and find and film interviews with them,

We met two nuns who remembered him from the time he was in hiding in a Catholic orphanage, which is how he survived.

And they remembered and told stories that only my father had told me before about things that happened in that orphanage.

Extraordinary for me that his younger brother, who was three, saw the priest come in one day in his room.