Shoah Survivors Call On Nigel Farage to Say Sorry Over Claimed Antisemitic Comments.

A collective of Holocaust survivors has called for that Nigel Farage be honest and express remorse for alleged anti-Jewish comments he reportedly directed toward Jewish pupils during his school days.

The Reform UK leader has claimed he never targeted anyone with deliberate cruelty, proposing it may have been mere "playground banter".

"As Holocaust survivors, we understand the profound danger of bigoted language – because we have witnessed where such words inevitably end," declared the survivors in a letter.

"Let us be clear: praising Hitler, mimicking gas chambers, or directing racial slurs is not teasing. Not on a schoolyard. Not anywhere."

A Direct Question

The correspondence asks blunt questions to the public figure: "Are the claims accurate that you stated ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘gas them,’ and mimicked gas chambers? Did you expose your classmates to anti-Jewish taunts?"

The Signatories

The collective of 11 survivors includes individuals with deeply traumatic personal histories from the Holocaust.

• Hedi Argent, who saw the murder of 27 members of her family.
• Simon Winston, who was imprisoned in a ghetto before escaping in 1942 and living through the rest of the war in hiding.
• Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and later moved to Bergen-Belsen, where she was freed.

Other signatories include Janine Webber, Edith Jayne, Helen Aronson, Ruth Barnett, John Fieldsend, Susan Pollack, Hanneke Dye and Agnes Kaposi.

Mounting Testimony

This action is a response to the rejection of similar allegations by more than several dozen ex-schoolmates and teachers as "fabricated nonsense" by a high-ranking official.

After the story broke, additional former pupils have shared their stories. Twenty-eight former pupils and teachers now claim they observed prejudiced actions by him.

One prominent allegation comes from Peter Ettedgui, a Jewish-born award-winning director, who said that a teenage Farage would approach him and repeat the phrases "Hitler was right" and "send them to the gas chambers", on occasion adding a long hiss to mimic the sound of the gas chambers.

Further Allegations

Additional alumni from diverse backgrounds have also shared experiences with allegations of personal harassment.

• Cyrus Oshidar said he was called a "Paki" and has rejected the claim that such actions were devoid of malice.
• Another individual with Asian roots characterised him as an "blatant racist" who would use the phrase "Enoch Powell was correct" as a form of "ethnic harassment".

The Survivors' Final Appeal

The final appeal poses a final dilemma to Farage: "Should you continue to deny saying those words, do you mean that scores of witnesses are lying? If you did say them, now is the time to acknowledge you were wrong and make amends."

"People who seek to govern our country should under no circumstances divide people by ethnicity or faith. Anti-Jewish bigotry must never be normalised. This moment is about personal accountability. The decision is your own, Mr Farage."