Manfred’s father travelled alone to England in August 1939 in order to escape imminent incarceration in a concentration camp. A month later war broke out, dashing his mother’s hopes of joining her husband in England with her two young sons. In 1943 after two years in a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, they were taken to a nearby labour camp to work on repairing bomb-damaged railway tracks. His younger brother was deemed too young to work and he was taken away by guards, never to be seen again.

A year later, in Stutthof concentration camp, Manfred met Zigi Shipper. As the war was nearing its end, Manfred survived a death march to Neustadt, where he and his mother were liberated on 3 May 1945.

A gentle man at peace with himself and the world looks out at us from this luminous portrait. Clara was moved that Manfred, in spite of the horrors he has witnessed, remembers with gratitude the kindnesses shown to him by strangers that allowed him to survive. She hopes that she has captured a little of his soul.