The son of a Jewish dermatologist talks about his family’s exile and the murder of his parents by the Nazis.
Conrad Brann was born in Rostock in 1925. His father, Dr Günther Brann (1892–1944), ran a dermatology practice in Hamburg until 1933, when the Nazis revoked his licence to treat insurance patients. That same year, he also lost his position as a chief senior physician at the city’s Harburg Hospital. The family fled first to Italy, where Günther Brann opened a new practice in 1937. When persecution began to threaten there too, they sent their 13-year-old son to London. They themselves fled to Amsterdam, where they lived underground for several years before being betrayed, deported to Auschwitz, and finally murdered.
Conrad Brann studied German, French, and Education at Oxford. In the 1960s, he became a professor of French and sociolinguistics at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria, where he died on 23 June 2014.