Berlin - 28 January 2019

1. Simon Wallfisch cleaning his cello

2. Various of Wallfisch rehearsing

3. Concert at Jewish museum

4. Wallfisch playing

5. Simon Wallfisch together with his aunt Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch and grandmother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

6. SOUNDBITE (English) Simon Wallfisch, Grandson of Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch:

"This nationalistic movement that has led to this disaster that we call Brexit, has led me to just finding a way to secure my future and my children's future. In order to remain European, I've taken the German citizenship."

7. Tilt up of Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch

8. Wide of concert

9. Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch in audience

10. SOUNDBITE (English) Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch, Daughter of Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch:

"We cannot be victims of our past. We have to have some hope for change. I feel somehow in a strange way triumphant. Something is coming full circle."

11. Various of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in audience and on stage

12. SOUNDBITE (English) Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Auschwitz survivor:

"But because Jewish people never feel secure, and even with your German nationality, I had German nationality, you did not buy security."

13. Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch, Simon Wallfisch, at table

14. SOUNDBITE (English) Simon Wallfisch, Grandson of Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch:

"Great Britain has an illness and they are choosing the wrong medicine to cure it. Leaving the EU will not cure the deep, deep problems that are in our society. So maybe what has to happen is that they have to leave. Things have to get worse and then they will think, 'well, that didn't work, let's maybe actually now work on what the problem is'."

15. Lasker-Wallfisch family members on stage

16. Audience clapping

17. Simon Wallfisch and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch on stage

18. Simon Wallfisch and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch leaving stage

The UK's imminent exit from the EU is making Britons from diverse communities apply for citizenship in European countries - including some whose continental roots are linked to a deeply traumatic history.

Simon Wallfisch grew up in London as the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor who swore to never return to the country that murdered her parents and six million other Jews.

But more than 70 years after the Holocaust, Wallfisch and thousands of other Jews in Britain have been applying for restoration of German citizenship which was stripped from their ancestors by the Nazis during the Third Reich.

Their surprising decision was triggered by Brexit - the impending withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

The country is scheduled to leave the EU on March 29, and among other things, Britons stand to lose the privileges of free movement and work across the 28-nation bloc that they have enjoyed for the last decades.

"This nationalistic movement that has led to this disaster that we call Brexit, has led me to just finding a way to secure my future and my children's future," said Wallfisch, a well-known classical singer and cellist, who received his German passport in October.

"In order to remain European, I've taken the German citizenship," he said.

Many Britons, whose ancestors came from other parts of Europe, have tried claiming citizenship in other EU member states so they can retain ties to the continent.

But for Jews whose families fled Germany to escape the Nazis, the decision meant re-examining long-held beliefs about the country that once persecuted them.

Wallfisch's grandmother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was 18 years old when in December 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp in occupied Poland where more than one million Jews were murdered.

She survived because she was a member of the camp's girls' orchestra.

As a cellist, she had to play classical music while the other Jews were taken to the gas chambers.

In November 1944, she was taken to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, where she was eventually liberated by the British Army in April 1945.

Lasker-Wallfisch migrated to Great Britain in 1946, got married and had two children.

Her career as a famous cello player took her around the world, but it was decades before she overcame her hatred and set foot on German soil again.

Only in recent years has Lasker-Wallfisch, now 93, become a regular visitor, educating children in Germany about the Holocaust.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, Lasker-Wallfisch, her grandson Simon and her daughter Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch performed for the first time together on stage at the Jewish Museum Berlin in commemoration of their family.

They played music with other members of their extended family and read letters from the past as a tribute to those who survived and those who perished in the Shoah.

Before the start of the show, the three generations were sitting next to each other on a red couch in the museum's dressing room, discussing their reasons for reclaiming the German nationality.

"We cannot be victims of our past, we have to have some hope for change," said Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch, a 60-year-old London psychotherapist who has also applied for a German passport.

"I feel somehow in a strange way triumphant. Something is coming full circle."

Her application is one of more than 3,380 requests for repatriation that the German Embassy in London has received since the Brexit referendum in June 2016.

In comparison, only about 20 such requests were made annually in the years before Brexit.

The applicants are taking advantage of Article 116 of the German constitution that allows the descendants of people persecuted by the Nazis to regain the citizenship that was removed from them between 1933 and 1945.

For many Jews who are seeking restoration of their citizenship, the passport comes in handy because it retains their ability to travel easily from country to country, maintain business ties or simply makes sure they remain a part of Europe.

But Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch says there are other, more emotional reasons for her getting back German citizenship.

"I feel an aliveness here (in Berlin) that I have not experienced before, but it totally makes sense because after all I am German," she said adding that if the country where all these cruelties against Jews and other minorities were planned and executed is now a country that welcomes the descendants of the victims, "that's a good thing".

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the Holocaust survivor, has a more sober and pessimistic view of life.

"Jewish people never feel secure ... even with your German nationality," she said to her daughter and grandson, reminding them of her own past. "I had German nationality; it did not buy security."