Artist Peter Layton says it is ‘a total miracle’ his family escaped the Nazis

89-year old tells BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: 'We caught the last train out in August, arrived here at the end of August, and war was declared a few days later, so it was a narrow escape'

Glass artist Peter Layton has said it is a “total miracle” his Austrian-Jewish family escaped Nazi persecution before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The 89-year-old, who is best known as one of the founding artists of the British studio glass movement which transformed glass into an art form rather than an industrial medium, said his career was “all because Edith and Freddy (his parents) managed to get away” and move to Bradford.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: “We caught the last train out in August, arrived here at the end of August, and war was declared a few days later, so it was a narrow escape.

“When I get together with my family, or when I think about my family at all, I just think what a miracle, they were heroic…

“There is a tale that the family do know, how they were queuing up to get their papers stamped with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of others and an SS man comes and approaches them and says to my dad, ‘What are you doing here?’

“My dad was rather fair, blond almost, and didn’t look characteristically Jewish, he assumed he wasn’t Jewish.

“So he said, ‘Why are you here?’, and my dad said, ‘But I’m here with my wife and we’re queuing for our papers’, and the answer said, ‘Show me the papers you’ve got already’, and he noticed that something was missing.

“So, my mother, who’s a really dynamic woman, she was off like a shot, she zoomed across town, she left my dad in the queue, and he moved up towards the front, by the time she got back, she charmed whoever she needed to charm to get the records a stamp, and got back as my dad arrived at the front.

“That they got out at all was a total miracle.”

Layton went on to say that his family chose to anglicise his family name of Lowy to Layton due to the difficulties around being Austrian in Britain during the war, saying he suspected they chose the name via “a pin in the telephone book”, adding “I never actually did know why” they chose Layton.

He added: “I like (the name) a lot, we’re all very happy to be Layton, there’s quite a clan of us now.”

Layton chose Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind and Nina Simone’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne among the records he would take with him on a desert island.