Julian Sofaer was born in 1924 in Baghdad, Iraq. Julian found life as a Jew difficult in Baghdad and described his experience of the 1941 Farhud, during which time he was at home alone with his sister. The Farhud was a pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad in 1941. In this same year, the family moved to Mumbai, India. In 1945 Julian came to England to study and forged a sucessful career as an architect.