Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC1, Wednesday, August 27
V If you are familiar with Who Do You Think You Are, you will know that it has addressed the Holocaust before. David Baddiel, Stephen Fry and Natasha Kaplinsky have all uncovered the horrors of their families' experiences.
But this week the BBC, which has just sold the idea to American television, wanted a celebrity and a story which would engage US as well as British viewers. Jerry Springer turned out to be the perfect subject. He was born in Britain - at East Finchley tube station during an air raid in 1944; he is one of America's biggest stars; and his family fled from Germany only weeks before the Second World War.
Springer knew that his grandparents had perished between 1939 and 1945, but he did not know any of the facts. Thanks to the BBC's forensic research and the mania of the Nazis to record their act of mass murder in minute detail, he discovered exactly how his family met their deaths.
As always, when the bland figures of lives lost are given specific names and places, it is as if we experience the Holocaust afresh. And Springer became intensely human - recoiling in shock as the details were revealed. There was plenty of substance to his story - which he had never pieced together for himself, mostly due to his parents' reticence on the subject and his reluctance to pursue the topic with them.
The willingness of the British to grant his family asylum had saved his family from almost certain death.
Springer grew up until the age of five in a block of flats in East Finchley, North London. His two grandmothers failed to make it across the Channel and succumbed to the Nazis. That they should do so was doubly poignant because Springer's paternal great-grandfather, Abraham Springer, had been a community leader in the German town of Neustettin in the 19th century and had confronted and defeated prototype antisemite Ernst Henrici. He won the battle, but not the war. Sixty years later, Springer's grandmother, Marie Kallman, was deported to the Lodz ghetto. From historical records, Springer discovered that she had lived for six months in an overcrowded single room with no heat, no toilet and no running water. When she was told she was to be resettled, she must have felt relief. What could be worse than this existence?
The truth was stark and appalling. Marie was thrown on to a cattle-truck train bound for the newly built death camp of Chelmno on May 6, 1942, where she became one of the first victims of Hitler's Final Solution. Gas chambers had yet to be developed, so Marie and 50 or 60 others were herded into a "gas van", which was driven for several kilometres until those inside succumbed to carbon-monoxide poisoning from the exhaust which had been fed back into the van. Death was slow - typically 20 minutes. Springer was as appalled as one would expect anyone to be when informed of their grandmother's excruciating murder.
If this was not harrowing enough, Springer was then told of his other grandmother, Selma Springer, who was deported from Berlin to Terezin - a ghetto claimed by the Nazis to be a refuge for affluent Jews but which in reality was rife with overcrowding and disease. Springer was horrified. "This is part of the fraud. That is what's so disgusting about this place."
The one mercy was that Selma was never deported to her death. She died aged 72 in the ghetto hospital.
An emotional Springer admitted that he had agreed to have his family's suffering exposed like this in part so that he could "achieve closure". He had not, he said, expected any happy endings. Yet there was one of sorts. Springer was introduced to Yoram - a cousin from Israel he never knew he had. What did he take from this?
"Hold on to your family," he said, his voice quivering with emotions. "That's all you really have."