April 5, 2023 • 17 mins
Jackie is one of over three million children orphaned during World War II, for nearly 60 years, he and his wife Lita have been searching for any information about his past.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So today I am with the rather wonderful Jackie from Series 2 of DNA Family Secrets,
and I can tell you this was one of the biggest stories of the series,
and it really touched a lot of people, and that's because when you came to us you wanted to know
whether or not DNA could help you find out about your biological father. So, tell us your story.
(00:26):
Well I was born in Vienna, I was put into an orphanage between my birth and September
of 42. Subsequently I was told from records that the Gestapo found me in the orphanage
and took me to Theresienstadt. From then on it's a total blank, because I have no
(00:48):
recollection of being in that camp for two years eight months, till the liberation in 45.
Anyway a load of the babies and children were put into a castle,
just outside Prague. We were there for a few weeks obviously to feed us a little bit better,
do all the inoculations and things, and then subsequent the British government were allowed
(01:13):
to bring us over to a place called Windermere in Stirling bombers, 300 children at a time. And in
the year that we were there at Bulldogs Bank we were taught how to speak English, and behave,
and then we went to another place called Weir Courtney, which was where the older children were.
Then after a few months this elderly couple put me into this big Rolls-Royce car, my father had
(01:41):
hired, and he was then fostering me until I was officially adopted by them at nine years old.
And everything was going swimmingly until some kid in school told me I was adopted,
went to my parents who were very loving parents but very reluctant to tell me about my past. And
(02:02):
was getting another surprise when I was in my teens, when I went to see my grandmother on my
father's side, she then told me you're not English Jackie, you're Austrian. And I went back with this
new information, told them, they were once again shocked that somebody else would tell me this
terrible story. Then the third surprise was when we were about to get married and the synagogue
(02:30):
authorities required me to prove I was Jewish. As luck would have it my mother did have the
papers to prove my situation, and I snatched the papers to find out then I’d been in this Terezin,
Theresienstadt camp for two years eight months, which absolutely total surprise and shock.
(02:51):
Essentially you are finding out, at a pretty young age, that you're a survivor of the Holocaust. I
mean you cannot get much heavier than that, and you must have had so many questions?
There was a conspiracy of silence with my mother and father, her friends,
their family and everything, so I was surrounded by a big wall of silence.
(03:13):
So you start your search, so what was your mum's name, what did you find out about her?
I found out she was a milliner, her name was Elsa Spiegel, my name originally was Jona Spiegel,
and we got an address called 12 Schreygasse, which is Vienna but it actually wasn't where she lived,
(03:34):
it was where they got hold of a lot of the Jewish people, two or three hundred stayed there until
they were put on trains to a place called Maly Trostenets where sadly she was murdered.
I think this is one of the things that people don't necessarily realise about it,
is just how much the Nazi’s, sort of, went to town in terms of getting rid of records,
(03:56):
so it makes it so difficult for people like yourself to be able to trace family members,
and as you must have found, when we were looking into your story for DNA Family Secrets you could
see the people going off on the records, you can see them on the transports, and you can see that
(04:17):
people were rounded up in Vienna, and as you say, kept in places before they're going off,
and you were able to find out a little bit more eventually weren't you? You were
able to find out that she had siblings and?Yes it was the Red Cross that I approached
and they did come up with the names of my mother and her siblings, Rudolph and Hilda, and I think
(04:40):
they also gave me my grandparents names, Emilie Schwarz was my grandmother and Leopold Spiegel
was my grandfather, who came from just outside a Brunn or Brünn, which is not too far from Austria.
And I know before you'd come to see us you had gone to places like Maly Trostenets to
(05:03):
see where your mum had been killed, and that must have been quite something.
Very emotional. The thing was that, the first time we went we saw this big monument there and
said a few words, that I felt Lita prompted me to say, and the second time was much more positive
(05:26):
because there was this Austrian woman, and I went with a few people, and I met a few Viennese guys,
and it was still terribly overgrown, and it was just basically the forest and we were tying
memorial plastic sheets to the trees to signify this is basically where sadly about ten thousand
(05:50):
Viennese Jews were sent and were murdered.The third time we went it was all manicured
situation. The Austrian Chancellor was there, Alexander Lukashenko was there,
and the band was there, and there's a huge monument with my mother's name on it.
(06:11):
So when you came to us your question was around your father's side, because I remember one of
the things that you told me was that your mum seemed to manage to survive for quite a long time,
and you managed to survive. You were obviously sent off to a concentration camp, Theresienstadt
(06:31):
was one of these kind of model concentration camps wasn't it, that the Germans tried to
show yes we're treating everybody terribly well, type thing, and you wondered therefore whether
or not your father might have been in a position of power, a Nazi essentially, to be able to help
with that, and I mean, obviously that was one of the things that I remember talking to you about
(06:52):
is that, even if he does come back as being Jewish there is the possibility that he was part of the
Nazi party, but it makes it much less likely. And when we took your DNA and we put it into
the databases overwhelmingly your matches were coming back as Ashkenazi Jewish, which is exactly
what we would be expecting. How did that feel to get that kind of final resolution on that side?
(07:16):
Well, it was a major part of the jigsaw puzzle really, you could say that finding out that he was
just an ordinary tailor from Austria and Jewish, and it fills in a space that was totally empty.
Also I found out that my mother had a few addresses from where she was in Vienna and she
(07:37):
was moving around, so one can only assume moving around to avoid detection for quite some time.
And that was the next question really was, if we could then use DNA to find your father and this
is where we are completely at the mercy of who's on the databases, and my goodness you were getting
(08:00):
some matches and there was a huge amount of work that went into this. So we had researchers in the
Czech Republic trying to see if they could get any more information on your mum's line,
because she came from Moravia in the Czech Republic, and then we also had people here looking
at these matches and trying to build trees.You had this match into the Sussmans and I
(08:24):
couldn't get it to match into your mum's side, other researchers couldn't get it to match into
your mum's side, right this seems to be through the father's side, they're in Vienna and then
I was able to trace some of the family members who had made it here, so Toni in particular, who
said I will do DNA tests, whatever you need and she was great, and so one of the things we were
(08:48):
able to tell you on the programme was, we don't know quite how they fit, you're getting matches
to Kornfeins, and Sussmans, and Gottliebs. We know these people are related to you but we can't
join up the tree at the moment, this is with who's on the databases so far. So you finish with me and
then you go in and see Stacey, how was that?When Stacey showed us the movie of Toni and
(09:17):
Alex saying, we are your distant cousin, it was just amazing, it was just terrific, something I
dreamed of but never thought could happen. To look into the eyes of somebody after thinking for so
long that I was the only one that survived, I'm not alone anymore which was terrific.
(09:41):
And your story has an even more amazing ending because when the programme went out
it was one of the big stories of the series, and it got picked up by the press a lot,
it then got picked up by the press in Israel, and then I know a lot of people started contacting me,
(10:03):
and started contacting you because they wanted to be able to help you. And sometimes what
happens is suddenly something will happen it'll take it that little bit further, and
that's what happened to you, you got contacted by two rather amazing people who helped you further.
Yes, Jennifer and Adina from America, all of a sudden they got in touch with us and said if
(10:27):
possible we'd like to take it further. And within a very short space of time they came up with
so much more about my father's side.So what did they find, they were able
to give you your father's name, so what's your father's name and how did that feel?
Well I think I must of in my mind said, Adolf Kornfein, I wasn't too happy about the Adolf,
(10:51):
but Kornfein was okay. And uh sadly finding out he had been married before and he had a son who was
18-19 years older than me, so he would have been my half-brother, and sadly finding out that his
mother and my half-brother went to Auschwitz and were murdered there, is extremely sad.
(11:15):
How he evaded capture really whilst his wife was caught we'll never know, but
he had a liaison with my mother and I'm the by-product of that liaison. I'd like to think
it was a love affair in the short space time, but we'll just have to keep on wondering on that side.
(11:36):
I mean I know for you this has been a massively long journey from your 20s up until now,
where we've been lucky enough to play a part in it, and you've also had Jennifer and Adina
who've been able to play a part in it, you've had the amazing support of your wife Lita, who
I know has been a champion of yours through all of this, but what were your fears going into it?
(12:04):
I didn’t think I had any fears. When I first approached you Turi I felt it's my last chance,
as far as I could see and I've got to expect the good, the bad, the ugly, and I wasn't fearful I
was more hopeful you could say, we’d been through a lot of tragedies with it. I meant to say to you,
(12:25):
one of my endeavours I did was I found out my grandmother was buried in the Zentralfriedhof
cemetery, just outside Vienna, and I said I'm going to put a stone on for her, which I did,
and I felt very good about doing things like that.There's quite so many things on this 60-year
(12:47):
journey that we've done, but I have to say not that I'm lucky or unlucky,
it's just that I'm 10 or 15 years younger than most of the survivors that are around.
I suppose what the programme did was it allowed you to kind of really
tell your story and allowed us to tell a bit about what happened during the Holocaust,
(13:09):
and do you think that going through the process of DNA Family Secrets helped your
family understand what you had been through?Yeah I think they really did get the message
that it wasn't a picnic. I'd have loved to have had my adopted parents take it
on board but unfortunately my father, if I was to ask him any questions he'd walk out,
(13:33):
probably trying to protect me but, my mother used to say, you're hurting your father.
And not taking on board that it was hurting you, through all of that. I think you've been
incredibly courageous, not an easy thing to do, to go through all this and inevitably bring up so
(14:03):
much pain, hurt of what your life has been and finding out about this kind of thing.
Yes, a lot of people backed my mother up when she would go around telling them that he wants
to find out and they'd say, isn't he satisfied. I think the theory at that time was, you know,
(14:24):
you've lavished onto him, I've had a car at 17, I was spoilt silly, but it was a deep hole that
needed to be filled and they couldn't come around. I would have loved it for them to be
more understanding, but I think the theory at that time, you know, I think they were looking
(14:44):
upon as like ordinary adopted children who should just forget the fact that they've had
a bad past or something, but I differed slightly from the fact that my background was different
from an ordinary adoption type of affair.Oh completely and I think regardless of how
wonderful a life somebody has had since, and you see this with people who come to
(15:08):
DNA Family Secrets, they may have had amazing adoptive parents and a wonderful, you know,
upbringing and really lovely family, but that doesn't ever get rid of the fact that there
is a hole there, and you can feel that there's such a longing for information, any information,
(15:29):
just so they can fill in those bits of the jigsaw puzzle on that side of the family.
And yours especially with your backgrounds.It’s also like families, I mean the first
thing people do say when a baby's born, who does it look like? You know you can't put a look on me
like that because I don't look like any of those on the tree, because they're just blank blue and
(15:52):
red for boy and girl type of thing so, I can't see anybody looking as ugly as me, but there you go.
I have to say that was one of the really big things that I was desperate to see if they could
find for you, was a photo. I was looking in books, there was a book by a woman who was a milliner in
Vienna in the 1930s and very early 40s, and I thought I wonder if there's anything in there,
(16:17):
it was anything just to be able to find you a photo and that is presumably the one last thing?
That would have been the Holy Grail.So, Jackie your personal story is really
wrapped up in one of the most terrible series of events in 20th century history. So I know you go
(16:40):
and talk to schools and you talk to children in schools, what do you feel is the importance of the
new generation knowing about what happened?Well we have to put it into a different
perspective. This has happened in our lifetime and we have got the technology today now to really say it
(17:01):
as it really happened. Humanity went down a very dark road 80 years ago and if we don't take on
board what went on, then sadly the possibilities of repetition are there. The fact that such a
society that was so marvellous intellectually, scientifically, in the cultures and the arts,
(17:25):
and everything, that they could go down this very dark road was a tragedy, and
it’s so important that we get a handle on how the impossible became possible, all those years ago.
Jackie thank you so much for chatting to me, it was amazing to catch up and
(17:46):
I just feel ridiculously privileged to have been a tiny part of your journey.
So today I am with the rather wonderful Jackie from Series 2 of DNA Family Secrets,
and I can tell you this was one of the biggest stories of the series,
and it really touched a lot of people, and that's because when you came to us you wanted to know
whether or not DNA could help you find out about your biological father. So, tell us your story.
(00:26):
Well I was born in Vienna, I was put into an orphanage between my birth and September
of 42. Subsequently I was told from records that the Gestapo found me in the orphanage
and took me to Theresienstadt. From then on it's a total blank, because I have no
(00:48):
recollection of being in that camp for two years eight months, till the liberation in 45.
Anyway a load of the babies and children were put into a castle,
just outside Prague. We were there for a few weeks obviously to feed us a little bit better,
do all the inoculations and things, and then subsequent the British government were allowed
(01:13):
to bring us over to a place called Windermere in Stirling bombers, 300 children at a time. And in
the year that we were there at Bulldogs Bank we were taught how to speak English, and behave,
and then we went to another place called Weir Courtney, which was where the older children were.
Then after a few months this elderly couple put me into this big Rolls-Royce car, my father had
(01:41):
hired, and he was then fostering me until I was officially adopted by them at nine years old.
And everything was going swimmingly until some kid in school told me I was adopted,
went to my parents who were very loving parents but very reluctant to tell me about my past. And
(02:02):
was getting another surprise when I was in my teens, when I went to see my grandmother on my
father's side, she then told me you're not English Jackie, you're Austrian. And I went back with this
new information, told them, they were once again shocked that somebody else would tell me this
terrible story. Then the third surprise was when we were about to get married and the synagogue
(02:30):
authorities required me to prove I was Jewish. As luck would have it my mother did have the
papers to prove my situation, and I snatched the papers to find out then I’d been in this Terezin,
Theresienstadt camp for two years eight months, which absolutely total surprise and shock.
(02:51):
Essentially you are finding out, at a pretty young age, that you're a survivor of the Holocaust. I
mean you cannot get much heavier than that, and you must have had so many questions?
There was a conspiracy of silence with my mother and father, her friends,
their family and everything, so I was surrounded by a big wall of silence.
(03:13):
So you start your search, so what was your mum's name, what did you find out about her?
I found out she was a milliner, her name was Elsa Spiegel, my name originally was Jona Spiegel,
and we got an address called 12 Schreygasse, which is Vienna but it actually wasn't where she lived,
(03:34):
it was where they got hold of a lot of the Jewish people, two or three hundred stayed there until
they were put on trains to a place called Maly Trostenets where sadly she was murdered.
I think this is one of the things that people don't necessarily realise about it,
is just how much the Nazi’s, sort of, went to town in terms of getting rid of records,
(03:56):
so it makes it so difficult for people like yourself to be able to trace family members,
and as you must have found, when we were looking into your story for DNA Family Secrets you could
see the people going off on the records, you can see them on the transports, and you can see that
(04:17):
people were rounded up in Vienna, and as you say, kept in places before they're going off,
and you were able to find out a little bit more eventually weren't you? You were
able to find out that she had siblings and?Yes it was the Red Cross that I approached
and they did come up with the names of my mother and her siblings, Rudolph and Hilda, and I think
(04:40):
they also gave me my grandparents names, Emilie Schwarz was my grandmother and Leopold Spiegel
was my grandfather, who came from just outside a Brunn or Brünn, which is not too far from Austria.
And I know before you'd come to see us you had gone to places like Maly Trostenets to
(05:03):
see where your mum had been killed, and that must have been quite something.
Very emotional. The thing was that, the first time we went we saw this big monument there and
said a few words, that I felt Lita prompted me to say, and the second time was much more positive
(05:26):
because there was this Austrian woman, and I went with a few people, and I met a few Viennese guys,
and it was still terribly overgrown, and it was just basically the forest and we were tying
memorial plastic sheets to the trees to signify this is basically where sadly about ten thousand
(05:50):
Viennese Jews were sent and were murdered.The third time we went it was all manicured
situation. The Austrian Chancellor was there, Alexander Lukashenko was there,
and the band was there, and there's a huge monument with my mother's name on it.
(06:11):
So when you came to us your question was around your father's side, because I remember one of
the things that you told me was that your mum seemed to manage to survive for quite a long time,
and you managed to survive. You were obviously sent off to a concentration camp, Theresienstadt
(06:31):
was one of these kind of model concentration camps wasn't it, that the Germans tried to
show yes we're treating everybody terribly well, type thing, and you wondered therefore whether
or not your father might have been in a position of power, a Nazi essentially, to be able to help
with that, and I mean, obviously that was one of the things that I remember talking to you about
(06:52):
is that, even if he does come back as being Jewish there is the possibility that he was part of the
Nazi party, but it makes it much less likely. And when we took your DNA and we put it into
the databases overwhelmingly your matches were coming back as Ashkenazi Jewish, which is exactly
what we would be expecting. How did that feel to get that kind of final resolution on that side?
(07:16):
Well, it was a major part of the jigsaw puzzle really, you could say that finding out that he was
just an ordinary tailor from Austria and Jewish, and it fills in a space that was totally empty.
Also I found out that my mother had a few addresses from where she was in Vienna and she
(07:37):
was moving around, so one can only assume moving around to avoid detection for quite some time.
And that was the next question really was, if we could then use DNA to find your father and this
is where we are completely at the mercy of who's on the databases, and my goodness you were getting
(08:00):
some matches and there was a huge amount of work that went into this. So we had researchers in the
Czech Republic trying to see if they could get any more information on your mum's line,
because she came from Moravia in the Czech Republic, and then we also had people here looking
at these matches and trying to build trees.You had this match into the Sussmans and I
(08:24):
couldn't get it to match into your mum's side, other researchers couldn't get it to match into
your mum's side, right this seems to be through the father's side, they're in Vienna and then
I was able to trace some of the family members who had made it here, so Toni in particular, who
said I will do DNA tests, whatever you need and she was great, and so one of the things we were
(08:48):
able to tell you on the programme was, we don't know quite how they fit, you're getting matches
to Kornfeins, and Sussmans, and Gottliebs. We know these people are related to you but we can't
join up the tree at the moment, this is with who's on the databases so far. So you finish with me and
then you go in and see Stacey, how was that?When Stacey showed us the movie of Toni and
(09:17):
Alex saying, we are your distant cousin, it was just amazing, it was just terrific, something I
dreamed of but never thought could happen. To look into the eyes of somebody after thinking for so
long that I was the only one that survived, I'm not alone anymore which was terrific.
(09:41):
And your story has an even more amazing ending because when the programme went out
it was one of the big stories of the series, and it got picked up by the press a lot,
it then got picked up by the press in Israel, and then I know a lot of people started contacting me,
(10:03):
and started contacting you because they wanted to be able to help you. And sometimes what
happens is suddenly something will happen it'll take it that little bit further, and
that's what happened to you, you got contacted by two rather amazing people who helped you further.
Yes, Jennifer and Adina from America, all of a sudden they got in touch with us and said if
(10:27):
possible we'd like to take it further. And within a very short space of time they came up with
so much more about my father's side.So what did they find, they were able
to give you your father's name, so what's your father's name and how did that feel?
Well I think I must of in my mind said, Adolf Kornfein, I wasn't too happy about the Adolf,
(10:51):
but Kornfein was okay. And uh sadly finding out he had been married before and he had a son who was
18-19 years older than me, so he would have been my half-brother, and sadly finding out that his
mother and my half-brother went to Auschwitz and were murdered there, is extremely sad.
(11:15):
How he evaded capture really whilst his wife was caught we'll never know, but
he had a liaison with my mother and I'm the by-product of that liaison. I'd like to think
it was a love affair in the short space time, but we'll just have to keep on wondering on that side.
(11:36):
I mean I know for you this has been a massively long journey from your 20s up until now,
where we've been lucky enough to play a part in it, and you've also had Jennifer and Adina
who've been able to play a part in it, you've had the amazing support of your wife Lita, who
I know has been a champion of yours through all of this, but what were your fears going into it?
(12:04):
I didn’t think I had any fears. When I first approached you Turi I felt it's my last chance,
as far as I could see and I've got to expect the good, the bad, the ugly, and I wasn't fearful I
was more hopeful you could say, we’d been through a lot of tragedies with it. I meant to say to you,
(12:25):
one of my endeavours I did was I found out my grandmother was buried in the Zentralfriedhof
cemetery, just outside Vienna, and I said I'm going to put a stone on for her, which I did,
and I felt very good about doing things like that.There's quite so many things on this 60-year
(12:47):
journey that we've done, but I have to say not that I'm lucky or unlucky,
it's just that I'm 10 or 15 years younger than most of the survivors that are around.
I suppose what the programme did was it allowed you to kind of really
tell your story and allowed us to tell a bit about what happened during the Holocaust,
(13:09):
and do you think that going through the process of DNA Family Secrets helped your
family understand what you had been through?Yeah I think they really did get the message
that it wasn't a picnic. I'd have loved to have had my adopted parents take it
on board but unfortunately my father, if I was to ask him any questions he'd walk out,
(13:33):
probably trying to protect me but, my mother used to say, you're hurting your father.
And not taking on board that it was hurting you, through all of that. I think you've been
incredibly courageous, not an easy thing to do, to go through all this and inevitably bring up so
(14:03):
much pain, hurt of what your life has been and finding out about this kind of thing.
Yes, a lot of people backed my mother up when she would go around telling them that he wants
to find out and they'd say, isn't he satisfied. I think the theory at that time was, you know,
(14:24):
you've lavished onto him, I've had a car at 17, I was spoilt silly, but it was a deep hole that
needed to be filled and they couldn't come around. I would have loved it for them to be
more understanding, but I think the theory at that time, you know, I think they were looking
(14:44):
upon as like ordinary adopted children who should just forget the fact that they've had
a bad past or something, but I differed slightly from the fact that my background was different
from an ordinary adoption type of affair.Oh completely and I think regardless of how
wonderful a life somebody has had since, and you see this with people who come to
(15:08):
DNA Family Secrets, they may have had amazing adoptive parents and a wonderful, you know,
upbringing and really lovely family, but that doesn't ever get rid of the fact that there
is a hole there, and you can feel that there's such a longing for information, any information,
(15:29):
just so they can fill in those bits of the jigsaw puzzle on that side of the family.
And yours especially with your backgrounds.It’s also like families, I mean the first
thing people do say when a baby's born, who does it look like? You know you can't put a look on me
like that because I don't look like any of those on the tree, because they're just blank blue and
(15:52):
red for boy and girl type of thing so, I can't see anybody looking as ugly as me, but there you go.
I have to say that was one of the really big things that I was desperate to see if they could
find for you, was a photo. I was looking in books, there was a book by a woman who was a milliner in
Vienna in the 1930s and very early 40s, and I thought I wonder if there's anything in there,
(16:17):
it was anything just to be able to find you a photo and that is presumably the one last thing?
That would have been the Holy Grail.So, Jackie your personal story is really
wrapped up in one of the most terrible series of events in 20th century history. So I know you go
(16:40):
and talk to schools and you talk to children in schools, what do you feel is the importance of the
new generation knowing about what happened?Well we have to put it into a different
perspective. This has happened in our lifetime and we have got the technology today now to really say it
(17:01):
as it really happened. Humanity went down a very dark road 80 years ago and if we don't take on
board what went on, then sadly the possibilities of repetition are there. The fact that such a
society that was so marvellous intellectually, scientifically, in the cultures and the arts,
(17:25):
and everything, that they could go down this very dark road was a tragedy, and
it’s so important that we get a handle on how the impossible became possible, all those years ago.
Jackie thank you so much for chatting to me, it was amazing to catch up and
(17:46):
I just feel ridiculously privileged to have been a tiny part of your journey.
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