At the beginning of the program Jerry Springer said he thought both his grandmothers had died at Auschwitz.
In fact neither was there. The Germans kept very good records, and we were able to see the deportation order for the ghettos, the order to be ‘expelled’, and which camps they ended up at, and when and how they died.
The station and cattle truck displayed to show how it would have been.
He also wanted to know about his family before the war, and we learned about his great grandparents, the shoe shop, and how prosperous they were.
This is what makes the program interesting. It is really a slice of social history seen through the eyes of someone’s family history, which should not be confused with genealogy. One of the most interesting things to me, was how difficult it was for the Jews to leave Germany and that they could only come to Britain if sponsored, or by advertising themselves available for positions of work as servants in British households. America and other European countries were more restrictive. The many newspaper adverts revealed this.
The value of the program is that is shows areas of research that we may not have known of. In this case, the very meticulous German records that still exist.
Frankly, I am not really interested in any of the celebrities’ family history per se, but through Barbara Windsor, we learned something of the match girls of the East End of London, through Robert Lindsay, (both previous series) something of Gallipoli, and through Boris Johnson, something about the history of Turkey, which I was completely ignorant of.
Finally, I did not know my grandmother’s real name until some years after her death when I was a teenager, even though she lived with us for the last few years of her life. She was always ‘Grandma’ to us.
