This weekend's Sunday Times had an article about John Hurt finding out he wasn't Irish as part of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? series. This might sound a little harsh, but I really don't care whether Hurt is Irish or not. No, I only brought this up because that article reminded me of the episode I saw about a week ago.
I've seen one or two episodes of this program before, but this one will stay with me. The focus was on the family of the BBC's Natasha Kaplinsky.
Kaplinksy's father grew up in S. Africa and he was part of the anti-Apartheid student movement there in the 1960s. Yet, it was this man's parents, uncles and grandparents that were the truly riveting part of the program.
Kaplinsky's grandparents left for S. Africa from Poland before WWII. So, Natasha traveled to what is today Belarus to investigate this aspect of her family. She went with her cousin, who nowadays lives in Australia.
And, although I've heard the statistics and other similar stories a million times, I was really struck by the horrors that her Jewish family endured during the Nazi occupation. Her great grandparents were burned alive along with many others when the Nazis burned the local synagogue. Her great uncle committed suicide after his two-year-old daughter was killed. {The local historian explained to Kaplinsky that the Nazis didn't waste bullets on children, but killed them with their bare hands.}
Her other great uncle and his wife - parents of the cousin she traveled with - survived with many other Jews living in an underground hovel in the woods for 3 years. He was part of the local resistance movement. Yet, they only survived to that point because he was a doctor and was spared when 2500 other local Jews were executed in a forest.
It was an amazing few minutes of television and I was really glad that my children were watching. It was worth far more as a lesson on Nazism than anything they might get out of any Junior or Leaving Cert history book or, I fear, classroom lesson.
