Jane Seymour Who Do You Think You Are?

British-born Jane Seymour is an award-winning Hollywood actress

and lives in Malibu, California.

She shot to fame as Bond girl Solitaire in Live And Let Die,

and went on to star as Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Jane has played many historical figures,

including Wallis Simpson, Marie Antoinette

and a Jewish mother fleeing the Nazis

in the drama series War And Remembrance.

There is nothing more important in my life than family.

I have six children and four grandchildren, which is amazing.

You ready? There you go, you took a picture of Uncle.

Good girl, Willa.

My mother was from Holland.

My father's family came from Poland and they were Jewish.

And my real name was Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg.

My agent made me change it and we came up with the name Jane Seymour,

which of course is quintessentially English. But I'm not.

What does a kitty cat say?

Meow. Meow.

I really care about memories and I really want to know more

than just the names and the dates of birth and the family tree.

I know that some really extraordinary things must

have happened to, especially my Jewish family,

the Polish family, and I want to know more than just their names.

To begin with, this is a picture of my father.

He was in the RAF. His name was John Frankenberg.

He was of Jewish descent, his father came from Poland, I'm told,

but he was born in the East End of London.

He was an obstetrician and gynaecologist

and a doctor in World War II. He was also a Squadron Leader.

At the end of the war, he was allowed to go to Bergen-Belsen.

He personally wanted to go

because he knew that some of his cousins had been interned there.

This is the most amazing photograph.

I love it because it was the entire Frankenberg family in the 1930s,

all together in Poland.

Who I can actually recognise immediately is my father,

this would be my grandfather, Lewin, and my grandmother.

Well, we all know that absolutely horrific things

happened to the Jews during the Holocaust and in this photograph,

there are two people here I'm particularly interested in.

This is Great-Aunt Michaela and this would be Great-Aunt Jadwiga.

I heard that they survived.

But they survived in Nazi-occupied Poland and France,

and how does anyone survive the Holocaust during that time?

Jane is keen to find out about her Jewish great-aunts,

Michaela and Jadwiga, and their experiences under Nazi occupation.

She's starting in Warsaw to learn more about Jadwiga and what became

of her husband, Herman Temerson, and their two children, Jerzy and Hanna.

So, this photograph is obviously very important because it was sent

to my grandfather, Lewin.

It says, "Lewin, I love you, Herman."

And Herman was married to Jadwiga and Herman was an obstetrician

and gynaecologist, which is of course what my father became.

So, I think this man was very influential in my father's choices.

And their children are here, Jerzy and Hanna.

And I have no idea what happened to them.

This is another picture of Hanna.

I can see a family resemblance. We all have that crooked smile.

Jane is meeting Professor Jan Grabowski.

So, where did Jadwiga live before the war?

So, before the war, Jadwiga and her husband, with their two children,

they lived in a very, I would say upscale neighbourhood

called Sienna Street, which was a upper class neighbourhood.

You can see the street that they lived in,

which testifies to their wealth.

So, definitely a doctor was someone with good

standing in his community and this was a very much mixed area.

So you have, you have Christian Poles,

and you have Jews living together.

And people like doctors,

they were heavily assimilated to Polish culture,

which of course was very helpful once war started.

Before war broke out, Jadwiga lived in an affluent part of Warsaw.

It was a cosmopolitan city where Jews and Poles lived side by side.

But in September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland

and Warsaw was occupied.

A year later, in October 1940, the Germans created

a ghetto in the heart of the city,

enclosing it with a 10 foot high wall and forcing 400,000 Jews

into a space of just over one square mile.

The Polish Jews were cut off from the non-Jewish Poles,

living on the so-called Aryan side.

What you see here is basically the area of the ghetto.

And this is actually the area through which we transit right now.

If you look at the lowest part of the ghetto,

on the southernmost front you will see Sienna Street.

This is where your family dwelled at that time, at least for some time.

-Their home was inside the ghetto?

-Their home was inside the ghetto.

So they didn't have to move, which was actually to their advantage.

They threw out the Poles who lived here

and they threw in the Jews who lived outside.

So, what would ghetto life have been like for Jadwiga?

They had some money, right?

They had some money, but the money would be gone soon.

I mean, how long can you live off your resources?

The life in the ghetto became extremely, extremely,

horribly difficult.

Starting in the winter of 1941, people start to die.

Would her husband have been treating people in the ghetto

if they were so sick and he was a doctor?

Well, the Germans allowed the Jews to have their own little newspaper

and you can see here

that there are traces of your family's business at that time.

Oh, so here I see Temerson and that's his clinic, right.

And he is exercising his profession. He has his clinic.

Now, the other thing is, I don't think he would be a very busy man,

there were practically no births in the ghetto.

How could they have adverts in the ghetto?

Did they have to pay for those?

If they didn't have money and they didn't have food?

Well, it wouldn't cost much to place an ad in a paper but the thing is,

people tried to live normal life as long as they really could.

But by 1942, over 80,000 people had died from starvation

and disease inside the ghetto.

In January that year, the Nazis devised the Final Solution,

their plan to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe.

In July, the Germans began to liquidate the ghetto.

Over a quarter of a million Jews were rounded up

and sent to Treblinka death camp to be murdered there.

So, Jadwiga was 50 years old.

I'm very surprised that she managed to survive the ghetto,

but she would never have survived Treblinka, would she?

She would never have survived.

Probably, she would not even survive the trip.

If you had a contact outside the ghetto walls

among the Polish community,

and we can safely assume that your family had these links,

then getting out of the ghetto was difficult, it was not impossible.

Jan brings Jane to the Warsaw court building.

I have very strong reasons to believe that Jadwiga

made her flight from the ghetto through this building.

This is a frontier between two worlds.

On the one hand, you have ghetto, on the other hand, you have Aryan side.

And this was the way in which very many Jews from the ghetto

reached safety, for some time at least.

And moreover, we know that Jadwiga was not alone,

not the only member of her family that made good this escape

because if you look at this document here, it's part of a book of memory.

Many books of memory are written by Jews after the war who wanted

somehow to commemorate and to remember what has happened to them.

So, here you have an English translation.

You can read it.

"Temerson, Herman, Doctor Herman.

"He ran a gynaecological clinic in Warsaw and was the

"Chief Physician of the Association of Aid For Impoverished Women.

"During the time of the war, he was hidden on the Aryan side."

Well, there you go.

Here you have, I would say tangible proof of the fact that more

-than one member of your family managed to...

-This is good news.

Managed to reach the Aryan side under German occupation,

but outside of the horrors of the ghetto which they left behind.

What about the children?

Well, usually in this situation,

the parents would make certain that the children went first.

So, usually before they fled themselves, they would have

arranged for their children to reach the safety of the Aryan side.

Escaping through the court building was fraught with danger.

Jadwiga would have needed forged identity papers.

She would have pretended that she was attending a hearing,

then hidden somewhere to change clothes

and remove her Star of David armband so that she could emerge looking

as non-Jewish as possible.

Up to 1,000 Jews escaped through the court building,

but once out, Jadwiga would have needed someone

Polish on the Aryan side who she could trust with her life.

So, Polish people were willing to risk their lives to save some Jews?

Well, if you'll have a look at this announcement,

published in September of 1942,

that's when the ghetto is being liquidated, when the Jews flee

in large numbers to the Aryan side.

So, what the Germans do is here,

they announce that anyone who helps Jews in their escape

will be punished by death.

How obscene.

Jadwiga knew that her presence exposed to danger

people who were around her,

and responsibility would not only be hers,

but also her hosts and sometimes even their neighbours.

It was called collective responsibility.

It simply meant "If you do something wrong,

"we are going after you and your family and perhaps your dog, too".

Mm. So the ghetto's on that side and that would be the door.

The Aryan side will be on the other side here, exactly.

Well, so this, we believe, is the door through which your great-aunt

emerged from this building. She doesn't run.

She probably emerges slowly with hesitation, trepidation,

through the door, and possibly for the first time in two years

she is in so-called a normal city.

Behind the building, there was hell on Earth, right.

And here you have a resemblance of normalcy.

What you have are people milling around doing their jobs,

but also, this is one of the most dangerous streets in Warsaw.

There are roaming gangs of people who prey upon the helpless Jews

who use this particular exit in order to reach some kind of safety.

Very, very scary.

These people didn't want to kill you.

They wanted to rob you.

So, if you still had, you know, some pieces of jewellery,

you could give it to them and they probably would let you go

and they would transfer you into the custody of their friends

behind the corner who would rob you further, right.

Then finally, someone would call the Germans.

-Did she know who she was waiting for?

-Well, probably, yes.

Because in this stage when she emerged,

she would have someone prearranged, someone who would wait for her

or at least she would know where she would direct herself.

Hard to imagine.

Hard to imagine.

Somehow, my relatives got out of the Warsaw ghetto,

and what happened to them now I don't know,

because that was 1942 and there were still three more years of war.

I can only hope that they were fortunate.

Jane is meeting Professor Anita Prazmowska.

We know that Jadwiga

and her family managed to get out of the Warsaw ghetto.

Where would they have gone?

They would have been sheltered by Poles.

It wouldn't be possible for them

to survive without outside assistance, so they would be outside

the ghetto already, they would have been sheltered in most probably

extremely difficult circumstances and terribly frightened and lonely.

And would they have been together or separate?

Most likely separate. It would be very dangerous to be together.

So, would they be, like, hiding in a closet or hiding in...

I mean, they could never go outside, could they?

No, never, because there is always an anxiety of being denounced,

someone asking questions.

They would be very likely hiding in the inner side of the house

if possible, not even coming out into the front door,

anything of the sort.

Why did you bring me here to this monument?

It's a monument which commemorates the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising,

which was an attempt by the Poles to establish authority here.

In the summer of 1944, assuming that the Germans are withdrawing,

the Poles start an uprising.

So, we've got this imagery of that surge of energy, that hope,

that optimism that the Poles will be able to capture the town.

And Jadwiga would have known that things were happening,

because everybody would have been whispering,

getting ready, bringing out whatever ammunition was available

and that must have been one moment of hope for her.

The Warsaw Uprising began on 1st August, 1944

and was a major revolt led by the Polish underground

against the Germans.

Initially, the Poles caught the Germans off guard,

and some were captured.

But the Germans swiftly regrouped, with orders to kill

rather than imprison all of the city's inhabitants.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians were killed.

Why did the Germans hate the Polish so much

that they didn't just want to annihilate the Jews,

they wanted to destroy the whole of Warsaw, destroy Poland totally,

why did they hate Poland so much?

Think of the German government and the German regime at that time

as a race-defined government, a government that defines itself

as a superior race, and therefore they are the inferior races.

The Jews have to die, but the Slavs, the Polish race,

likewise comes next.

It was also assumed by Poles

that once the Jewish community is exterminated,

that very likely the same process is going to happen.

So, it is the race issue.

-So, they were trying to completely destroy Poland?

-Yes.

Now that Jadwiga's in hiding, would the likelihood be that

-she was in a damaged house?

-Most certainly, yes.

Because Warsaw is damaged terribly by fighting and subsequently

by the Germans coming in and mining every single building.

Warsaw is a skeleton, really,

and Jadwiga would have been very aware

of the precariousness of the world around her,

both the physical world and also the emotional one.

Anita takes Jane to a building that survived the war

and bears the scars of the Warsaw Uprising.

This is an old building and sometimes,

when I enter old buildings, I think, if only walls could speak.

These walls must have seen a lot.

I have more information about your family

and this is an account of what happened to Herman Temerson.

So, I will let you read this.

"Born in Pruszcz in 1884, graduated in 1911, a gynaecologist,

"he practised in Warsaw.

"He was at his window, watching the Nazis as they hastily

"retreated from the city.

"A German rifleman took aim at him and fired.

"Dr Temerson was probably the last physician

"to perish at the hands of the defeated Germans."

Wow!

-So, he almost made it?

-Yes.

And like many Poles also,

he dies during the uprising in the most incidental way.

Just a casual way in which a German soldier takes aim

and kills a man, for no reason other than

because the man was there and the soldier could kill him.

So, who did this? Who...who wrote this?

Someone who might well have been responsible for sheltering him

or would have known about it

and wanted that information then to be conveyed further, to be recorded.

That could only have happened because he was so respected,

otherwise he would be just one more Jew who died.

Do you think that Jadwiga would have known what happened to her husband?

Unlikely.

Simply because she was most likely to have been hiding separately,

not in the same place.

It's just very tangible in a way to imagine that Herman would

have looked out of a window like this

and have survived that much of the war,

having survived escaping the ghetto,

having been saved, presumably by a Polish family.

I mean, he got that close. He got that close.

Well, that was in 1944.

Now I'm really curious to find out what happened to Jadwiga

and what happened to Jerzy and Hanna.

Jane is meeting Professor Tony Kushner.

Nice to meet you.

This is a very important building in post-war Polish Jewish history.

This is where the Jews from 1945,

who are coming back into the city or maybe have survived in hiding

throughout the war, are going to find out about their relatives.

But it's also the place where they're going to get help with

rebuilding their lives.

So, this is the new epicentre of an attempt to revive

the Jews of Warsaw.

And this is where Jadwiga goes in June 1945

and we have the first evidence of her from this card here.

So, if you'd like to read the translation of it.

"Mrs Jadwiga asks all the Temerson family members to contact her

"care of Mrs Eugenia on Jerusalem Street, 79, Apartment 3.

"Address should be given only to family members."

The address in Jerusalem Street is where she's living at this moment.

-And is that in Warsaw?

-That's in Warsaw, yes.

And it's in the heart of what was the Jewish area.

Why only family members?

Why would she not want friends to contact her?

It's possible that she wants to keep her Jewishness

to some extent half-hidden,

she doesn't want the whole world to know that she's Jewish.

This is not a safe place to be, there are attacks on Jews.

There was a desperate shortage of housing, people are fighting

for scarce resources and they are still turning on the Jews.

I can only imagine that Jadwiga stayed here,

because she was hoping to at least find her children.

I don't even know, does she know that Herman has died?

It's not even certain about that.

So there is something to be said for staying in a place.

You may just hear from word of mouth,

but also just as basic as leaving messages on the building site,

the rubble of places where they used to live,

and that's how desperate people were.

The chances of Jadwiga surviving at the age of, well, in her fifties,

at this time is, is pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

She is part of a remnant of a remnant.

It's extraordinary for a community of close to half a million,

by the end of the war

there are something like 11,000 Warsaw Jews alive

and within the city perhaps less than 1,000,

so people are going to come back.

So, she is a tiny remnant of this vast Jewish world

-that had existed before the war.

-Oh, my gosh!

So, Jadwiga here is suggesting that people meet her at Jerusalem Street.

Does that still survive?

Yes, and we can take you there now.

So, this is the actual building that Jadwiga

lived in at the end of the war?

-And this would all have been rubble?

-This was rubble.

This was a nothing, an absence of anything, of any landmarks.

And we've got a couple of photographs here that just

shows ruins of a once great city.

Oh, my goodness me!

Oh, my gosh!

That could have been Jadwiga. How can anyone survive there?

There's just... Just... Where do you survive?

The Germans had razed Warsaw to the ground

and destroyed 85% of the city.

Across Poland,

over five million had died as a result of the German occupation,

at least three million of whom were Jewish.

So, Jadwiga is waiting for news.

She's waiting for someone to come back,

waiting for a knock at the door or something, because she wants

-still to see if anyone is surviving of her immediate family.

-And?

This document gives some indication of what's happened to Hanna.

Jadwiga's daughter. It says,

"Hanna Temerson is about 21 years old and is from Warsaw, Poland.

"She was seen in Belsen."

So, she's in Belsen?

Someone had spotted her in Belsen.

It's not definitive, but I think it's a very strong indication

that at some point, she's in Belsen.

My father went to Belsen to find his cousins

and obviously, he went there to find Hanna.

Belsen Camp was in Germany and very few Jews from Warsaw,

like Hanna, were sent there directly.

But towards the end of the war, it had a huge influx

of Jews from Eastern Europe, brought there on death marches.

Concentration camp prisoners were forced to march

hundreds of miles further west

to be used as slave labour and to remove evidence of the camps

before they were discovered by the Allies.

They were very public

in the predominantly closed arena of the Holocaust.

Those who were too feeble to keep up were shot.

As many as 49,000 people died at Belsen,

just before and after liberation, in April 1945.

So, is there any chance that Hanna survived Belsen?

Well, what we do know is that the searching for her went on.

There are requests to the camps, which are now

Displaced Persons Camps,

has anyone seen her, has she registered,

and what we see in this document is such a request.

Oh, my goodness, I can barely even read this. What does this say?

"No trace in Belsen camp."

This is the cousin my father went to find.

And I didn't know about her history.

I didn't know who she was, but this is who my father told me

he went to look for after the war.

And she's so beautiful at 21.

Was there any news of Jadwiga's son, Jerzy?

As far as we can find out, there's no news whatsoever.

So, we can only assume that he had died earlier.

I wanted to come to Warsaw because I wanted to find out

how Jadwiga survived.

But the big question is, what does that mean at the end of the day

if she's lost her husband, she's lost her children,

she's lost her home, she's lost her entire society?

She's lost the entire city.

I can only imagine she must have lost her mind.

I think I would.

It's time to go to Paris and find out about Michaela.

She was living in occupied France and I believe she survived,

and I'm just hoping that hers was a happier story.

Jane is now on the trail of Jadwiga's sister,

great-aunt Michaela, who had moved from Poland to France

before the war.

She was living in Paris with her husband, Aron Singalowski,

and their two daughters, Hanna and Lya.

I love this picture because it really shows the whole family.

And this is the only photograph I have of Michaela,

and I think it's wonderful

because she's sitting right beneath my father, John, and my grandfather,

Lewin, and she was married to this gentleman here, Aron Singalowski.

And here I have this wonderful photograph of Hanna,

one of their daughters, it says here,

"Hanna Singalowski, Paris, 1935."

And I know that's where they were living.

But then the war breaks and I'm dying to know what happened to them.

-Hello, Jane.

-Jane is meeting historian Hannah Diamond.

-This is where Michaela lived in the 1930s.

-Really?

Yes. Lovely house, isn't it?

Lovely part of Paris for her to have been.

I've got this census from 1936 that we found in the local archives,

and you can see that it's this road.

-Is there a name on here that you recognise?

-Singalowski!

-Yes.

-Aron Singalowski. Poland.

-Yes.

-Wow! And Michaela, Hanna, Lya.

-So, Hanna would have been 15 and Lya would have been 11.

-Amazing.

-So, do you know anything about Michaela's husband?

-Yes.

Aron, he was the director of an organisation called the ORT.

Does that ring any bells with you?

I've heard of that, yes, I have heard the name ORT.

I have heard the name Singalowski but I never knew his story.

-He was a very important man in the Jewish community.

-Really?

Yes. It was an organisation which allowed Jews to retrain

when they'd lost their jobs, often because of political reasons.

They'd train them to become carpenters, artisans,

and really he was a very distinguished figure

in the Jewish community and was renowned across most of Europe.

So, do we know how long he was in France or when he came from Poland?

He came here via Berlin with the organisation in 1933

when Hitler comes to power in Germany.

Paris at that time would have been a much more positive place

for them to live.

It was a very intellectually vibrant place.

Many, many Jews from Eastern Europe

and elsewhere were coming to France, who saw itself as really

a place of asylum for foreigners and particularly for Jews.

But then in September 1939, things changed dramatically

when France declares war on Germany.

So, 1939, the war's begun.

So, what would Michaela have done and her family?

Well, it was a very worrying time for everyone

because they knew the war had broken out

and nobody knew, really, what was going to happen.

At this time, and for several weeks after,

we enter the period of the Phoney War.

The Phoney War lasted eight months, from September 1939 to May 1940.

Life continued much as normal for Michaela and the people of Paris.

But on May 10th, 1940, the Germans launched

an offensive on Holland, Belgium and then France.

The French forces were overwhelmed

and people began to flee their homes.

At this point, the people of Paris will start to notice some changes,

and here on the Place de la Concorde, there were peasants

fleeing from Belgium and Northern France

as the German army advanced, and Michaela might have noticed

that people had loaded up all their stuff and mattresses,

everyone talked about mattresses at this period, in the cars, and

she'd have thought, these are cars that come from just outside Paris.

If these people are fleeing the German armies, that means

they must be very near.

And she may have gone home to Aron and said, "Now we must leave."

So, where did Michaela and her family go?

They would have gone to a station to try and get a train.

They would have explored whatever they possibly could.

So, where did Michaela go?

I've got a document here that she filled out later in the war

that shows you.

So, do you want to have a good look at this?

One minute, I'm going to put these on, because even I can't read that.

OK.

My name, Frankenberg. "Prename, Michaela..."

Marseille!

She's going to Marseille.

So, when did they leave?

Well, they left in June, 1940,

and they were part of this hugely important moment in French history,

this huge movement of population, south, away,

fleeing the German armies.

-I've got a photograph to show you...

-Oh, my God!

..of one of the last trains and the throngs of people that there were.

How many people left Paris?

Well, about three-quarters of the population of Paris left.

And there were millions of people on the road.

The writers who write about it talk about it as being a medieval scene,

a huge popular displacement.

This mass of humanity is nothing

compared to what Michaela and her family had to deal with.

They were just crushing. There's this mass exodus.

Three-quarters of Paris left at the same time as my family,

having already left Berlin trying to escape the Nazis.

And now the Nazis are coming to Paris, so she's going off

to Marseille and I have no idea if she'll be safe there.

In just four weeks, over six million people abandoned their homes

and escaped south in a flight now known as the Exodus.

On 14th June, 1940, the Germans rolled into a deserted Paris.

Within days, France signed an armistice with Germany

and was divided, with German rule in the occupied, or Northern Zone,

and French rule at Vichy in the Southern Zone.

In Marseille, Michaela and her family were far away

from the occupying Germans.

But they were now ruled by the Vichy government,

a government which was collaborating with Germany.

Jane is meeting historian Karen Adler in Marseille.

So, Michaela and her family left Paris and came south

and I imagine came here because it was safer.

Well, they also came south, particularly to Marseille,

because it was a port.

There were hundreds and thousands of people coming here,

trying to get away by ship.

It was extraordinarily over-crowded, there was a shortage of everything.

People were scrabbling around for just the basics of life.

Michaela and her family, they're foreigners,

so they're not really allowed to be there

until they have a residence permit, they have to constantly go and

try and find the residence permit, they are queueing up for food.

An awful lot of their time is just spent trying to live.

So, there's a lot of Jews now in Marseille and Michaela

and her family would feel that they were safe here

because they were surrounded by Jews?

-They wouldn't feel safe.

-They wouldn't feel safe.

They wouldn't feel safe at all.

The French government at Vichy lost no time in passing its own

anti-Jewish laws and spreading virulent anti-Semitic propaganda.

In 1941, Michaela would have been aware that thousands

of foreign Jews were being rounded up and imprisoned in French-run

internment camps, one of which was less than 20 miles from Marseille.

So, how would Michaela and her family

have tried to get out of here?

One of the reasons that Michaela came here

was because it's a port and she could get away.

But in order to get away, she needed the right papers.

And to get the right papers she could go to the consulate,

and all of those are found here in Marseille.

I wanted to bring you here

because this was a really important place for Michaela.

This was the former American consulate.

And what I've got here is

a photograph of what it was like for people,

for all the refugees.

OK. Oh, my gosh!

And what you can see here is people queueing up for days and days.

I can imagine everyone wants to get to the United States at this point.

-Of course. Yes, exactly.

-And Hitler's a long way away.

Yes, but it was unbelievably complicated to try and get out.

And this document is an exit visa, OK.

So, it wasn't just a question of queueing up here for days on end

to get the visa to be allowed into the United States,

you also have to have a document that allows you out of France,

and your visa is going to be limited in length.

-It might just be a couple of weeks.

-But this one is permanent.

No, it will run out. So, have a look at that.

OK. Singalowski, Aron, from Poland. Married with two children.

OK. Emigration.

And he's asking for a visa to go ultimately to the United States

and to emigrate.

And it says, "No opposition, avis favourable." It's favourable.

-Yes.

-So, he can now go to the United States.

This is good news, isn't it?

-It is good news.

-Except?

They don't go.

Why would he not go?

His work was keeping him here. It was so important...

-Really?

-..that he was working on behalf of the other refugees

and helping people worse off than him.

And what do you think Michaela felt about that?

Oh, what do you think Michaela felt about it?

I mean, she's a mother, she wants to protect her children.

Surely she can smell that war is all around,

she's already been displaced several times,

I would think that this was about one of the most valuable things

that could ever happen. I'm sure she was proud of him,

but at the same time, I mean, she'd want to be practical, wouldn't she?

-Yeah.

-So, what happened next to Michaela?

OK. The next stage of her journey in Marseille is actually just

over here, and this very grandiose building is the Prefecture.

Ah.

OK, so that was 1941 and now we're coming to 1942.

So, things are really getting very serious for Jews now in France.

And here we've got another document, OK.

Er, do you want to have a look at it?

Yes. "Singalowski, Aron.

-"Would like to have a visa en Suisse."

-Exactly.

-To Switzerland.

And it says, "No objection. Favourable."

So, 20th April, 1942, it was signed by the Chief of the Prefecture.

-In there.

-And then Vichy signed it, 9th June.

-And what did they say?

-No!

-Vichy refused.

-They refused.

In the Northern Zone, things are really heating up.

A month later, Paris fell victim to a brutal raid ordered by the Nazis.

In July 1942, French police arrested over 12,000 Jews,

including 4,000 children the Germans had not requested.

Most were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

I'm thinking right now about Michaela and her family

and how close they were to getting to America,

and then possibly to Switzerland, and now nowhere.

And they know what's going on in Paris and they know that

things are really getting, you know, from bad to worse.

And I'm just wondering, you know, what did she do next?

OK, so now we've got another document that I want to show you.

SHE READS IN FRENCH

SHE READS IN FRENCH

-He wants to go to Mexico.

-He wants to go to Mexico?!

-Now he wants to go to Mexico.

-He must be insane.

That's a really long way.

And we've come here because this is the former Mexican consulate.

It was one of the few places that offered asylum.

I mean, their whole life is spent standing in line hoping that

somewhere, somewhere in the world someone's going to let them

out of this nightmare.

That is absolutely it in a nutshell.

So, this is the next destination that Michaela comes to.

And there's a clue right up there.

-Switzerland!

-So she's doing the rounds. We've been...

She's starting again for Switzerland?

And she's coming back to the Swiss consulate.

Here is another visa application and this will tell you a bit more.

She wants to go for three months to Switzerland.

-Ah! Refused again!

-And then it's refused again.

-This is getting to be ridiculous.

-And so it's refused.

-Unbelievable! Unbelievable.

-Vichy has refused again.

This is on 9th November, 1942 that it's accorded in Marseille,

and it's refused in Vichy on 19th November, 1942.

In between those two days, there's a huge change.

The Germans take over the whole of the Southern Zone.

On 11th November, 1942, the Germans invaded

the Southern Zone and on the 12th, they occupied Marseille.

A week later, the family's official Swiss visa was rejected by Vichy.

The only way out now had to be an illegal one.

So, what happened next is clear from another document

and it's from Switzerland. It's in German.

"Michaela..." I don't understand.

-What's it saying here?

-Illogal, Illog. Illogo. Illegal?

-Illegal.

-They say she's illegal?

-Yeah.

-And she's in Switzerland now?

So, she's in Switzerland but she has not got there legally,

she's got there illegally.

Oh, my God! How would she get there?

It's now that the non-legal means have to kick in.

There was no kind of, you know, off we go, direct to the frontier

and then we show our passports and we go across the border.

-This was going from safe house to safe house.

-My goodness.

And it might take a while and basically, now they're in hiding.

-And were there soldiers or anyone around there?

-Absolutely. Absolutely.

There are guards who are patrolling the border.

-They could have been shot at any time?

-They could have been shot,

they could have been found, they could have been arrested,

they could have been taken back into France.

-To get over the border, you just need to...

-You just run.

You just need to run.

Just one week after Michaela and her family arrived

in Switzerland, there was a mass round-up of Jews in Marseille,

by both the French and German authorities.

And over 1,600 Jews were sent to be murdered at concentration camps.

Next, the old port area where many Jews had lived was obliterated,

systematically dynamited by the Germans for sanitary reasons.

It's a life of fleeing. Yet again, they manage to get out just in time,

just in the nick of time, like, a week later, they round up everybody.

So, Michaela and her family are on the run again,

going from Marseille to Switzerland.

It's a long way.

Here am I, today, making this journey, quite easily.

It'll take me a few hours. They're travelling for weeks in the winter

and then they probably have no food, they have probably by now no money.

They must be travelling either on foot or by bicycle

if they're lucky enough, and occasionally a car,

but there would be very little petrol,

and they don't even know they're going to get across the border.

They don't even know if one link to another is going to work.

They don't know if they're going to get shot on their way.

It is a journey that is fraught with uncertainty

and fear at all times.

And there's four of them.

I can't even imagine.

So, here I am pretty much where Michaela and her family would

have been and in dead of night, waiting for the moment

when the Germans are not going to see them.

Hopefully, they've got this far

and they're going to make a mad dash through those woods

and on the other side is Switzerland.

So, Karen gave me this and this is the actual arrest papers.

They were arrested by the Swiss in the moment

they came over the border, and it's really interesting here

because it tells the date, it said it was 17th January, 1943,

11 o'clock at night, middle of the night,

and this is the spot where they were arrested, this is Corniere,

and it also says here that they... How did they get out?

They said, "clandestinement". Clandestinely.

In other words, secretly.

And then it asks here, "What was your reason for leaving?"

And it says, "Rechercher par les Allemands."

Hunted by the Germans.

I mean, this looks like great news because they got across

and they've been arrested, but this one clearly says, "Illegal."

I don't know what that's going to mean to them.

Switzerland was one of the few neutral countries to which

Jews could escape during the war.

But it had a strict immigration policy,

limiting the numbers allowed in.

Those who managed to stay spent most of their time

in internment camps and were not allowed to seek work.

When Vichy France fell under German occupation,

Jews like Michaela fled to Switzerland, but tens of thousands

were sent back over the border, most to their deaths.

Have you been to Geneva before?

I have, actually. I learnt to speak French in Geneva.

-Oh, did you?

-I did.

Jane is in Geneva, meeting historian Dr Jessica Reinisch.

All right, the last thing I know about Michaela was that

she was arrested at the border, so I'm very curious as to

what happened to her next, and her family, of course.

We know that they arrived in mid-January, 1943,

and they were sent immediately to an internment camp.

We have a document you may be interested in.

This is just a page

from Aron Singalowski's entry questionnaire.

And this paragraph in particular is quite

important in this context.

-What does it say here?

-We have a translation for you.

It says: "Assets. In Switzerland, around 35,000 Swiss francs."

-That's quite a lot of money?

-It's a lot of money in the 1940s.

He's relatively wealthy

-and he could reassure the Swiss authorities that he...

-Had means.

-Yeah.

-"Earnings from professional activities,

"Monthly income of 2,500 Swiss francs from the ORT Federation."

-So that meant he was allowed to work here?

-Yes.

Aron was working for the ORT union, which was trying to precisely do

what the Swiss immigration policy had hoped would happen, which is

to equip refugees with skills and with training, which would

give refugees a possibility to leave as soon as hostilities allowed.

So, this isn't the end of the war.

Did Aron stay here till the end of the war?

We do know that a couple of months

after his stay in the internment camp, he was living in hotels,

he was free at large.

-Really?

-And he seemed to be working for the ORT.

So, this is very interesting to me

because when he had the opportunity to take them all to America

and he was in Marseille, he decided to stay behind

and be involved with his mission, which was working for ORT.

And that endangered their lives,

and they nearly got killed because of that.

And now, being this official at ORT is saving their lives

-and giving them amazing opportunities.

-Absolutely, yes.

So, why are we in this building?

Well, we do have a letter which is dated 11th March, 1946,

which shows that he was living at this address.

Oh, so this is after the war.

-Who's this from? From Singalowski.

-Yes.

-OK.

"Monsieur, je vous serais tres reconnaisant de voulois bien

"accorder un visa d'entree et de sortie pour la Suisse

"pour ma belle-soeur." SHE GASPS

Oh, my God. "Madam Jadwiga, Jocheta Temerson,

"born Frankenberg." He's asking for a Swiss visa for his sister-in-law,

for Jadwiga.

"Le but du voyage est le retablisement de la sante

"tres ebranlee par les terribles epreuves..." Oh, my God.

Said the voyage is really important

because of the terrible circumstances that

she's had to go through, losing her husband and her two children.

After the initial euphoria of liberation,

for many victims of the war, another nightmare soon began.

Nearly 30 million people were displaced by the conflict,

malnourished, destitute and scarred by trauma.

Many could not return to their own countries for fear

of persecution or because their homes had been destroyed.

Across Europe, millions of Jewish refugees like Jadwiga

were desperately trying to get visas and find a safe place to live.

So, does she come? Does she manage to get in to Switzerland?

-Well, we do know that Aron managed to get her a visa.

-Ah.

And we do know that she finally arrives.

When does she arrive?

So this is the key date here, the 23rd August, 1946.

23rd August, so...

So, we do know that by April 1946, the visa is granted.

-A six-month visa is granted.

-Right.

-Which will take her to mid-October, 1946.

-Yes.

So, Jadwiga came to this building, this was where Michaela was living.

Jadwiga almost certainly lived with Michaela and Aron Singalowski.

I can't even imagine what it must have felt like having

come from where she was in Warsaw, which was in ruins,

and here to this quite palatial house.

I mean, suddenly she's in the lap of luxury by comparison.

-Absolutely.

-And her sister still has a husband and both children.

-Yeah.

-And she doesn't. So this must be really hard for her,

because she's seeing everything that she's lost.

Yes, absolutely.

Do we know if Jadwiga got to stay?

We do know that Jadwiga stays and in fact dies in Switzerland.

Jane has come to the Jewish cemetery in Veyrier near Geneva

to look for Jadwiga's grave.

Well, there's the tree. Could be fourth along from the tree.

One. Two. Three.

Oh, my gosh.

I can see the name Frankenberg.

It says, "Jadwiga Temerson Frankenberg,

"deceased in the month of October,

"interred on 8th November, 1946."

So, she must have died pretty soon after she arrived here in Geneva.

It doesn't say when she died,

other than it was in the month of October.

It's weird that we wouldn't know when she died, except for the month.

Jessica, do we know how she died?

We do have some information from this newspaper clipping.

This is from the Journal Dejeuner, on 7th November, 1946.

It says, "On retrouve... we found a body of a Polish woman called

"Jadwiga Temerson.

"She disappeared in Geneva a month ago.

"The body of this person was found by the schoolchildren

"of Vieux Chateau near Saint Serge...

"dans un buisson..."

In a bush.

"We know that Madame Temerson had been very deprimer."

Oh, she'd lost a lot, very depressed.

Oh, God!

"Son mari... her husband had disappeared

"and her son had been shot

"and she had no idea of news of her other child."

Oh, my God!

So her son was shot, that's what happened to Jerzy, he was shot.

And that's the only one I couldn't find out about.

So, she was depressed and she ran away.

Now we know that her visa was good until 15th October.

We assume that she went on a trip and she wasn't found again.

And the implication, the suggestion of this is that she killed herself.

Her prospects were very limited and she would have had to return

to Poland unless somehow, the permit could have been extended.

She must have felt pretty desperate at the end.

It was true for many survivors

that once they had stopped focusing on just simply surviving,

that life became much harder.

There was time to process, to think about the past,

which made the future seem impossible.

You know, to survive so much, to have had the strength to keep going,

to have the strength to lose your husband, the strength to not know

where your children are.

The strength to go on this unbelievable journey and then

when you're finally safe and you're with your sister, just give up.

This is where they found Jadwiga's body here in the woods.

And if there's any consolation,

she did pick one of the most beautiful spots

and one can only hope that she found peace in the end.

This has just been the most incredible experience for me,

to learn about Jadwiga and Michaela's stories,

because I realise that

in my family were two incredibly strong women that

survived against all odds and I just think the fact that I had

the privilege of following both of their stories

and that they actually found each other at the end,

it's about the indomitable human spirit, I think.