Who Do You Think You Are - Jane Seymour 20th Aug

[kiterunner]

On BBC1 at 9 p.m. and it will be repeated on Tuesday the 25th on BBC1 at 11:35 pm.

Really looking forward to this one!

[Margaret in Burton]

Found it rather boring. Almost fell asleep.

[ElizabethHerts]

I'm dying to know what happened to Michaela and her family. Surely there must be a trace of them?

[kiterunner]

Episode synopsis:

Actress Jane Seymour lives in Malibu, California, but was born in Britain. Her real name is Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg but she changed it for her acting career. She has six children and four grandchildren. Her mother Mieke was from Holland and her father Benjamin John Frankenberg, known as Johnny, was born in England of a Polish Jewish family. He was an obstetrician / gynaecologist and during WW2 he was a squadron leader in the RAF. At the end of the war he visited Bergen-Belsen camp as he knew that some of his cousins had been in the camp.

Jane had a photograph which was taken before the war, of the whole Frankenberg family, including her grandfather Lewin and her great-aunts Michaela and Jadwiga. Jane had heard that her great-aunts survived the war, but didn't know how.

Jadwiga's husband was also an obstetrician / gynaecologist, Herman Temersen and they had two children, a son called Jertze and a daughter Hanna.

Jane went to Warsaw and saw the street where Herman and Jadwiga lived before the war, in an affluent, mixed part of the city. After Warsaw was invaded, in 1940, a Jewish ghetto was created which included this street. A ghetto newspaper had a listing for Dr H Temersen's clinic.

By 1942, 80,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto had died from disease and starvation. Then the Germans started moving people out and sending them to Treblinka. Jadwiga was 50 years old then.

Jane went to the Warsaw court building, which was probably where Jadwiga escaped from the ghetto; apparently it was a quite common way to escape as it was right on the border between the ghetto and the "Aryan" part of the city. A "book of memory" written after the war says that Herman was hidden on the Aryan side. Jane met a professor who said that the family would probably have been sheltered separately by non-Jewish Poles, despite the danger to themselves. Jane was shown the monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 which resulted in 150,000 - 200,000 Polish civilians. She was also shown an account written after the war of what happened to Herman (born in Plotz in 1884). It said that he was shot dead through a window by a German soldier at the end of the uprising.

Jadwiga visited the building which was used as a help centre for Jewish survivors after the war, and was shown a note which said that Mrs Jadwiga Temersen asked for all Temersen family members to contact her at Jerusalem Street, Warsaw. She was also shown a letter which said that Hanna Temersen, about 21 years old, had been seen at Belsen. Requests had been sent to the Displaced Persons Camp asking about her, but there was no trace of her. Researchers could find no information about Jertze.

Jane then went to Paris to find out about Michaela, who had moved there from Berlin in 1933 with her husband Aron Singalowski and their two daughters Hanna and Lea. Jane was shown the house where the family were living in 1936, and the 1936 census entry which showed that Aron was the director of the O.R.T. Foundation, which helped Jewish people to retrain if they had lost their jobs. A form filled in during the war showed that the family had travelled to Marseille by train in Jun 1940, when most of the population of Paris fled. Marseille was in Vichy France, and being a port, had consulates for many countries which might take refugees. There were documents showing that the family had applied for visas to the US (granted, but they didn't go because of Aron's important work), Switzerland (granted by the consulate, but blocked by the Vichy government), Mexico, and Switzerland again (with the same result). In November 1942 Germany invaded the Vichy zone and occupied Marseille. A document dated Jan 1943 showed that the family had entered Switzerland illegally.

Jane went to see where the Singalowskis would have crossed the border. Then she went to Geneva and was told that they had been arrested on arrival in Switzerland and held in an internment camp. Aron had declared that he had over 35,000 in Swiss francs plus income from the O.R.T. Foundation, and the family were allowed to stay in the country and to move out of the camp. Jane was shown a letter from Aron dated March 1946 applying for a visa for his sister-in-law, Jadwiga, to enter Switzerland, having lost her husband and children. She was granted a six month visa, and arrived in Switzerland in August but died in October of the same year.

Jane went to the Jewish cemetery near Geneva to visit Jadwiga's grave which did not have an exact date of death although it showed her burial date, 8th Nov 1946. A newspaper clipping dated 7th Nov 1946 said that her body had been found in the bushes and that she had disappeared a month previously, having been very depressed due to the disappearance of her husband and her daughter, and her son having been shot dead. Jane visited the spot where the body was found.

[Olde Crone]

Not my favourite actress but I found this episode rivetting. (I wanted to knock her silly hat off, though.)

I thought it was desperately sad that Jadwiga finally gave up on life at the point where she was safe. Suppose her daughter had still been alive?

OC

[kiterunner]

I thought this episode was rivetting too, and I loved that Jane could read out the French documents and translate them herself. It was so topical with the situation in Europe as it is just now, too.

[kiterunner]

This looks to be Aron travelling to New York in 1929:
New York Passenger Lists on ancestry (http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/7488/NYT715_4427-0622/?backlabel=ReturnBrowsing&dbid=7488&iid=NYT715_4427-0622&pid=2005795123&ssrc=&fn=Aron&ln=Singalowski&st=g)

SS "Majestic" passengers sailing from Cherbourg Jan 30th 1929
Singalowski, Aron, age 39, married, Doctor of law, nationality Polish, born Lida, Poland, visa issued in Berlin, last permanent residence Berlin, Germany.

And again in 1932:
http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/7488/NYT715_5125-0072/?backlabel=ReturnBrowsing&dbid=7488&iid=NYT715_5125-0072&pid=2014796181&ssrc=&fn=Aron&ln=Singalowsky&st=g

SS "Europa" sailing from Bremen March 8th 1932
Dr Singalowsky, Aron, age 43, married, Manager, nationality Poland, race or people Hebrew, born Lida Poland, visa issued Berlin, last permanent residence Germany Berlin.

[kiterunner]

This is Aron and Michaela's marriage record, but her surname has been mistranscribed on ancestry; I will put in a correction.
Berlin marriages on ancestry (http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/2957/41539_prep551_000098-00372/?backlabel=ReturnBrowsing&dbid=2957&iid=41539_prep551_000098-00372&pid=22249734&ssrc=&fn=Aron&ln=Singalowsky&st=g)

[Ann from Sussex]

I thought this episode was rivetting too, and I loved that Jane could read out the French documents and translate them herself. It was so topical with the situation in Europe as it is just now, too.

I too made the connection with the present movement of people across Europe Kite.

And I agree with OC about Jane's hat; it looked very silly, especially at the end when it was pushed back a bit on her head. That style should be worn pulled down low on the brow or not at all! Is she very tiny or was the first Polish historian she spoke to an extraordinarily large man? When they were standing next to each other, Jane didn't seem to come much above his waist! I think it must have been because he was very tall because I "measured" JS against others she met and there wasn't such a difference. Isn't it daft, the things that go on in your mind when you are watching tv (and I DID find the programme very interesting!)?

[Olde Crone]

I noticed in this episode and in Paul Hollywood's that both said "and I would like to know what happened to blah blah" which suggests a shift in what the programme makers are doing. It is no longer an examination of the wider family, it's concentrating on just one family. Which is ok - but I wonder how much interesting stuff they miss by just concentrating on one or two people.

OC

[Ann from Sussex]

From what Jane Seymour's Wikipedia entry says, it looks as though there is a war time story connected with her mother's Dutch family too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Seymour_(actress)

I can't make out from the way it is written whether her mother was a "prisoner of war" in the Far East or in Europe; it's a bit ambiguous. Somehow, the use of the term PoW indicates a prisoner in a Japanese camp rather than a German one. I wonder why we didn't hear any mention of that? Perhaps there are family members who don't want a tv programme about their relatives

[Janet in Yorkshire]

The programme makers can't win! In some of the earlier series, there were comments about going back through generations too quickly and sketchily, with lack of detail on issues which could have been explored more thoroughly.
Now we have much greater detail about a relatively short time span or a focus on one tiny part of the family tree.
I loved this second one (probably because it was on a theme I already found interesting) but was bored by the previous episode, because for me it was more like a military history lecture on a WW2 battle, rather than fleshing out Paul's mother and grandparents and exploring how the war impacted on their lives.
Other people I know have not cared for either programme - not enough on genealogy records, methodology or avenues to explore. Just goes to prove that you can't please all of the people all of the time!

Jay

[crawfie]

I was hoping that there would be more on her Dutch side as my father is Dutch, and he was born in Indonesia and was in a Japanese POW camp, so lots of possibilities. Anyway, I have just had a look at Janes tree online, her mother was a Van Tricht, and her mothers grand-mother was a Brouwers. That name rang a very large bell as my 6x GGF was a Brouwers. I checked my tree, and found I have traced the Brouwers down to the marriage with Van Tricht. Result is that Jane is my 6th cousin once removed!

[kiterunner]

Ooh, that's exciting, Crawfie!

[Ann from Sussex]

Well done Crawfie, I'm so pleased for you! That is something I long to happen to me through WDYTYA...but it never has.

[crawfie]

Some more info from the Genealogist, including Jewish records in London


https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2015/who-do-you-think-you-are/jane-seymour-257/

[Tom Tom]

http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/jane-seymours-unseen-footage

This is a link to unseen footage of Jane meeting a niece of her Great Uncle who was shot in Warsaw. Not a blood relativthough, which is perhaps why they didn't include it in the show.

I thought it was a very interesting episode.

[Rosie Knees]

I think I would have enjoyed it more if they had gone into some detail about where all these visas/applications were found.