Andrew Garfield

Hollywood star Andrew Garfield grew up between London and LA. He knows that his dad’s family are Jewish and came from Poland, but he doesn’t know exactly where they came from or why they left Poland.

To begin their journey, Andrew and his dad Richard look through some old family photos of Andrew’s great-grandfather Ludwig Garfinkel and great-grandmother Sara Kupczyk. Richard tells Andrew that Ludwig anglicised his name to Garfield when he came to the UK in around 1909 and that Sara’s family ended up in the USA, where their name became Cooper.

Richard shows Andrew more intriguing photos; one that shows Ludwig with two young women, who may be his sisters, and one of an unidentified woman on a postcard that has Yiddish writing on the back. Richard tells Andrew the family came from Kielce in Poland.

Andrew travels to Kielce to meet genealogist Matan Shefi, who has built Andrew’s Polish family tree, showing that Ludwig’s parents were Szmul and Chaja. Szmul died in 1904 but was survived by his wife and their seven children. Ludwig had six siblings, five sisters and a brother. The brother died when he was a child, so when Ludwig left for London in 1910, he had five surviving sisters. Matan also translates the postcard and reveals it’s from one of the sisters, Basia, and places her in Warsaw.

Andrew wants to know why his great-grandfather made the decision to leave his mother and five sisters behind and travel to London with his wife and child. He meets historian Katarzyna Person at the former synagogue in Kielce, where he learns that over 30 per cent of Kielce was Jewish. However, in the early 1900s, Poland was hit by waves of pogroms that destroyed many Jewish businesses and killed more than 3,000 Jews. It was against this backdrop that Andrew’s great-grandfather emigrated in search of a better life for himself and his young family.

Katarzyna takes Andrew to the street where Ludwig’s sisters and mother lived. A register from 1930 shows that Andrew’s great-great-grandmother and two of her daughters were working as seamstresses. Andrew knows from the postcard that his great-grandfather’s sister Basia was in Warsaw and is shown a record that reveals that another sister, Ruchla, had married and immigrated to Brazil, where she died in 1963. Andrew discovers she married into a notable family - the Szpilmans - and that her husband’s cousin was a famous pianist whose story was told in the Hollywood film The Pianist. Andrew also sees a death certificate for another sister, who died in 1935.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Jewish community were persecuted, and in 1941 a ghetto was built in the town. If Andrew’s family were still in Kielce, this is where they would have gone. There are no further records to tell Andrew what happened to his great-great-grandmother Chaja and his great-grandfather’s three remaining sisters, Szajndla, Dworja and Basia, during the war.

The team's genealogist tracked Andrew’s great-grandfather’s sister Ruchla, who immigrated to Brazil and traced her son, who now lives in Florida with his daughter. In an emotional zoom call, Andrew discovers that his great-great-grandmother Chaja escaped the Holocaust as she joined her daughter Ruchla in Brazil in 1936. Tragically, two of her other daughters tried to leave for Brazil as well, but they were unable to obtain visas. The family tell Andrew that during the war, letters from the daughters stopped, and they can only assume they were murdered. Andrew now knows the likely fate of the three sisters Szajndla, Dworja and Basia, who were left behind. His last stop in Poland is the memorial site at the former death camp at Treblinka, which is where most of the Jewish people who survived the Kielce and Warsaw ghettos were sent and murdered. Andrew lays a stone to remember his relatives.

Now Andrew wants to know about his great-grandmother Sara’s family, who anglicised their name to Cooper when they immigrated to Los Angeles in the US. At the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in LA, Andrew meets expert Caroline Luce. Documents reveal that Andrew’s great-grandmother’s brother, Andrew’s great-great-uncle Harry, was the first member of the family to come to the USA in 1919. Once in LA, he opened a women’s clothing shop, and over the next few years, his parents and some of his siblings joined him. On the 1930 census listing the family, Andrew notices another name, Bernard Taper, who is his grandfather’s cousin.

Andrew visits his Cooper relatives in LA, who tell him about the glamorous store the family ran and that Bernard was a successful journalist and author, and was influential in the arts.

To find out more, Andrew visits the Getty Art Museum, where he meets Anna Bottinelli. Anna reveals that Bernard was part of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archive programme, one of the Monuments Men, and that hHe went to Europe in the aftermath of World War II to recover art looted by the Nazis.