On Sunday (15 January 2016) has a special Holocaust Memorial episode. About the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Editor Jon Jacob spoke to Producer Julia Foot to find out more.
I didn't expect to feel quite so moved when I watched this episode of Antiques Roadshow.
It’s good to know you had that response. They were such powerful stories and we wanted to do them justice. I was really keen that we should tell the story of the Holocaust in a very accessible way and from a personal perspective. I think there is also a particular poignancy at the moment when you see all the news footage of the refugees fleeing Syria, families being torn apart and people suffering.
We were cutting the programme up till the Christmas break and when I was celebrating with my parents and children it really made me think, for the first time, about those families ripped apart forever by the Holocaust.
There is a ‘matter of factness’ in the way contributors tell their story, so is the emotional reaction rooted in our own projection?
I think it is perhaps the fact that we cannot help but be moved, hearing many of the individual stories for the first time ever. However, for the survivors, who have experienced so much loss, they have wept all their tears over the past seven decades and can be quite stoic about it now. When you look at documentaries on the Holocaust you see images of horror on such an enormous scale that it’s overwhelming, people don’t seem like individuals, they are statistics in a way. But that changes when you actually meet somebody like Axel and hear a very personal story. You come to understand that he was an only child when he came over on the Kindertransport and then both his parents, who had to remain behind, killed themselves rather than go to Auschwitz. Here he is as a man in his late eighties, telling us his story of being all alone, a young boy in England with nobody.
How do you verify the stories?
There are some stories you can verify easily because people like Sir Nicholas Winton, who brought so many children over from Prague on the Kindertransport, kept meticulous notes and records. So there are records to a degree, but also I think what we were relying on was family stories. For example the children of the survivors of the holocaust whose parents passed on their stories to them. Together these descendants of some of these survivors made memory quilts to pass on their stories to future generations. Of course it also goes without saying that we had our commentary checked by an academic for cultural and historical accuracy.
At the time the Holocaust was happening there was a lot of chaos. Some of the children were very young and some of the facts might have been confused, they might also have been told sanitised versions, to protect them. Zahava - didn't know that her mother had kept so many artefacts from their experiences in Bergen-Belsen because her mother was keen that she live her life without this enormous great shadow over it and wasn’t reminded on a daily basis of her time at Belsen. It was only when Zahava's mother died that they found all the items in the attic.
It struck me that there wasn't much dialogue, and the information wasn’t overwhelming and yet the detail I was provided with was striking enough for it me to have such an emotional reaction....
The survivors were incredibly eloquent, what they had to say was powerful. They were quite difficult pieces to edit for broadcast because we allowed a fair amount of time for each recording and each story could almost have been an hour in its own right. But we had to take them down to short interviews. What we decided to do was to look at the Holocaust as a whole and tell the stories in chronological order, from Judith Kerr's fleeing in 1933, right up to liberation and post liberation. Each piece told a specific period of a family's or individual's story.
I worked very closely with assistant producer Sophie Wogden. We visited most of the contributors in their homes before the filming. We wanted to ensure that they would be comfortable telling their stories on camera - for some it was the first time - and that they understood what we were asking them to do, so that they weren't made vulnerable in any way.
I'm thinking a lot about the board game…
When I first came across that board game it was in the Wiener Library in Russell Square. It stops you in your tracks because you can't believe that non-Jewish German families were sitting down to play a board game called 'Jews Out’, encouraging their children to have this whole attitude of the Jews being evil and bad and something to be gotten rid of. While they were playing these games at home, in schools the Jewish children were being segregated. Jewish children were being made to sit at the back of classrooms or even sent to different schools completely, the teachers were ridiculing them, it's horrific really.
You made a quite understandable decision not to value the items that were brought to the programme, but what currency do those items have?
At the start Fiona Bruce says that they are, historically, priceless. It feels quite clichéd but they genuinely are. For example, the pair of striped trousers from Auschwitz, the material cost nothing, but when you come into contact with a pair of those trousers having seen the images of people wearing them in concentration camps, they are incredibly poignant and potent. When I met up with the owner Sybil before filming and she handed them to me I felt a mixture of awe and respect and horror all at the same time. You almost want to get rid of them, or put them down, or hand them on as quickly as you can, and yet you know that they are such a stark reminder of the holocaust that you can't help but be drawn to them at the same time on a very human level.
Were there contributors who were reluctant to participate?
I think a lot of the survivors want to make sure their story is told. Some of the contributors that we interviewed came via the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and they had given their testimony for the new archive, which is due to be built and therefore had already spoken about their experiences. We put out an appeal on the Antiques Roadshow in October inviting people to get in touch with us if they would like to be involved and we had a tremendous response. We had several hundred people get in contact, so there were enough people who wanted to be involved and who wanted to share their stories.
How did the process change you?
I thought I knew a fair amount about the Holocaust, but working on the programme made me realise how little I actually knew. I found it a very humbling experience. It really made me think in real terms about how some of the contributors had lived through the most horrific times. I was taken by how these survivors managed to carry on, after suffering so much, often having lost their families, starting again with nothing, building themselves a new life in Britain and creating their own families.
When you are making a film like this, you are really immersed in it – for example, I spent time watching a great deal of horrific archive footage then went back into the edit suite, carried on editing, putting the programme together and was being very matter-of-fact about what we were producing. The next day, I had to give a presentation to our department about the programme and as I started to talk about the programme in front of a room full of people, I started to choke up as I told some of the stories. At that point I realised that it does affect you, of course, these human stories of family members who have been killed. You realise how close to home it could be. It could have been your mother, your son, your brother.