She describes feeling 'so emotional' at the new version of the image, eight years after her family stumbled across the original in a museum
January 22, 2020 10:24
Anna Romer’s sister first saw a black-and-white picture of their father, Eugene Spiegel, as a prisoner at Auschwitz when she visited the Holocaust Museum in Berlin eight years ago.
Mrs Romer’s sister and brother-in-law, Gladys and David Altman, were browsing images of camp prisoners when Mrs Altman let out a scream at recognising her father among them.
He can be seen stood next to other prisoners as part of a transport who had arrived at the camp.
This month, Mrs Romer opened a newspaper and felt “so emotional” to see the same picture in colour.
The photo is among those colourised for the first time as part of a ground-breaking documentary on the Nazi camp, which is to be broadcast later this month to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day.
“I opened the Times and the Jewish Chronicle, my two favourite newspapers, to see the image had been printed in colour and that it was going to be part of this new documentary,” she said.
Auschwitz Untold in Colour, a two-part series, will feature testimony from 16 survivors to bring “contemporary resonance” to the horrors of the Holocaust, production company Fulwell73 said.
The two-part documentary, which will be broadcast on More 4, is narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley.
In another unexpected turn, Mrs Romer discovered its producer, Sheldon Lazarus, was from the same shul she and her husband attends.
Her husband Neville Romer approached Mr Lazarus at shul to tell him of the coincidence.
“He was very overwhelmed and emotional to find out that we had recognised our father from the image,” Mrs Romer said.
“When we first came across it we told the museum that it was our father but they weren’t really able to tell us anything about it. We always wondered who had taken the picture and have found out that it is of one of the Hungarian transports arriving at the camp in May 1944. It was part of an Auschwitz album taken by a Nazi.”
Mrs Romer and her husband were invited to a screening of the documentary where Mr Lazarus told the story of how she had recognised her father.
“[Mr Lazarus] said that while it is a story of death it is also a story of life because we were there to see it,” she said.
Mrs Romer, who lives in Hendon and attends Hendon Adath Yisroel Synagogue, told the JC: “Our parents didn’t really talk about what happened.
“Like many people, it was not something you talked about. We know very few details but we know what our dad looked like and recognised him immediately.”
Her father and mother, Margareta Spiegel, were from Ungvar, which at the time was in Hungary, and is now Uzgorod in Ukraine.
They married in 1942 and were taken by the Nazis in 1944. Mrs Romer knows her father was liberated from Buchenwald but does not know her he came to be there after arriving at Auschwitz, from which her mother was liberated.
Despite being separated in the camps, the couple were reunited “by miracle” in 1946 when someone who knew them both saw the name Eugene Spiegel in a list of survivors receiving medical attention.
“My parents spent two years in a sanatorium in Davos where my father was recovering from TB. They eventually went to South America where I and my sister were born.”
Their parents made aliyah in 1993. Eugene Spiegel died in December 1998 and Margareta Spiegel died in April 2018.
They had six grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
Mrs Romer said: “Hitler did not succeed. I feel honoured to be able to tell their story. Despite not talking much about their experiences, they weren’t overly anxious or frightened, we had a happy childhood.”
