UK
Andrew Garfield explores Jewish roots in BBC1’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are’
The Spider Man actor goes on a teary voyage to Poland and America in pursuit of information about long-lost family members
April 24, 2025 10:58
The Spider Man actor goes on a teary voyage to Poland and America in pursuit of information about long-lost family members
April 24, 2025 10:58Hollywood actor Andrew Garfield embarked on an emotional journey across Poland and America to learn what became of his paternal Jewish ancestors in the jam-packed latest episode of BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are.
Garfield, 41, who grew up between London and Los Angeles, delved into his Jewish father's Polish lineage in this hour-long episode of genealogical discovery, which sees Garfield trace the history of family members whose fates were previously a mystery.
“I feel a longing to connect more to my Jewish heritage on my dad’s side,” Garfield said in the episode. “I’m really curious about that. There's large parts of my identity that I just feel quite far away from.”
Garfield’s paternal great-grandparents Ludwig Garfinkel and Sara Kupczyk emigrated from Poland to London around 1910 when their son Sam – Garfield's grandfather – was a baby, anglicising the family’s surname to Garfield. But with the lives of Ludwig’s family back in Kielce, Poland still shrouded in darkness, Garfield begins a journey to his great-grandfather's former home town to discover what became of them.
“It does feel like a homecoming,” he said upon arrival in Kielce. “It feels familiar to me in some mysterious, unknown way.”
Thanks to the research of genealogist Matan Shefi, Andrew explores an expanded Garfinkel family tree, revealing the names and birth dates of Ludwig’s six siblings – five sisters and a brother – as well as his parents, Szmul and Chaja. “It’s like pulling open a trapdoor and finding a whole family line,” Garfield said.
Ludwig, whose brother died as a child and father died in 1904, left behind his mother and five sisters when he emigrated to London with his wife and young son. To understand why, Andrew meets historian Katarzyna Person at the former synagogue in Kielce, whose interior was desecrated during WWII. There, Person explains that over 30 per cent of Kielce was Jewish, but a large wave of violent pogroms in the early 1900s instilled fear in many Polish Jews and likely informed Ludwig’s decision to leave with his young family.
Person shows Garfield the death certificate of Ludwig’s sister Ruchla, which reveals that she emigrated and passed away in Brazil in 1963. The record also shows Ruchla married into the notable Szpilman family; her husband’s cousin was a famous pianist whose story was depicted in the Oscar-winning film The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody.
While Garfield learns another of Ludwig’s sisters died in 1935, there are no further records explaining what happened to his great-great-grandmother Chaja and Ludwig’s three remaining sisters, Szajndla, Dworja and Basia in the years before German occupied Poland in 1939.
But when genealogists put Garfield in touch with Ruchla’s son Adolfo, 92, and his daughter Lydia, now based in Florida, he discovers that Chaja joined her daughter Ruchla in Brazil in 1936 to escape the rising persecution in Poland. Speaking over Zoom, Adolfo explains that Chaja’s other daughters were unable to obtain visas to join their family in Brazil. Left behind in Kielce during the late 1930s, Szajndla, Dworja and Basia were likely murdered at the Treblinka death camp.
As his last stop in Poland, Garfield pays a visit to the memorial site at Treblinka, where most of the Jewish survivors of the Kielce and Warsaw ghettos were murdered. Wiping away tears, Garfield places a pebble for each of the three women on a memorial stone for the Jews from Kielce.
“The Nazis attempted to erase even the memory of them, their names, any record of them, and they had succeeded in a certain way,” he said. “They were just normal women that wanted a life, to thrive. But this journey that we’ve been on has recovered my memory of them and my family’s memory of them, and I’m very grateful for that.”
The latter part of Garfield’s journey takes him to LA, where his great-grandmother Sara’s brother Harry emigrated in 1919 and changed the family surname from Kupczyk to Cooper.
Meeting expert Caroline Luce at the temple Harry attended, Garfield learns that Harry opened a glamorous women’s clothing shop on Hollywood Boulevard and later in Beverley Hills. His parents and some of his siblings joined him in the following years, also working in the LA fashion industry.
Garfield visits the daughter of one of his grandfather’s cousins, where he discovers that another of his grandfather's cousins, Bernard Taper, was a successful journalist and author who emigrated from London to LA as a child and became an influential figure in the local arts scene. Taper later travelled to post-war Europe to recover art looted by the Nazis as a member of the “Monuments Men”, a group whose rescue missions inspired an eponymous Hollywood film – the second, it seems, to have been inspired by a Garfield family member.
The Who Do You Think You Are episode reaches its denouement as a tearful Garfield reads aloud a fragment of text Bernard wrote after the war: “It was good, I thought, that amid all the sickening evidence of man’s depravity and destructiveness, I should have had the opportunity to help preserve some of the things mankind had done that one could not only bear to contemplate but even take joy in.”