A postcard, a few faded photographs and a family name change sent actor Andrew Garfield from a kitchen table to the Treblinka memorial, and finally to a relative who helped recover art stolen by the Nazis.
“I feel a longing to connect more to my Jewish heritage on my dad’s side. I’m really curious about that,” Garfield said near the beginning of an episode of WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
The BBC first broadcast Garfield’s episode on April 22, 2025.
At the table, Garfield and his father, Richard Garfield, worked through old photographs and a family name that had shifted from Garfinkel to Garfield. The BBC’s account says his great-grandfather Ludwig left Kielce, Poland, for London around 1910 with his wife Sara and their baby, Samuel, leaving his mother and five surviving sisters behind.
In Poland, genealogists translated a loving postcard from one sister and located a 1930 register showing that Garfield’s great-great-grandmother Chaja and two of her daughters worked as seamstresses. The official trail stopped after 1935, but a newly found branch of the family revealed that Chaja escaped to Brazil in 1936 while two daughters in Warsaw were unable to obtain visas; their letters later stopped.
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The episode handles the gap with appropriate care: the family could only assume the sisters were murdered. Garfield traveled to the Treblinka memorial and laid stones in their memory, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the Kielce ghetto was established in April 1941 and that Jews from Kielce were deported to the Treblinka killing center in 1942.
“They were just normal girls. They were just normal women that wanted a life, that wanted to live, to thrive,” Garfield said at the memorial.
Then the trail crossed the Atlantic, and the mood changed. Sara’s relatives, who took the name Cooper, built a new life in Los Angeles through the clothing business, and Garfield discovered that his grandfather’s cousin Bernard Taper had carried the family’s creative drive into journalism and a remarkable postwar assignment.
The Monuments Men and Women Foundation says Taper was born in London in 1918 and moved to Los Angeles at age 11. After the US Army drafted him in 1943, he eventually joined the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section in Germany as an art-intelligence officer, investigating Nazi-looted works and interrogating officials and collaborators involved in art theft.
“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 has done that one could not only bear to contemplate but even take joy in,” Taper wrote.
“Bernard, in his words here, has clarified and reminded me of something about how I want to live, ultimately,” Garfield said after reading Taper’s reflection.
By the end, Garfield was trying to make sense of both halves at once: the relatives who disappeared and the relative who helped restore what the Nazis stole. He described Taper’s chapter as a full circle of healing.
“I wasn’t able to feel my belonging without my knowledge of them,” Garfield said.
The episode does not pretend that Taper’s work cancels the family’s loss. It does something quieter: it says the women’s names, remembers the lives they wanted and follows their family toward restoration. Evil does not get the last word.
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