Searching for a secret ancestry

Jan 24 2007 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Researching the horrors of Auschwitz set this photographer on a hunt for his lost family history. Philip Key reports

WHEN Liverpool photographer John Guy arrived at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz early last year he had a curious thought in his head. Was this where members of his unknown family had died?
 
Guy had always been fascinated by the grim story of Auschwitz where thousands upon thousands of innocents were put to death in World War II, the majority of them Jewish.
 
The 46-year-old was determined to make a photographic record of the place, particularly after hearing that to half of the British population, the name Auschwitz means nothing.
 
Efforts are being made to change that, particularly since the introduction of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain in 2001.
 
It has been marked every year since, always on January 27, the day that Auschwitz was finally liberated in 1945.
 
What was uncovered shocked the world: hundreds of emaciated bodies lay dead and the living were only the living dead. Here too was evidence of unspeakable experiments on living victims and of the mass extermination of a whole generation.
 
For Guy, born in the Kensington area of Liverpool and brought up a Christian in the Church of England, the story was shocking enough. But in recent years, he had begun to believe there was a secret side of his family, German Jews who would have perished in the Holocaust and most likely at Auschwitz.
 
The key to the mystery was his maternal grandmother Hannah, who died 20 years ago. Her origins were mysterious and she never talked about her background.
 
"If someone brought up the subject, she would put her finger to her lips as if to say, "don't ask questions," says Guy. "Another time if you asked, she would reply, ‘You don't want to know, love.' If anyone persisted, she would lock herself in the toilet."
 
Guy and members of his family began to investigate the family history after her death, a project made more difficult by her burning all her personal documents before she died. "Why she did that, no one knows," he says.