VIEWERS watching DNA Secrets were left ‘sobbing’ over the story of a Holocaust survivor trying to track down his family.
Jackie, 79, spent his early years in a Nazi concentration camp before being adopted by a Jewish family in north London and for decades was convinced the only reason he survived is because his dad was a Nazi.
The show uses DNA to reveal missing relatives and solve other family mysteries.
Jackie only learned of his childhood in the concentration camp when he applied to the local synagogue to get married and had to provide papers to prove he was Jewish.
The shock of learning he was both adopted and spent years in a concentration camp plagued Jackie.
Firstly, he wanted to know how he managed to survive.
“The only reason I can think why I survived is that my dad was a Nazi,” he told host Stacey Dooley.
The other burning question was whether any of his other families managed to survived the Nazi Holocaust.
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Professor Turi King, a geneticist, admitted Jackie’s case would be one of the hardest she’d ever work on.
“The Nazis did a number on records,” she explained to Jackie about how the regime destroyed as many records of Jewish people as possible to wipe their existence from the face of the earth.
As Turi’s team got to work, viewers saw how the trauma of living in a camp and not knowing his family tore Jackie up.
“Sometimes I would find him crying in the shower,” his wife told Stacey.
Turi emphasised again on Twitter as they show aired how hard it was to find out information about Jackie’s family.
She wrote: “As a Holocaust survivor, Jackie’s was one of the most difficult I’ve worked on. What a courageous man to let us go on this journey with him.”
But her team worked “every day” to do what they could and come back to Jackie with some information.
Turi was able to work out that Jackie was likely “99 per cent Ashkenazi Jew” – Jewish people from central and northern Europe.
This meant it was very unlikely Jackie’s dad was a Nazi, which was a massive relief for Jackie.
Thinking there would be nothing more for Turi to tell him, Jackie’s shocked to learn she has tracked down distant relatives on his dad’s side.
She found his great uncle and aunt who died at the Auschwitz camp, but their daughter Irene managed to escape to the UK and settled in north London.
“It’s unbelievable to think they’re living a few streets away,” his wife said.
Jackie was then shown a photo of his “closest living relatives”, and had an emotional reunion which left viewers in tears.
“Wow what an incredibly moving #dnafamilysecrets tonight. So pleased for Jackie and his family,” wrote one fan on Twitter.
Another added: “Another tear jerking episode of #DNAFamilySecrets wow. How absolutely amazing.”
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And a third wrote: “Stacey Dooley is so professional being able to hold it together. I’d be an absolute bubbling mess.
The episode finished with an update on Jackie who travelled to Austria where he was born and saw his mother’s name on the Holocaust memorial where he held a flower up in front of it.
