Shocked daughter spots dad in death camp photo

ANNA ROMER’S sister first saw theblack-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-inlaw, Gladys and David Altman, were browsing images of camp prisoners when Mrs Altman let out a scream at recognising her father — who survived the death camp — among them.

He can be seen next to other prisoners as part of a transport that 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 documentary on the death camp, which is to be broadcast 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.

Mrs Romer said: “We told the museum that it was our father but they weren’t really able to tell us anything about it. We found out… it was part of an Auschwitz album taken by a Nazi.”

Mrs Romer’s father and mother, Eugene and Margareta, were from Ungvar, which at the time was in Hungary, now Uzgorod in Ukraine. Eugene survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Margareta also survived Auschwitz and 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.

They made aliyah in 1993. Eugene died in December 1998 and Margareta died in April 2018. Mrs Romer said: “Hitler did not succeed. I feel honoured to be able to tell their story.”