Relief for Holocaust survivor who feared father was a Nazi

FOR six decades, Jackie Young feared he only survived the Holocaust because the father he never knew was a Nazi.

At nine-months-old, he and his mother were sent to Nazi camps, but whereas she went to Maly Trostenets where Jews were killed within moments of disembarking the transport, her baby went to Theresienstadt, a transit camp.

After being liberated at the end of the war over two years later, he was flown with 300 other Jewish children to Windermere in the Lake District and was eventually adopted by a Jewish couple in the south of England.

But two questions were left unanswered. Why was he separated from his mother and not sent to Maly Trostenets? And why, in a camp that sent 15,000 children to Auschwitz, was he spared?

“This is where I’ve even toyed with the idea, the possibility, that my father was a Nazi… who may have said, ‘Leave him alone’.”

Mr Young was speaking on the second series of DNA Family Secrets, which begins on BBC Two on Wednesday.

The Londoner was born in Vienna at the end of 1941, “a particularly dodgy time”, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

The only trace he has of that life is his birth certificate, bearing his mother’s name but with a blank space where his father’s should be. Mr Young did not find out about his past until he went to wed Lita, his wife, and was told that to do so in a synagogue he would need proof of his Jewishness.

After years of fruitless research, Mr Young, 79, turned to Prof Turi King, a DNA and genealogy expert.

Prof King told The Telegraph that she knew right away that it would be a difficult case, given how many of Mr Young’s relatives would have died.

Nevertheless, using a combination of DNA analysis and old-fashioned genealogical work, Prof King and her team managed to find answers for Mr Young.

Determining that his father likely wasn’t a Nazi proved relatively straightforward. Mr Young’s DNA showed he was 99 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish, making it extremely unlikely his father would have been a party member.

While that was all Prof King was able to tell Mr Young about his father, she has not given up hope of a further breakthrough. More and more people add their DNA to online databases every day, any one of whom could prove to be another living relative of Mr Young.

In the meantime, the team were able to bring him together with a pair of first or second cousins, likely from his father’s side. He told The Telegraph: “I never thought this day would occur.”