Watching Andrew Garfield explore his family history was like seeing a teddy bear marching towards the machine guns

Irish Independent

22-04-2025

His episode of Who Do You Think You Are? opened at Tooting Bec lido in London, an island of calm where Andrew's father was a swimming coach. It seemed that only the death of his mother, Lynn, in 2019 had shaken the scenery of this sheltered, successful and happy life. His father, Richard, came over as an absolute darling.
So to watch Andrew Garfield setting off to explore his father's Jewish history was like seeing a teddy bear marching towards the machine guns. 'We're a very mushy family,' he said. 'We're a very easy cry, the Garfields.'
This is not to say that Andrew Garfield is in any way a wuss. Anyone who has climbed the Hollywood ladder as he has must be pretty tough. Also, although he looks like a cuddly toy, he is 41. Television viewers might remember him from the very good crime series, Under the Banner of Heaven. Or even from one series of Doctor Who. But he is a Hollywood actor really. He was, or maybe is, Spider-Man.
Andrew's father is an American from Los Angeles, and that is where Andrew was born. But his father's family was originally from Poland, and their surname Garfinkel.
'I feel a longing to connect with my Jewish identity,' said Garfield. He didn't seem to know much about it. So off we went to southern Poland, to a city called Kielce, and all the horrors it contained. Kielce looked pretty grim, even now. But then we were in the poor part of town where Andrew's great-great-grandmother and her single daughters worked as seamstresses. One of their modest apartments – which may have consisted of just one room – overlooked the spot where Jews would later be corralled by the Nazis into the Kielce ghetto.
There was anti-semitism in Poland long before the Germans arrived. In the early 20th century, Kielce was under the rule of Tsarist Russia and there were pogroms against the Jews in which about 3,000 were killed. Garfield's great-grandfather, Ludwig Harry, the only surviving son of the family, left in 1910.
For the women left behind, life was very hard. One girl went to Warsaw and sent back a photo of herself looking amazingly stylish. We heard a later postcard from her being translated from the Yiddish, in which she bubbled with joy and affection for her family.
Of the five sisters, there is little further record. At least one married, and got out during World War II. The others were most likely taken to the concentration camp designated for Kielce's Jews, Treblinka, and murdered there. At the end of the war, the prison guards destroyed all records.
The only tiny chink of light in this disaster was the married sister, Ruchla, was by then living in Brazil. Her husband was a member of a musical family, the Szpilmans. They were cousins of the radio pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose story of struggling to survive the Warsaw ghetto was the basis for the film The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody.
Remarkably, in 1936 the Brazil Szpilmans had succeeded in getting Ruchla's mother, the Kielce seamstress, out of Poland. Her son-in-law had to sell his saxophone to do it. They tried to get the single daughters out as well but, as Ruchla's granddaughter put it, 'Brazil wasn't very fond of Jews'. She was talking from Florida. Visas for the single daughters were denied by the Brazilian government. The letters from them to their mother in Brazil stopped.
At Treblinka, Garfield stood and wept.
Meanwhile, the maternal side of his father's family, the Kupcyks, had left Poland much earlier, for Britain and then Los Angeles. They changed their name to Cooper, and Harry Cooper, who was listed in documents as a ladies' tailor when he arrived in the US in 1919, opened his own shop.
On Wilshire Boulevard. Harry was providing Hollywood glamour and his customers eventually included, according to his descendants, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor. Harry worshipped at a temple which was frequented – and even partly built – by Hollywood moguls.
Harry brought over his mother, Sarah, a terrifying figure to her grandchildren. She didn't much go in for Hollywood glamour, preferring high-necked Polish blouses. Her daughter Gertrude, on the other hand, used to model at Harry's store, parading up and down the staircase, past the crystal chandelier.
The glamour of the Coopers seemed to be the best response to the horror of what very nearly befell them. Garfield, equally at home in Surrey or Los Angeles, revelled in what he called their 'neurotic will to succeed'.
The journeys of the Garfinkels and the Coopers were so enormous, so terrifying, that it was extraordinary to see all that murderous history, and decades of hate, end in a soft-eyed movie star. It will be difficult for this new series Who Do You Think You Are? to top this episode.