Every Family Has a Secret

Every family has its secrets.

Locked away behind our front doors are the hidden pasts,

the buried scandals and the life-changing decisions

that have shaped our families, and our nation.

All my mother's family were murdered in concentration camps.

I don't know how I survived.

It's a human right to know who your parents are.

When my mother disappeared,

how long it took for the police to take it seriously?

Well, I've heard my father was a spy, so who is this man?

He died of a head injury.

I have been told that my father was the cause of his death.

Wow!

Every Family Has a Secret

uncovers the extraordinary stories behind our everyday lives.

This time, two Australian women

who were born amidst death and uncertainty

try to piece together their fractured pasts.

It all looks so peaceful.

It's just hard to believe all these terrible things happened here.

Ellis Treleaven traces her mother's path through the Holocaust

to uncover the secrets surrounding her birth.

You and I are both survivors and we have to stay strong.

And Marie O'Connor investigates the shocking accusation...

This is my birth certificate. Oh, gosh! He's not even on there.

..that saw her father banished from her life.

It's amazing to see your father for the first time.

One step. There. That's better.

That's it. Oh, good girl Well done.

That's terrific.

Perth grandmother Ellis Treleaven

knows little about her own mother's past.

Mum was a silent survivor.

I don't think she wanted to burden her family

with what she saw and what went on during the war.

Good. Good girl.

I did ask her questions but I never pressed for any answers

because I felt it's going to unleash a whole box of demons,

so I left it.

Ellis was just seven when she migrated to Australia in 1952

with her Dutch Jewish parents, Abraham and Helena Hayim.

Ellis has always known

that her mother lived through the horrors of World War II,

but Helena never spoke to her about her experiences during the Holocaust.

It was only after Helena died

that Ellis discovered her mum had kept a monumental secret from her -

a secret that challenged everything she knew about her own identity.

Ellis. Hello, Noni.

Hello. Lovely to meet you. It's a pleasure. Come on through.

OK, thanks.

Ellis, it wasn't until later in your life

that you found out that everything that you'd understood always

about your birth and your identity

was not what you'd been led to believe.

Is that right?

Well, my mother died in 1997.

Mm. And, um, I was going through her paperwork.

I found a family book.

Yes.

And what's that? Is it a government thing?

This is a Dutch family book and I'm going through it.

Yeah. I've never seen it before.

And it's got A.B. Hayim, my father's name

and Helena de Vries, my mother's name.

And then I came across this page

and in it, it gave my birthplace as Theresienstadt.

So, where did you think you'd been born?

Amsterdam, in Holland.

So it was the 15th of October 1944. 1944.

And where's Theresienstadt?

Czechoslovakia.

So, what did that make you think?

Well... It's a can of worms, obviously.

It's a can... I thought, I've never heard of the place.

What with one thing and another, I looked it up and realised it was a concentration camp.

And she never told you that she'd been in a concentration camp. Never.

Never. Wow.

Is this your mum? That's my mother, yes.

And is that you? That's me.

Oh, that's beautiful.

You found out that you weren't born where you thought you were born.

Yes.

Did you discover anything else about your identity

that piqued your curiosity?

Well, later, I found Mum's naturalisation papers.

Right. I read some interesting information.

"Daughter Ellis Hayim was born to Mrs Hayim before marriage,

"when she was held in a prison camp by the Germans.

"Child acquired the name of 'Hayim' upon her mother's marriage."

Well... Gosh.

..I realised that who... the father I thought was my father

was not really my biological father.

That must have been a shock.

It was.

So, your mother didn't speak to you about her wartime experiences?

No. Not at all?

Not at all. Do you know why?

She never gave a hint of anything,

you know, terrible having happened in her life.

It may have been too traumatic for her to talk about it.

Ellis's whole history needs to be rewritten.

How was it she was born in a Nazi concentration camp

and how did she and her mother survive?

If Abraham Hayim wasn't her biological father, who was?

Ellis has recently taken a DNA test

and Ancestry's Brad Argent has the results.

So, Ellis, these are your DNA results

and maybe, just maybe,

it might help us solve a little bit of this secret.

Thank you. The big reveal.

As you can see, they're blobs on a map, right?

But the blobs on the map tell us something about you.

Roughly half of you, 51% of you, is Jewish.

Mm-hm.

And the other half of you is mostly German.

Right. With a little bit of English

and a little bit of French. Right.

I'm just curious how the Germanic part got into my DNA.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

So, we take what we know, right?

Now, you know that your mother was Jewish.

Yes.

So, we can be pretty confident that you're getting that 51%...

Yes. ..from mum.

And so just based on the DNA, I would be fairly confident

to say your biological father, he's probably German.

Hmm, it's, it's interesting but...

..I can't, um...

I've got mixed feelings about it, I have to say.

I know I was conceived during the war

and I just hope that, you know, the conception took place

in a consensual way,

not... my mother was abused.

And that's my main concern.

It's not unreasonable to imagine that she may have been...

Yes. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, it's something that you need to consider.

Yes. But there's a whole lot of possibilities out there.

Yes. But at the moment, it's data.

It's not the story. Right.

To discover the true story of her conception,

Ellis has travelled to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands

where her mother was born in 1920

and where Ellis always thought she'd been born.

We're in Sint Antoniesbreestraat,

the street where my mother, Helena de Vries, grew up with her family.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Ellis's mum, Helena de Vries,

lived with her parents, Moordes and Elizabeth,

and her brother and sister, in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter.

The family's street has been rebuilt in the post-war decades.

My mother's parents had... I think it was a haberdashery shop

on this street.

All my mother's family were murdered in concentration camps,

bar her sister and one cousin.

And I have no grave to go to,

to visit and pay my respects.

So, whenever I've come to Holland, I always walk down this street

and say hello to the ghosts of my family, my mother's family.

Home movie footage from Ellis's Aunt Carrie's wedding in March 1941

shows the De Vries family joyfully celebrating the event.

Ellis's mum, Helena, is a beaming bridesmaid.

It would be one of the last happy occasions

the De Vries family would spend together.

In May 1940, Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands.

Anti-Jewish laws were introduced to segregate Jews

and restrict their social, economic and legal rights.

Jews were removed from government employment,

their children barred from attending government schools.

Gangs of Dutch Nazis vandalised businesses in the Jewish quarter.

Hello. I'm Bart Wallet.

At Amsterdam's city archives, historian Bart Wallet

has found police records showing how Ellis's grandfather, Moordes,

was affected by these events.

"Moordes de Vries has stated here

"that on the night of the 10th of October 1941,

"his store at Sint Antoniesbreestraat 30

"was broken into."

In the same book, he appears for a second time.

"In the night of the 28th of October, 1941,

"his store was broken into."

This is the general climate.

So, all kinds of measures in order to isolate the Jews

in order to prepare for the second phase, of course,

which is rounding up and deporting the Jews.

And what we know of Moordes de Vries is that everything that happened

affected him so much... Yes.

..that he was sent to the psychiatric hospital

of the Jewish community. Yes.

Back then, at the time, a lot of people thought

that if you were in a psychiatric hospital,

you were more or less safe... Oh.

Unfortunately, not that long after Moordes was taken in,

everyone was deported and brought right away to Auschwitz,

including Moordes.

My grandfather. Your grandfather.

Yeah. Yeah.

With Moordes gone, the rest of the De Vries family fled Amsterdam

and went into hiding.

In June 1943, Ellis's grandmother and uncle were arrested

in a small village in the Dutch countryside.