Rinder’s hardest journey

IN powerful scenes, Robert Rinder explores tragic holocaust stories in the wake of his experience on Who Do You Think You Are?

A couple of years ago on the ancestr y show, the TV j udge d i s c o v e r e d h i s g r a n d f a t h e r ’s devastating background. Morris Malenicky was the only survivor of the war, while his parents, four sisters and a brother died at a concentration camp in Poland in 1942.

Robert says: “I’ve come to realise, as the grandson of a holocaust survivor, that its shadow, its dark impact has affected everything. It’s shaped my entire family.

“The trauma of what happened has caused decades of silence in families, but now it’s important to talk about it.”

In this moving two-parter, Robert sets others off on their own Who Do You Think You Are? journeys.

He h elps se c ond and third generations of families retrace their relatives’ footsteps and find out what happened to them.

We meet Bernie, from Plymouth, who heads to Frankfurt to find out about his family.

Also, musician Natalie Clein and her sister Louisa, best known for playing Maya in Emmerdale, investigate their Dutch roots. And Robert explores further his own family ’s stories on his mother’s and father’s side. He travels to Treblinka, the site of a concentration camp in Poland, to discover how his greatgrandparents, great-aunts and greatuncle came to meet their ends.

And watch out for a h ear twrenching interview with a 97-yearold survivor in Belarus, who shares some devastating memories.

It all leads to a tearful monologue from Robert about human evil.

MOVING Robert with his mother and a holocaust survivor