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Who Do You Think You Are? review - Judge Rinder's family story is so moving that even the historian cried

Robert Rinder - Robert Rinder
Robert Rinder - Robert Rinder

Those in the Labour party still determined not to adopt the internationally recognised definition of anti-Semitism should really be required to watch this episode of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One).

No one who saw lawyer and TV “judge” Robert Rinder retrace the story of his Holocaust-survivor grandfather Maurice – who lost every member of his family to the gas chambers at Treblinka – could come away anything other than confirmed in the belief that anti-Semitism must be stamped out.

Robert Rinder's great-grandfather Israel in an Army photo from the First World War - Credit: Robert Rinder/BBC 
Robert Rinder's great-grandfather Israel in an Army photo from the First World War Credit: Robert Rinder/BBC

This was one of two sad stories of the men in Rinder’s family. His great-grandfather, Israel, had a rough time of it, too, ending up sectioned and confined to Friern Hospital in London for the last 15 years of his life – the result of a shattering psychological trauma suffered during his childhood, before he escaped Russia for England.    

It was Maurice, though (from the Polish side of the family, who died in 2001), whose experience resonated the most. Rinder travelled to the modest former family home in Piotrkov to hear what his grandfather had spoken little of in life: of how the town had been the first in which Nazi forces had established a Jewish ghetto; how he spent years in slave labour in German munitions factories, while his parents, four sisters and a brother all met their deaths at Treblinka; how Maurice endured appalling suffering in a number of other camps before being liberated by the Russians in 1945, and getting himself sent to England as a “child” by lying about his age.

Robert RInder's grandfather Morris - Credit: BBC
Robert RInder's grandfather Morris Credit: BBC

The story of how he recovered and learnt to live again in a small community of fellow survivors in Windermere was as affecting as anything we’ve seen over the 14 years that WDYTYA has been running. A startlingly poignant letter in which a reborn Maurice invited the psychologist who had aided his recovery to his wedding in 1951 brought tears even to the eyes of the historian who presented it to Rinder.

As a testament of the resilience of the human spirit this was immensely powerful indeed. Hearing of the courage and enduring decency with which Maurice forged his new life, one could only echo Rinder’s conclusion that it had been “a privilege, a real gift to walk that path with him.”