Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on November 11, 2020

Two years ago, barrister and TV personality Robert Rinder appeared on a moving episode of Who Do You Think You Are? to trace the fate of his mothers family during the Holocaust.

Understandably, the experience had a huge impact on Rinder and My Family, the Holocaust and Me was a way both to deepen his own understanding of what happened and to widen the conversation out to other families similarly affected.

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Rinders mothers family, with the exception of his grandfather Morris, was murdered in Treblinka Camp. His Lithuanian ancestors on his fathers side were buried in a mass grave in Belarus. In this opening episode of the documentary Rinder travelled to Lithuania to follow in the footsteps of his fathers relations next week he will visit Treblinka with his mother Angela but the main focus was on other families still struggling to come to terms with their own loss and grief.

For psychologist Bernie Graham, the Holocausts shadow, its dark impact has affected everything, its shaped my entire family. Bernies mother arrived in England on the Kindertransport at the age of eight, his grandfather Solomon survived Buchenwald concentration camp but his grandmother, Sabina, died elsewhere and the uncle Bernie was named after apparently took his life in Dachau before his 19th birthday. Growing up, those deaths haunted the family: I feel in some ways that I was born into a state of bereavement.

Because of this, he had never visited Germany. Now almost 60, he headed to Frankfurt for the first time to uncover the truth. A harrowing journey followed, as Bernie discovered that his grandmother, along with a thousand other people, was forced to pay her own fare to Sobibor Extermination Camp where she was murdered. As Bernie broke down in tears, it was impossible for the viewer at home not to join him.

As Rinder aptly concluded after a powerful, emotional and timely hours television, it was hard not to feel that what we were watching was the most articulate expression of human evil that could be imagined.

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My Family, the Holocaust and Me, BBC1, review: An emotional and timely film from Robert Rinder - iNews

Category: Holocaust
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