“So many people knew their parents had gone through the Holocaust and grew up with this shadow of trauma”
BBC History Magazine|October 2020
Barrister and TV presenter ROBERT RINDER tells us about his two-part documentary dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust and its impact on his family – and why it’s vital to talk about the trauma
ROBERT RINDER
“So many people knew their parents had gone through the Holocaust and grew up with this shadow of trauma”

How did My Family, the Holocaust and Me come about?

It grew out of Who Do You Think You Are? [in a 2018 episode of the BBC genealogy series, production company Wall to Wall researched the stories of Rinder’s relatives lost in the Holocaust], and the extraordinary response it generated. I was probably the least famous person to appear in that series, but it attracted a wave of viewers. One good news story is that there wasn’t a peep of anti-Semitism on social media – just an outpouring of conversation, curiosity and a desire to know more.

How did you attempt to reconcile yourself with the trauma your relatives went through at the Treblinka extermination camp?

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