Jerry Springer

Series in which celebrities trace their ancestry.

Jerry Springer was born in Golders Green in 1944. His Jewish parents had escaped to London from Nazi Germany just three days before the outbreak of the Second World War. Jerry's grandmothers did not make it, however - both were murdered in the Holocaust. He does not know what happened to them after his parent's escape, or where they died, but with their death all knowledge of his family's roots were lost.

Jerry first sets out to discover how far back he can trace the Springer family. He discovers that his great-grandfather, an Abraham Springer, came from the small town of Neustettin. Now in Poland, in the 19th century the town was in the German kingdom of Prussia. Documents reveal that Abraham too had to struggle against, but ultimately overcame, an anti-Semitic campaign of hate.

Next Jerry undertakes a painful and disturbing investigation into the fate of his grandmothers. Nazi documents reveal their fate in shocking detail and Jerry traces the journeys they took, first to the ghettos and then to their deaths.