ROB Rinder choked back tears live on ITV show Lorraine as he recalled discovering a link to his family’s Holocaust tragedy on the set of his new TV show.
Rob, known as Judge Rinder to many telly fans, was opening up on gritty new TV series Britain Behind Bars to host Lorraine Kelly, 64.
The Jewish criminal barrister told the Scottish show anchor how one particular episode at Shrewsbury Prison focussed on the controversial topic of corporal punishment.
Rob told how, though he was opposed to the death penalty and had been an “activist” against it, it was a difficult subject to address with many facets.
He said: “I feel very strongly, and still do, that it’s never right for the state to take somebody’s life.”
He continued: “But there’s a moment in that episode and you will see I am confronted by Pierrepoint, the last hangman, his voice, and I am told to turn over a page.
“As I do so I discover he was the hangman in Nuremberg.
“That was the trial where all the Nazi war criminals were eventually sentenced to death.
“He was the person who conducted those executions.
“So as I turned over the page, I realised that one of the people who he had executed was the person responsible for torturing my own grandfather.”
Lorraine interjected: “Oh Rob!” as he fought back his emotions.
I doing so, he said: “Let’s pause for a second.”
He added: “It hasn’t changed my mind about capital punishment but what I acknowledge, and we should all acknowledge, is this is complex.
“Rather than shouting at each other and saying ‘prison should just be awful, it should just be punishment’ listen to the voices of the prisoners.
“Listen to the people who have worked in the prisons and understand their is a very challenging situation but above all else, an opportunity to change individual lives and make society better for all of us.”
Rob has previously documented his family’s Nazi death camp horror in a show for the BBC.
JUDGE Rob Rinder has been open about his family's experiences, but just what happened?
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah – which means “destruction” in Hebrew – took place between 1941 and 1945.
It was a genocide carried out during World War II, where Jews were targeted among other groups because they did not match the behaviour of the prescribed norms that Adolf Hitler preferred.
The Romani people, ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed.
The Nazis were the orchestrators of the Holocaust and after coming into power in 1933, Hitler passed laws to exclude Jews from society by creating various extermination camps.
The Nazi regime’s state-sponsored persecution resulted in up to 17million deaths overall
He broke down in tears after learning his family was murdered in just 30 minutes.
The emotional scenes, aired in 2020, saw him travel to Poland and Belarus with his mum Angela to find out more about his family history.
During the two-part series the star tried to find out more about what happened to their family members during the Holocaust.
He also took part in the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are in 2018 and learnt that his grandfather, Morris Malenicky, was one of only eight family members to survive the holocaust.
In September 1939, German troops created their first ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe located where Robert’s grandfather and the rest of his family lived – the city of Piotrkow.
Then in February they were moved to Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, where six million Jewish people were murdered during the massacre.
Robert’s grandfather was the only one to survive.
Meanwhile, also on Thursday’s Lorraine, Rob told how he felt he had a “different experience” to the female stars on his series of Strictly Come Dancing.
It came after Strictly Come Dancing professional Graziano Di Prima, 30, was fired by the BBC following claims he hit, spat at and kicked former celebrity partner Zara McDermott, 27, during rehearsals.
Graziano, who started out on Strictly in 2018, was accused of “physical incidents” towards the Love Island alumni.
