As I didn't have time to do my write-up of Marvin Hulmes' episode of Who Do You Think You Are? last week, I figured I'd combine that write-up with the write-up for this week's episode, featuring Robert Rinder.
Marvin Hulmes' episode showed the difficulty of coming to terms with the past from where we are in the present.
Slavery is, and was, wrong. But it was not only white people who owned slaves.
As Marvin learned during his time in Jamaica, free black people also often owned slaves. Coming to terms with that is not the easiest of things to do, especially from Marvin's position of being descended from both black slaves and black slave owners.
Marvin's episode also showed that it can be unfair to judge people - such as his mother's grandfather, known as 'Old Man Buckingham' and thought of as grumpy and standoffish - without knowing their stories.
Old Man Buckingham's story was one of the worst kinds of luck, encompassing workhouse stays, abandonment by his parents, a painful disease as a child, and being shipwrecked twice. Such a background is enough to make anyone a little standoffish.
Robert Rinder's episode explored a lot of the same themes, albeit from a completely different aspect of geography and history.
Judge Rinder's family story covered the horrors and uncertainties of the 20th Century, and their affects on the lives of those who lived through them.
The Holocaust, as his grandfather's old friend and fellow Holocaust-survivor told Robert Rinder, is something that should never be forgotten - what the Jewish people and other victims of the Holocaust suffered is something we should never let ourselves forget, so that we never, ever, repeat it.
It also showed, very clearly, that the rules are sometimes meant to be broken. Rinder's grandfather lied about his age in order to be allowed to move to the UK, and re-start his life. As uncomfortable as it made Rinder, it seems an exceptionally small sin when compared with those committed against him.
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