The star of courtroom series Judge Rinder and presenter of Good Morning Britain has told the JC how a stint reporting on refugees fleeing Ukraine has moved him to tears — and reminded him of the Holocaust.

Rob Rinder, who has been broadcasting from Prezmysl in Poland, said it was “an experience I didn’t anticipate in the modern world”.

He originally went as part of a mission to help his Strictly Come Dancing professional partner Oksana Platero’s grandparents to cross the border, but found himself driven to report on the alarming scenes he witnessed.

The trained barrister said: “Seeing men and women cheek-by-jowl on trains escaping war on the European continent was a sight to behold.”

Mr Rinder, whose maternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, who found a new life in the Lake District as one of the 300 Windermere children, described scenes of “babies in arms with their mums that we haven’t seen on the European continent in 80 years.

“There are echoes of the past here that don’t just relate to me.”

In My Family, the Holocaust and Me, a two-part BBC1 series, Mr Rinder delved deeper into his family history to learn what happened to the family on his paternal grandfather’s side.

“If you watched that you’ll know it was too late for them,” he said.

“There is a lot of light here,” he told the JC when describing the spirit of the Ukrainian people fleeing Russia’s invasion.

“The reality is, families arrive here after exhausting trips, they have to cross borders and try to get on buses to various parts of Europe. They are exhausted.

“Women and children tell you their stories and about the fear they have been feeling. In one case, a woman told me about looking after her children by pretending that it was all a game and so they have been playing hide-and-seek as the air raid sirens came on.

“Another woman who was working in Poland when the war broke out needed to get back into Ukraine to get her children out, but has left her ageing parents there and she can’t get them out.

“There is all of this horror taking place in 2022 and it is those families that have been separated and torn apart that you feel, hear and experience.

“But as emotional as they are, they are all so proud of Ukraine and they want to go back.”
He said the spirit of the Ukrainian people reminded him of the Jewish people.

“In one instance, one of them saw my Magen David. I have to tell you, they are incredibly proud of their Jewish president. There is also this echo of survival,” he said.

Mr Rinder said he had been thinking about the story of Purim and “the sense of triumph over adversity . . . We as a Jewish people have similar echoes of the sense of greatness of our nation and our peoplehood, which is shared by the Ukrainian people as well.”

Mr Rinder said Britain’s response to the crisis had been divided. “There are now 100,000 people in the UK who have offered to give people a room in their home. What greater example of tzedakah is there than that?

“The problem is on the ground. In order to obtain the relevant paperwork to get to the UK, you need people from the Home Office and the various government agencies to grant that paperwork.

“To that extent it has been really bad. It is a failure.”