We all know Jerry Springer from his schlocky TV show. (I had the dubious pleasure of travelling to Chicago to be an audience member for one of his shows some years back. It still ranks as one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Chicago itself was lovely, I must stress.) But Jerry has had quite a life - born in a tube station in England, he emigrated to America, embarked on a political career becoming both a presidential aide to Robert Kennedy and then, himself, mayor of Cincinnati (we won’t mention the sex scandal). So Jerry is quite a guy, and from last night’s extraordinary episode, he seemed like a nice guy too (even if he did have this habit of balancing his glassed above his eyebrows a bit too often). It was clear though, that Jerry had been carrying huge amounts of family pain for most of his life. If you missed the show and you’re intending to catch up on your PVRs or the iPlayer, be warned… there was a lot of crying.

From the first meeting with his sister to discuss his impending journey, you knew that this was going to be an emotional programme - Jerry was in tears just talking about his mum and dad. Unlike last week’s relatively jolly Boris Johnson episode, where he managed to go back to the 17th century, Jerry’s journey centred around his family’s recent history and, more specifically, how his Jewish parents managed to get out of Nazi Germany, and what happened to his grandparents who were left behind.

Jerry went over to his birth city of London to meet a Jewish historian, who explained what the form was back in the 1940s. Jerry’s father was a middle class worker who managed to find a guarantor – someone who would sponsor their emigration to England. Jerry’s parents were lucky. So many Jews, some university graduates, advertised their wears in the newspapers, desperate for any sort of job so they could flee and start a new life. Jerry broke down when he recounted a story his father had told him – he choose England because it would take the Germans longer to catch them, because of the channel. In those times, Jews were under the impression that they were always going to be chased. I just cannot comprehend what that feeling must have been like.

Jerry then journeyed to Gorzow, now in Poland (but then it was part of Germany). He wanted to know why his father left a successful family business and moved to Berlin. He soon found his answers.

As the Nazis grew in power, so intense was the discrimination against the Jewish community (people spitting at them in the streets, daubing Jewish shops with anti-semitic slogans), Jerry’s father had no choice but to move out of the small town and into the metropolis of Berlin, hopeful that the sheer number of people there might breed more cultural tolerance. The full horror of what it was like to be Jewish in the early part of the 20th century came to light pretty vividly during this sequence.

Along the way, Jerry also found out about a great grandfather who stood up to a sort of Hitler pre-cursor called Ernst Henrici, who was spreading rabid anti-semitism around a town that had previously seen harmonious integration of all creeds. Jerry great grandfather Abraham took a stand against him, and Jerry was proud that he had found a relative that stood up to this frothing nutball.

Jerry then switched his attention to his mother’s side, and the fate of his grandmother and her sister. He had always sort of known what had happened to them, but was determined to meet the full truth head on. Fair play to him - he knew what was coming, he knew that the full truth would mean tales of concentration camps, but he was determined to know it all (he admitted that not knowing the details had provided a kind of protection). Not surprisingly, as the details began to emerge, this led to more tears.

There were tales of extreme hardship in ghettos, where Jewish families were stripped of their belongings and their dignity and bundled into sub-standard accommodation, and, thanks to an historian (poor woman, you got the impression that she was so nervous telling Jerry these awful truths), Jerry was even able to see the train station his grandmother would have been taken to before her final journey to the Chełmno concentration camp. Jerry also saw the mobile ‘gas vans’ that were used to exterminate the Jews there too. It was a full-on television moment.

On his father’s side things weren’t much better – Jerry’s father’s parents also perished at the hands of the Nazis, this time in a Czech Republic camp (which the Nazis disingenuously advertised as a ‘nice’ camp).

By the end of it, Jerry was obviously drained. He wanted to face the truth and the horrifying, shameful truth he most assuredly got. But to understand, to make connections and to feel more about his family, he needed to know this stuff. For the best part of his life the fate of his grandparents, and his family’s part in the Holocaust, hung over him like a shadow.

And, as viewers, we really shared his pain. Previous episodes have also featured the Holocaust in WDYTYA? but this one has been the bleakest. As Jerry almost staggered from dreadful location to dreadful location, it was pretty much raining all the time. This unremitting greyness only served to heighten the sadness of Jerry’s story.

I’m not complaining. It was fascinating, emotional and necessary. Today’s generation really needs to know what happened during World War II.

Despite the relentless doom, there was a shining beacon of positivity at the end of the show. Jerry found that some of his grandfather’s family had survived the war, and he speculated that he might have a whole set of relatives out there somewhere. Then out of nowhere, a distant cousin appeared. His Jewish name meant joy in English and this revelation prompted Jerry to just collapse into this new-found relative’s arms. As Jerry said at the end: “I’m blessed”.

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